>no legal way at all to watch the vast majority of movies here.
You could buy them.
You could buy them.
Essentially, if you search for movie dvds on amazon and ship them to an US address with a US credit card, then the selection is at least 10x, if not 100x larger than when I try to buy them.
Nevermind of course the time it takes to order things online and then have them ship the dvd, which I don't really want anyway, but fair enough, that's just convenience.
So, the problem is not that I'm not wiling to pay for it, the problem is that nobody will take my money, because the movie studio hasn't signed a redistributor for that movie in my region.
So use a computer to play your DVDs. Region lockout works on the honor system.
People seem to be missing the fact that importing DVDs is not necessarily legal; and turning your DVD player to region free is arguably not legal (under the various "interfering with rights protections mechanisms" laws.
To you and me "buying the DVD from some other region" is legit, while "pirate the movie" is less legit, but to the rights-holders there's not much difference. See, for example, this submission which is talking about rights holders asking Netflix to stop people buying content from a different country.
But the industry has different ideas, and they are well funded and influential. We see the results of that influence in international copyright agreements and laws like DCMA.
See for example the Japanese games that have "NO RE-SALE" printed on the back of the box. Japanese publishers pushed pretty hard to make second-hand sales of games illegal. (I don't think that succeeded). It is (or was?) illegal to rent games in Japan.
In the face of this kind of vigorous assertion of rights of IP holders it's can be difficult to stick rigidly to the law.
"Just buy the DVD" doesn't work for the reasons given; just go without is dumb for the reasons you give.
I don't think I'm arguing for the position you think I'm arguing for.
This is definitely not true. Piracy in that region builds up a support infrastructure for piracy that can be used in other regions. It builds social support for piracy, and can spread, as a cultural practice, when people from the afflicted region converse with people from other regions. All of those things can impact sales outside the region.
And there's a simple solution: Make sure that your stuff is available legally everywhere. Because if it's not, you know that it will be pirated.
I'm hoping as we move to a global market with digital distribution, these dinosaur companies will realize that there is no risk to handling world wide distribution themselves. But it means killing the distributors (who were the businesses that helped you get that content when nobody else was listening...).