Book People Archive

RE: FW: Globalization DVD/E-texts



On Thu, 29 Thursday, March 29, 2001, Ron Gustavson
"mailto:rongusss@[redacted]  wrote:

In response to:
>The real problem here is the stiff approach to "import" that the United
>States has again adopted with respect to DVD copyright protection. Let me
>explain; it is currently illegal in the United States to own a DVD device
>that reads region 1(US) AND region 2(The rest of the world) DVDs.

<<Don't disagree with the statement, just the geography:
http://www.unik.no/~robert/hifi/dvd/world.html>>

Much appreciated. I have to admit that my mind is crowded these days, and
that your link is a wonderful visualization of the issue at hand.
             
<<Certainly France's suit against Yahoo! illustrates the danger that the
Web might one day be zoned.>>

Yes, but the net is far to complex to be contained or institutionalized.
However hard they try, there will always be those that can get around it for
the sake of nourishing their intellectual curiosity. Like those in France
that simply choose to connect via an ISP service in Belgium... Besides, as
the net was not developed by the military, Governments world wide trail
behind scientists and engineers in implementing future advances in the
medium, and thus are equally impaired to establish dominance. Furthermore
Governments do not have the resources either financial, or in qualified man
power to cause that much of a threat at present. Yet, the zoning of the
Internet is to be feared...

>More painfully, I have lately tried accessing several foreign financial
>websites, from the USA, and was surprised to see that access to certain
>areas of these websites is restricted to viewers from the US territories -

<<But these restrictions are certainly not the policy of the US gov, but
of those individual Web sites. Care to drop some URLs?>>

Just try any one of the big foreign banks; Japanese, Swiss, British... and
try to access information for offshore banking - sometimes it will state
outright that certain information may not be viewed by the American public
on their home page, other times when trying to locate the aforementioned
information you will wind up being fed a splash page that states that due to
your geographic location you are unable to view the information... The
restrictions are I believe imposed by US Government law. However, there is a
vast difference between an American wishing to obtain information pertaining
to the establishment of a foreign account and perhaps opening one abroad for
issues of travel or safety, then the action of actually doing it with
fraudulent intent.

Government that makes decisions on behalf of its constituents for "their own
good" shows a considerable lack of respect for those individuals
intelligence. After all are we to remain children for the duration of our
lives? Rather I believe that any form of information control conceals public
manipulation from which those that command it reap personal power and
money...

[Moderator: One URL is for AIG private bank in Switzerland; see
 http://www.aigprivatebank.com/ . If you select "products", and then
 "US" as your country it will tell you that product or services information
 cannot be made available to you, due to a regulatory restriction (which
 apparently also covers Japan, Canada, and the UK.)  The page appears
 to rely on self-reporting of the user's country, so the technical
 restriction is rather weak on this site, but it's there.
 I don't know what specific regulation requires these restrictions . - JMO]