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I think that the DVD Region coding system is an attack on all that is good in the world.  More specifically, it is a perversion of four hundred years of copyright law, in both the letter and intent.  It supports corporate power to an astounding extent, and even attacks a fundamental of commerce, saying that it is reasonable for a company to sell you a product, and then conspire with other manufacturers to prevent you from using that product.  The region coding system enshrines for the life of a DVD a prohibition based on the silly hope that by blocking DVD sales for a few months in a few places, the content cartel will squeeze a few more dollars out of in-theater sales.

Welcome to the current world.  As part of giving corporations the right to write their own copyright laws, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) says that it is illegal to circumvent technology-based content controls, even if those control measures were created without legal foundation.  Personal computers developed completely outside of this DVD issue, and reached primacy largely because the offered users wide freedoms in how they used the equipment that they had purchased.  The worlds collided in the late 90s, when it became standard for a PC to contain a DVD drive which could play movies.  The PC makers didn't want to produce a different computer for each country or region, and the movie studios didn't want their customers to be able to play movies that they had already paid for, if that customer strayed outside the lines of company-approved sale.  It's sort of like digital serfdom.

The compromise reached was that every computer would be able to play DVDs from any region, but changing from region to region would be allowed only five times, and then the DVD drive would be locked onto the final region FOREVER!  Bwaaa-haaa-haaa-haa! (Maniacally evil corporate laughter).  At first, the counting was done by the computer, and various ways of resetting the counter were quickly discovered.  Next, the movie companies managed to get most of the DVD-drive manufacturers to put the region code change counters in the drives themselves.  Now it is harder to reset the counter, and the difficulty varies with drive manufacturer, and the attention of the hacker community.

In every case, it is a hassle for the user, who has paid for both the computer and the DVD.  This is a tenet of modern business- punish your paying customers.  Different universities take different stances, but it looks clear to me that reseting the DVD region code counter is a violation of the DMCA.  This law should be abolished, but in the meantime, it prohibits a lot of options useful for education.

The approaches that I have heard of being used by universities are, in order of my declining personal preference, and declining order of risk, 1) spite the evil DMCA, and, by whatever means necessary, use the materials that you have purchased;  2) get sufficient region-free DVD viewing stations, that computers aren't needed for viewing "foreign" DVDs;  3) purchase the necessary number of external DVD drives for needed "foreign" region codes, and allow students to check out a drive with the appropriate region code and plug it into any computer, when they need to view a "foreign" DVD;  4) dedicate a few computers to each "foreign" region code, and require students to use those computers for "foreign" DVDs;  5) refuse to have any DVDs with "foreign" region codes in your collection.

Most university legal departments seem extremely risk-averse, and have no problem sacrificing educational quality.  I stopped asking, after the copyright lawyer in my university stopped answering emails, and would only give advice over the phone, so that no record would exist of the advice the university lawyer had given me.  I hope that your university is more dedicated to its educational mission.

Best of luck,

Derek

Derek Roff
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