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One can think of many scenarios where DVD region codes might hypothetically provide some reasonable benefit for some company.  I am skeptical that many of these conjectures have any significance in real life.  In any case, copyright law was not created originally to benefit corporations, although now all laws are for corporate advantage.

As a practical matter, region codes discourage more sales than they encourage, and decrease profits, rather than boosting them.  I'm told that almost every European can play region 1 and region 2 DVDs.  Any North American that wants to can get an inexpensive region free DVD player.  Computer software such as VLC bypasses region coding.  So region codes are not preventing the playing of "foreign" DVDs.  They just make life harder for some of the people with interest in other languages and cultures.

Instant international distribution is ALREADY available, with almost everything appearing on various torrent sites before it is available in stores.  That is what the industry needs to work against.  It is generally easier, as well as cheaper, to steal video than to buy it.  To combat the massive piracy problem, the industry needs to encourage their paying customers, and make it easy and advantageous for people to pay for content.  Up to now, they prefer to harass their paying customers, and make legal purchases more difficult.  It is easy to see that this has not worked.  I read today of a person who had bought downloadable content, and was unable, during three days and multiple phone calls, to get the activation code needed.  This complaint was posted on Amazon.com<http://Amazon.com>, and the writer warned everyone not to buy from this vendor, while saying that they did eventually find the needed code on one of the piracy sites.  When the pirates provide better service and support than the publishers, it is not surprising that they have a major market share.

As for the idea mentioned in the last sentence quoted below, I'm skeptical that a small French film company (or even ALL the small European film companies) could "put a number of American companies out of business" by releasing their DVDs as region 0.  If true, those American companies aren't providing much of a service.

Derek

Derek Roff
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