> You'll find that many of the people on this list will not help you.  At
some
> point an engineer designed the scheme you are attempting to circumvent,
and we
> like to look after our own, so to speak.

Noble sentiment.  In general, I'd agree - however, in this case, I feel your
reasons are not quite accurate.

> As far as overcoming multi-region encoding on DVDs, I suspect
> that there are
> laws in the UK which would prevent you from disabling the
> copy-right protection
> scheme in your DVD players.  The owners of the work you are
> trying to play have
> given certian rights to DVD publishers to produce DVDs on a
> per region basis.
> By enabling your player to play a DVD published and sold in
> the US you are
> denying the owner of the work the ability to determine who
> sells their work,
> what the royalties are, etc, etc.

Firstly, there are no laws in the UK that "prevent you from disabling the
copyright protection".  The crime exists in breaching the copyright -
whether or not one is entitled to make a backup copy is rapidly getting
greyer.  However, making a "backup" and selling it is obviously criminal.

Secondly, region coding on DVDs does not exist to prevent copyright
protection, it exists to control distribution between regions, in much the
same way as film releases are phased (we in the UK get films months after
they have disappeared from cinemas in the US).

Thirdly, the selection of R2 DVDs is fairly poor in comparison the selection
available in the US - we have perhaps 10% of the titles available.

Fourthly, for reasons best known to the producers of the DVDs, we generally
end up with inferior (and significantly more expensive) discs than the US.

Defeating region coding (as opposed to Macrovision, which is there for copy
protection) enables those of us who give a monkey's about the films we watch
(and, on a similar note, are allowed to watch by the BBFC - but that isn't
my issue) to get hold of discs from the US that simply cannot be obtained
anywhere else.  Still purchased, at (full?) retail price, from US
distributors - so there is no theft going on.  The recent case over DeCSS
has been a more interesting issue - those for it, said it enabled Linux to
play DVDs.  Those against it pointed out (accurately) that it made it easier
to copy those same DVDs.  Modchips do not facilitate piracy.

The one area that could be construed as dubious is that it reduces revenues
for the local distributors who wish to fob us off with sub-standard
reproductions of films we wish to watch.  Quite frankly, if they reacted a
little bit more sensibly - for example, by producing discs of equivalent
quality to R1 releases - then the demand for modchips would disappear.

> Now, I personally feel that it would be better if authors and
> owners were more
> open with their work.  But I certianly believe that if they
> want to excercise
> such control over it, and implement schemes to do so, then by
> overcoming those
> schemes one is essentially stealing from them.  While that
> may be 'legal' in a
> particular country, it is certianly unethical and/or immoral.
>  (unless of course
> it is a corporation whose copyright you are breaking, they
> have no rights, and
> we love our double-standards too much to think clearly.)

No theft is carried out.  No immoral behaviour goes on.  No copyrights are
broken.  The only thing that is unethical is the distribution of substandard
product at 50% more than the cost of the "identical" product n thousand
miles away.

As you can probably guess, I tend to buy a number of DVDs from across the
water, so I'm biased in favour of defeating region encoding!

Cor, it's a long way down from this hobbyhorse...

Peter
(and no, I'm not going to be assisting, as I lack that one vital commodity -
time)

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