At 1:08 PM +0100 9/7/2000, Ben Laurie wrote:
>John R Levine wrote:
>> CSS is entirely about subverting first sale, since the only useful
>>thing that
>> the CSS crypto does is to assign each DVD a "region code" so that
>>the DVD can
>> only be played on players with the same region code. (As has been widely
>> noted, if you want to pirate a DVD, you just copy the bits, no crypto
>> needed.) The reason that they use region codes is that movies may already be
>> on DVD in the US while still in theatres in Europe, or vice versa, and they
>> want to prevent people from sending DVDs from one place to the other and
>> undermining theatre revenues. If I were the movie industry, I'd want to
>> prevent it, too, but if I were a judge interpreting the copyright law, I'd
>> look to the first sale doctrine and say "tough noogies".
>
>That's not quite the only reason for region codes: regional price
>differentials are also important to revenue. :-)
>
I think the issue of enforcing foreign censorship is important too.
Here is the main part of my comment to the LOC on this matter:
http://www.loc.gov/copyright/reports/studies/dmca/reply/Reply014.pdf
"...The technical protection measures that DCMA addresses can also be
used by foreign governments to prevent unwanted content from being
viewed by its residents. This is the digital-millennium equivalent
of the jamming of Radio Free Europe during the Cold War. An attempt
by a US Citizen to bypass those measures, for example by buying a DVD
movie about Tibet and re-coding it so that it is playable by a
Chinese-zoned DVD player, could be prosecuted under DCMA as an act of
circumvention. The tools for producing such a re-coded DVD are
similarly proscribed under this law, as interpreted by its supporters
and US District Judge Kaplan.
Here is the testimony of Dean Marks, Senior Counsel, Intellectual
Property for Time Warner, given at the Stamford Library of Congress
hearing on DCMA (transcript page 262):
1 MR. MARKS: Another reason why we need
2 regional coding, why we do regional coding is that
3 the law in various territories is different with
4 regard to censorship requirements. So we cannot
5 simply distribute the same work throughout the world
6 in the same version. Local laws impose censorship
7 regulations on us that require us to both exhibit
8 and distribute versions of the films that comply
9 with those censorship requirements.
The DCMA makes violations of the censorship laws of every
dictatorship in the world enforceable against US Citizens in US
Courts. This violates the 'first sale' doctrine and is an outrage in
a country that professes to promote freedom throughout the world."
Arnold Reinhold
