As I had promised earlier, in today’s column I would like to tackle one of DVD’s most controversial features, its region coding capabilities. Only recently waves of disappointment and outrage went through the European ranks of DVD owners, when in a British police raid $800.000 worth of imported region1 DVD discs have been confiscated and marked as illegal. The underlying, basic problem causing this situation is unfortunately not completely understood by many, and neither are the results and implications. Misunderstanding, confusion and misinterpretation of facts twist the truth to the point that many people were quick last week to yell at the studios or the “evil Americans” in general. As I always say, there is a reason for everything and once you understand the reasoning, most of the times it becomes easier to live with any given situation.

Region coding has not always been a part of the DVD specifications. As I explained in an earlier column, DVD was originally designed as a superceding medium for CD-ROMs. The computer industry needed a bigger and faster medium and the DVD technology was the answer. Only after much of the format had been standardized, movie studios were approached by the DVD Group, because it had turned out that DVD would actually make a very good, robust and inexpensive home video format. Now, we all know that Hollywood studios have different agendas and business plans than most people in the computer industry and they wanted to make sure that their films are adequately protected once they put it on disc. That’s why Macrovision’s copy protection and region coding made it into the format’s specifications as elemental rules, everyone had to live by. Both protection mechanisms were there to serve different problems the studios were anticipating. The first one is the obvious protection from piracy that has also been used on VHS. It is there to avoid people making copies form the high quality digital disc. Now, I hear you say, people can still copy the films from the high quality Laserdiscs, right, so why the fuss? The problem lies deeper. DVD is the first digital home video format  and I am counting out digital satellite transmissions  that could potentially allow people to create “identical” copies without generation loss. Now, what does that mean? If you copy a Laserdisc to a VHS tape, you will get a pretty good copy but it will never look exactly like the Laserdisc. The resolution is different and because the analog signal will be distorted in one way or another while it goes from the Laserdisc player to the recording unit of the VHS recorder, by the time the signal makes it to tape, it has been significantly altered. The real problem with DVD is that within months or years from new recordable DVD drives will become available and we will see the same problem the software industry is facing all over the world. A few kids on the block throw their money together and buy a DVD-recorder, which then allows them to make copies for everyone from one master disc they buy. Each of those discs will be absolutely identical to the other one without any loss, and that’s what the studios are trying to avoid. Before you always had generation loss and it made a big difference in quality whether you owned an original or a copy. The digital age does away with these limitations and you certainly agree that there is nothing really evil about the studios trying to protect their assets. After all they need to make money in order to produce more of those films we’d like to see on DVD at some point. You might also bring to mind every once in a while that although the films are made for the public they are not owned by the public. Although many people still believe they can do whatever they want with as disc they “own” and buy, the fact of the matter is that they can’t. Copyright protection reaches much farther than that.

But what has region coding to do with all this. Region coding has been introduced to avoid geographical piracy and interferences. One problem Hollywood studios have been facing  and dealing with  ever since they started their operations is the global market. Different languages, cultures and ethics come into play, as I had discussed in my previous column. In practice this means that a film that open during the summertime here in the US, will most likely not hit theaters in Europe until three or four months later. Some films won’t even make it to theaters until Christmas. The reasons are manifold. It starts with the fact that the films need to be subtitled or competely dubbed. In Europe for example it is common practice to have the whole film re-dubbed and re-mixed. Marketing and advertising needs to be restructured, prepared and kicked into effect. Cross-promotion deals have to be initiated and so forth. It all takes time while the film is already raking in money in the US. Another aspect is that summer is traditionally a weak time to open films in Europe, while it is the strongest box office season in the US. Disney for example, would never dare to open any of their animated movies in the summer in Germany. Those films are Christmas events and people expect them to hit theaters at that time. The problem this global picture introduces is that by the time the video hits the shelves in the US, the film might not even have opened in Europe. Of course, everyone would love to buy the video from the US and watch the film at home, instead of shelling out ridiculously high prices for theater tickets. But that’s not the way Hollywood works. That’s not the way they make money and it is something they do not want to see for understandable reasons. It’s not only that they do not want people to watch films in their homes, the much bigger problem lies in how badly it hurts the films theatrical release. The studios have distributors in all those countries and if the film has been imported and is readily available on video before its theatrical release, no distributor might actually pick up the film. The promotional costs to bring the film into theaters and the movie going audience might not be recouped and hardly anyone would be willing to take this risk. Studios have to protect their distributors in those territories in order for them to make profits and stay in business. The region coding has not been implemented in DVD to piss of people in different territories. It has been implemented to help keep the film industry healthy and alive without cannibalizing itself. With VHS video this wasn’t much of a problem, different TV standards, namely PAL, SECAM and NTSC, were a big hurdle and the language barrier added to that. Shipping a fragile and magnetically unstable videotape around the globe is also not exactly something I would recommend if you are interested in any kind of quality. With the robust DVD disc and its multiple languages this becomes a significant problem. All of a sudden people in France and Spain, for example, can watch their films in their native tongue, freshly imported from the US.  People in the US can all of a sudden watch imported films from Europe and, yes, there are film studios as well who try to protect their properties by region coding their films. A number of favorite films like “Das Boot” are German productions and it would have been devastating when the film’s original US release would have been hurt by video imports on DVD. The film might never have found a distributor here in the US for that reason and the public might not even be aware of this outstanding film.

These are the reasons why Hollywood imposed region coding on the DVD standard. If you ask me, they made the right choice. A younger and less experienced industry  like the computer industry  might have overlooked this aspect all together and found itself in a huge predicament a few years down the road, finding that it actually killed itself.

So what does all this mean in practice? It means that importing discs from a region 1 country into a region 2 country for sale is illegal. That is why the discs in England have been confiscated. They were gray imports and as such considered pirated goods. What do the “evil Americans” to do with this? Nothing. It is the British legislature that marks those discs as illegal and the same is pretty much true in all other copyright attentive countries. There are global contracts in place that prevent this things from happening and give the individual countries the leverage to act. All this has been introduced for good reason. On the upside, it is not illegal owning such a disc. It is illegal to import discs for resale, but you can own such discs for private use and its completely legal from my understanding. If you go to the US for a vacation trip, you can buy as many discs as you wish and you can watch them as often as you wish back home. “Resale” is the operative word and as long as you buy your discs in the region where it belongs to, there is nothing wrong with it. It might be inconvenient sometimes, but let’s face it we have to be reasonable sometimes, too, although we are the customers. We’re just a little too spoiled for our own good sometimes.

For now, make sure to take a look at our Halloween Special and be part of our “Halloween” give-away. Also, we still have our feedback page where you can always let us know what you think. Simply click here, fill out the form and let us know, just what you really think of us. I you’re lucky, we will even give you a free DVD disc for doing it.

Have a great week everyone

 October 11, 1998

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