Hacker News Reader

Comment by cheschire | Hacker News Reader

I remember when I went to a major electronics retail store in Germany back around 2006, I was looking specifically for a DVD player I could region hack easily. This was before smart phones so I took a small list with me. I asked a floor worker if they had one on the list, and he asked me why I needed one. I explained I wanted to region hack the DVD player using remote control codes so I could watch region 1 and 2 DVDs.

He took me to his workstation in the middle of the show floor, looked up a DVD player in the list, printed off the region hack with company letter head, and showed me the DVD player on the floor to get.

It was at that point I realized the way that other countries treat piracy is vastly different than America.

View on HN

I wouldn't consider that "piracy", and certainly at the launch of the DVD player it wasn't considered piracy either. It may have been turned into an infringement by the DMCA, and it was a breach of the DVD-CSS licensing agreement by the manufacturer, but not actually piracy.

And of course other countries than region 1 were unsympathetic to it, as it prevented them from watching things.

(It was this that taught me the heuristic that if you want a piece of consumer electronics with maximum format support and convenience features, it should be the cheapest and most Chinese version you can find; expensive e.g. Sony kit is heavily loaded with "protection" antifeatures.)

I love it when DVD players force me to watch an unskippable anti-piracy threat that pirate copies always cut out.

It’s like they want me to pirate so I can avoid that garbage.

That's actually what stopped me from watching DVD's many years ago. I got so pissed off at all the unskippable garbage one day that I decided never to bother with DVD's again and haven't watched a single DVD movie since. I haven't pirated in a long time either, though, as I'm not a particularly heavy TV/movie watcher, so Netflix has been enough for me.

That always reminds me of the parody anti-VHS-piracy warning I remember from an old Australian skit show from the 80s.

"FBI Warning. If you suspect this video is not a legitimate copy, please call the number that is not appearing on your screen to report it."

I ended up ripping my DVDs as the resulting MP4s were so much nicer than the original media. I'd rip it, put it on a tablet to watch on the airplane, then flush them out for the next set waiting at home for me. Zero interest in blu ray media.

This is how I feel every time I type "youtube-dl" in my terminal.

A difference is that while copyright restrictions as such are nearly universal worldwide, any further restrictions like those imposed by DMCA are USA-specific, so for decades there have been actions (and software tools) that were considered 'shady' in USA but legal and condoned elsewhere.

Region-lock is one thing. Selling "chipped" game consoles is another - while piracy is obviously a clear driver, as long as no pirated software exchanges hands, in many places outside USA it was legal to sell consoles with pre-installed mod-chips that can play "game backups", so major legitimate electronics stores did so.

> (It was this that taught me the heuristic that if you want a piece of consumer electronics with maximum format support and convenience features, it should be the cheapest and most Chinese version you can find; expensive e.g. Sony kit is heavily loaded with "protection" antifeatures.)

Earlier it was Japanese gear from the Akihabara that had that desirable property. Sony didn't participate because they had a conflict of interest: they had bought large film and music studios. Showing again that vertical integration is anti-consumer.

> I wouldn't consider that "piracy", and certainly at the launch of the DVD player it wasn't considered piracy either.

It was definitely treated like piracy at the time (if for no good reason other than that DVD distributors demanded that it be treated like piracy.) At the consumer level it wasn't at all criminal, but pressure on retailers was pretty absolute. You had to shop at weird stores to get out of region DVDs or region-free players, or be in the know about how to hack mainstream models.

It was notable that amazon began to ship you DVDs from other regions the more international it became. It was the most mainstream place that I had seen that would do that.

Ignoring the region code didn't enable DVD piracy (like for example putting a modchip in your Playstation enabled game piracy while allowing you to play games from other regions) so the industry didn't have an argument that would aid them in making region code violation an actual crime.

> Ignoring the region code didn't enable DVD piracy (like for example putting a modchip in your Playstation enabled game piracy while allowing you to play games from other regions)

Only because the equivalent hack was unnecessary, right? A standard region locked DVD player can play a pirated disc by default, unlike a Playstation.

> and it was a breach of the DVD-CSS licensing agreement by the manufacturer

Hum, no. The poor manufacturer only created a test system, kept secure, with instructions for internal people only. It's hardly his fault that somebody leaked the instructions.

There was a similar attitude in the UK. There were even (legitimate) retailers set up to sell region 1 DVDs into the UK via the Channel Islands to reduce tax.

But was it truly "piracy"? You still had to buy the DVDs even if they were from the "wrong" region. It was a bit of a nonsense scheme by the industry and was more about them not violating rights (to distribute movies in certain territories) rather than the end user.

The only reason I can think of why region locks were even a thing is that there was probably a price difference for DVDs depending on region - $15 in the one country, $5 for the same movie elsewhere.

Nah, it really was all about movie distribution rights, and the completely bonkers web of agreements surrounding them. Since there used to be a desire to re-use 35mm film, countries would stagger cinema releases. So "6 months after end of cinema release" is different dates in different places. And there's also music rights which make the process even worse. A big problem is TV series re-releases which couldn't or didn't license the original music, so it's been substituted with something else.

Much of the time for small films the distributors wouldn't bother, so it was region 1 or nothing - or buy a hackable player.

Like Dawson's Creek on Netflix.... totally different theme song.

Haha, always funny when an EU watcher starts singing the « wrong » theme song to a show and confuses all the Americans on the couch.

There are a few TV series where music played a significant role that, on DVD, much of that has been stripped out because of music rights. You basically can't get the shows as aired. Norther Exposure, and (I've been told) WKRP in Cincinnati come to mind.

You know, I never though of this before, but I'm sure there was an episode of Northern Exposure that ended with Etta James's "At Last," and I'm positive that the DVD version doesn't have the song.

I remember it because it was one of my favorite episodes. I lost my box set years ago, so I guess I won't be verifying that.

My favorite butchering of a show due to external license rights is Beavis and Butthead. My guess is that during their original run on MTV, MTV possessed the rights to air the videos, and the show never acquired those rights. Given the sheer number of videos the series must have gone through, I don't hold out much hope for ever having a complete set, short of piracy.

Hilariously, or sadly, depending on your point of view, box sets of the series say things like "Complete Episodes!" which is technically true, if you consider the episode to be only the non-video content, but the episodes were also largely about B&B saying stupid things while sitting on the couch watching videos.

Daria is another case of that happening. I have seen DVD rips with the audio track from old TV rips floating around somewhere just because people want the music back.

It is a real shame when art gets modified after release due to licensing agreements

I feel like you're confusing movie theatres with DVDs. DVD regions were _all_ about market segmentation and affordability as opposed to release dates.

It was very much about price differences. Here in Australia we'd pay $30+ for a music CD around the year 2000. We always got shafted on regional pricing. The companies would use the "distributor" excuse but it didn't explain why our prices were so crazy.

EDIT: To clarify, the "local distributors" were a method to optimise local price points.

"Piracy" has very little actual meaning, it's just a negative metaphor. Smuggling things across the border that you aren't meant to have works better with the metaphor than making copies for personal use.

Contrast that with today in Canada, where telecoms are trying to sue big box retailers and their customers because they sold blank Android STBs:

https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/best-buy-staples-canada-com...

It’s like the 2003 RIAA dinosaurs have been resurrected.

What's with this weird trend on HN lately of taking some random anecdote of an experience in a non-US country, then using that as well as a bunch of assumptions to extrapolate how you think the US did things? Stores in the USA sold unlockable DVD players as well. Hell, we even had Divx DVD players that would play pirated movies off of CDs (which is why you often see old scene releases limited to 700mb).

I can confirm, I still have a DivX DVD player although I think I smoked around it a little too much, messed up the laser. I guess it is popular to bash on the place DMCA comes from, although the US has people from everywhere, so if some other place has good circumvention, it will reach it(US) sooner or later.

Yea I had similar experiences in the US with burning CDs and electronic stores helping me. Some even told me better and cheaper ways to do it.

If I went to Microcenter and wanted to build a plex server they would help me optimize it for sure.

> taking some random anecdote…as well as a bunch of assumptions to extrapolate

I don't think this is specific to Hacker News, or even a recent phenomenon…

Not only is that not piracy, region locks themselves should be seen as illegal, anti-competitive measures that infringe on user rights. The only reason they're not treated as such is industry lobbying.

The only reason the rest of the world even cares about intellectual property is America forces the issue via trade agreements. The US makes "adopt laws similar to ours so that our companies can reliably sell stuff to your people" part of the conditions for the agreement. Developing countries end up having the same laws on paper but little to no enforcement.

In USA, stores in chinatown openly sold multi-region DVD players. But outside of immigrant communities, most Americans had no reason to know or care about this. (Also bittorrent was a thing in 2006 so many ppl had moved away from physical disks.)

Best Buy sold unlockable players as well, though they weren't unlocked by default.

Eh, Germany isn't exactly "piracy friendly" at all. If you torrent a popular song there's a decent chance you get sued for hundreds (previously thousands) of dollars.

But region hacking isn't really piracy, and the guy you talked to might've just been cool with it. People in electronics stores are super different, some of them are just nerds who pirate at home and will gladly help you with any problem you have in that regard, others will just follow "protocol".

My thought exactly.

Germany is probably the unfriendliest EU country when it comes to piracy, enforcing fines even on small offenders.

Grandparent's example with the DVD player region lock isn't exactly piracy.

In some cases the region locks were even counterproductive if the goal was to reduce piracy. If you have to install a modchip to play a game from a different region, then you've just enabled someone to pirate who might not have bothered otherwise. But now that they've gone to the trouble to mod the system it's no extra effort to start pirating games.

It also give the modchip companies a thin veneer of semi-legitimacy.

I had the exact same experience in the US when CD burning became popular. Same with Divx DVD players.

Your comment was spot on until you turned it in America thing.

Copying a copyrighted disk is clearly against the law in most countries that have copyright law.

But I'm not sure that changing the region code settings would be "piracy."

In Sweden around the same time, a big-box retailer asked my parents if they wanted their DVD player region-unlocked for a $10 fee.

Pre-smartphone, but I could probably have looked up if it was possible without some special IR remote (which was required for some players in that age) in Opera Mini on my Sony Ericsson on some shady site if I spent half an hour but it was worth it to just say "yeah sure".

same, years ago bought an unknown brand DVD player at a supermarket (it was the only one they carried). It came with the code region hack instructions printed.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com