Sony puts two fingers up at fair trade and fair use - again ...

[gaspode]

So much for fair trade laws.

Once again the MPAA & Sony screw the consumer (through sony throwing literally millions of dollars in bribe money around). Its no real skin of my nose - I have a PS3 and an HD DVD player - not to mention Bluray and HD DVD drives in my PC (Btw - the cheapest way to play the disks - the drives are around 80 quid if you shop around).

The reason why I've been (and continue to be) so pro HD DVD is the lack of region coding. I have no problem with copy protection aside from fair use - thats a different arguement - however region coding is another matter. Why shouldn't i be able to pick up a disk if i'm in new york and play it at home? Region coding is in direct opposition to fair trade laws and as such should be denounced and denied.

As a matter of fact I can rip US Blurays into a format I can watch (I had to do this with a copy of Lost S3 that I was given, I own the disk so why shouldn't I ?) really easily - no lose of qulity or use of compression but its soomething I shouldn't have to do. I will continue to buy HD DVD's over blu ray for as long as they are being released (and theres a fair few lined up stateside for release over the next few month) .. By then I suspect someone will have produced a region hack for UK PS3's.

Comments

[the-magician.livejournal.com]

This all may be boring and splitting hairs, so if you're bored with this, just say and we can move on :-)

therefore they are saying I cant buy a disk in New York and use it in the uk - with no legal backing at all.
a) what emperor_zhark said, the copyright/rights holder can say what is done with their work. And if they say it can't be sold in Cuba or Iraq or Finsbury Park, then they do have that right. In the US there is another piece of law which basically says though, that if a person in the US buys something, then that person now owns it and can sell it on as they see fit (no copying of course, and no breaking export bans of restricted materials to certain countries). So having an agent/friend buy something in the US and then send it to you should be perfectly legal.

Nowhere, as far as I have been able to find, does the MPAA or anyone else stop you buying a region 1 player for use in the UK, do you know any different? Certainly that's what I had to do for my original Region 1 DVDs (before multi-region hacks became common). And as far as I'm aware, that's still perfectly legal and the MPAA haven't stopped anyone selling region 1 players to the UK.