(Moral question/Debate) Making a DVD drive regioon free?

Sorry if this is in the wrong place as I feel it fits better here than in "HEXUS.lifestyle > audio/visual arena."

Anyway after googling about way around the number of region changes programmed into DVD drives I have found a few methods...
* Get a region change counter resetter.
* Update the firmware with an external RC1 firmware on your DVD drive (voiding the warranty) and then get a crack on the protections in windows and the DVD player.
* Use a software like VLC as it does not check for protection (too bad I don't have any other region discs to check this on!)

However, what's really puzzling is that regions was put into place at the start to control where certain content discs are sold and viewed i.e. so that films / DVD discs containing say propaganda don't reach and be viewed in a controlled government. Therefore under UK law is it legal or illegal to crack the software or make your drive a multiregion player (as you can easily buy from high streets multi regioned player!?)

Also many online shops aim for other regioned discs to be sold in the UK, take for example Yesasia and CD wow and Amazon Jersey and not forgetting play.com!

I dont see much of a moral dilema (not for me anyway ;))

I think region protection was put in place because of differences in release dates and more importantly prices.

Prices are different in different countries because of the differing strengths of economies and other factors (elasticity of demand etc) so if you open the whole world up into one market for discs it is an uneven playing field.

So in summary... crack that drive and get some bargains ;)

Having regions also allows them to define which languages are supported on the disc - there is not enough space to put every language soundtrack on a single disc.

Blueball

ha ha ha ha ha ha ha

right thats the reason for it not making more money

If they have to make different disks for the different languages they could print that information on he case, there is no need to prevent you playin g the wrong language version at all

partly of what BB said is true..

if you've imported certain shows from asia, you'll notice it only has chinese, japanses, korean and english..

while an equivalent UK DVD (same show, say for example LOTR) will allow spanish, italian, german, french and english subtitles and voiceovers, but not the rest..

Well, the fund is partly absorbed by the region company.. i.e. the farbication and recordings of retail DVD.. say UNIVERSAL european DVDs are not made by asian factories.. ok, perhaps they are (outsourcing manufacturing to china/korea for instance), but not under the asian branch or licensed distributor for UNIVERSAL in asia.

So in a way, Asian distributors do not need to include language the region do not understand. Same here, I can only name a handful of locals here that actually speaks fluent japanese..

Cracking to bypass copyright protection is illegal, but as long as the crack only allowed you to view different regional content and it did not bypass any copy protection mechanisms then you should be fine - however see below.

Region coding is also often about licensing - where the publisher has a license that only permits them to sell the product in particular territories. This should be included in the terms of the product when you purchase it, and *if* there are any such restrictions then you could be breaking the law if you imported a product against such license conditions.

I've not seen any DVDs that came with such licensing conditions, so you're probably OK, but I have seen games that come with 'only for sale in X' conditions - cracking a player to be able to view these I don't think would be a problem, but importing the product itself would be. Not that that stops the hundreds of thailand sellers on EBay who sell region licensed products.

*insert usual forum legalese disclaimer

With the whole cracking to bypass copyright protection thing being illegal I thought that was part of the whole dvd jon case where the eu court basically said its yours and as long as you sont actually break any copyright you havent done anything illegal, although I may well be wrong