OT: excellent book on information theory

[Terry Hancock]

On Wed, 18 Jan 2006 18:31:35 -0800
aleax at mail.comcast.net (Alex Martelli) wrote:

> Terry Hancock <hancock at anansispaceworks.com> wrote:
>    ...
> > > Nothing at all. But I still prefer tales of people who
> > > have hacked their  DVD players to be multi-region :-)
> > 
> > It isn't illegal in Canada anyway.  And yes, it would be
> > possible for me to pay a very high price to get a
> > region-free player in the USA, but I'm certainly not
> > going to. 
> 
> Me neither!  I got mine for about $50 from a well-rated
> web merchant, as I recall -- is that what you mean by "a
> very high price"?

My information may be out of date, but while I certainly
feel there is nothing wrong with such a purchase, I think it
may in fact be illegal.  It doesn't sound like the seller is
paying the royalty fees required to provide for all regions
(they would be guilty of patent infringement, AFAIK).

In many cases, these are actually after-market
modifications, which may be illegal.

Of course, you should rest assured that it is not *you* who
is breaking the law in this case. As with "pirated" tapes
and DVDs, it is the distributor, not the purchaser who can
be prosecuted.

There is also the point, that if the seller is not in the
USA, they may be outside the jurisdiction of such laws, yet
it may still be legal to import the products.

But, IANAL, and this is one of the stickiest areas of the
law, so I should hesitate even to speculate what the truth
is here.

It is also possible that the aforementioned royalty fees
have been reduced since I last checked into this stuff.

None of which changes my opinion that "region coding" is an
evil conspiracy or that the DMCA is just plain wrong.

-- 
Terry Hancock (hancock at AnansiSpaceworks.com)
Anansi Spaceworks http://www.AnansiSpaceworks.com