As you may or may not know, the world has been arbitrarily divided up into “zones” in which movies and DVDs are released. Each zone often has its own release dates, and on top of that, each local zone has a unique kind of “coding” done to all DVD players and media. Why?
Very simply, it’s so that the entertainment industry can try to control what you see and when you see it, by doing its best to make sure that each local zone’s mafia-like multimedia distributors have total control over that zone’s releases of music, film and DVD. And, of course, when each local mob boss decides to release the entertainment — and at what price.
Here, for instance, is a local film distributor’s page for an interesting Mike Leigh film that is currently showing on the big screen here, called Vera Drake. According to Ster Kinekor’s release policy, it will be a month or more before it bothers releasing the film on DVD (if ever). However, over in “zone one”, for R120, you can simply buy it on DVD already: Vera Drake on Amazon.
Their motive is a combination of control and profit. Nothing else. Our convenience is irrelevant. Take the ongoing wars over music piracy for instance. The music mob tried to make the public think that the “artists” are the ones being ripped off by any change to the structure. However, this isn’t really true. Read Music Industry Way Off Track with Song and Dance about Falling Sales.
To show you that the music industry is frankly lying about “piracy” having anything to do with falling music sales, first read this news item from a few years back: Missing RIAA Figures Shoot Down Piracy Canard. Then there’s a study by Harvard Business School that shows there is no impact whatsoever on sales of music when that music can also be downloaded off the internet for free. Download the 300k PDF file here. Then read this article by the New Scientist: Net Music Piracy Doesn’t Harm Music Sales.
And to counteract all the “evil movie piracy” news items, there’s the simple fact that Most Pirated Movies Leaked from the Studios Themselves.
Despite the PR about DVD piracy funding organised crime and terrorism, and being as bad as serious crime, this simply isn’t true. These ideas have little basis in any official law-enforcement findings — and tend to be the thumbsuck press releases from the multimedia mafia’s own PR firms. One of its front groups is a very official-sounding thing called the Industry Trust for IP Awareness Limited.
To help this group spread its assorted ideas about piracy, it released its own “studies” for people to download. Have a look at this forum where there’s a discussion about the documents and — more importantly — the meta-data in them, which the makers were too stupid to remove prior to public distribution. Read Latest Anti-Piracy Guff
Here’s a local version of the mob’s official-sounding thing: Safact. (Funny how, despite all the impressive statistics, you can still buy a wide range of DVDs at most flea markets, irrespective of how many “bulldozer running over boxes of confiscated goods” PR events they stage.)
As an example of the industry’s own propaganda, read this press release, and the pungent comments that follow it: RIAA and Labels Are ‘Changing Hearts and Minds’.
Now bookmark and take some time for reading at Boycott RIAA. Also read New Attack on DVD Piracy Goes Too Far. There’s also a lot of information and news at On Lisa’s Radar: the RIAA Death Throes Archive.
This authoritarian urge has a long history. When the first cassette tape players emerged, these global mafias spent fortunes trying first to prevent it, then mount campaigns suggesting “home taping is illegal” — remember those? Then when the VCR arrived, they did the same thing — spent fortunes to try to prevent you and me legally from recording anything. Finally they gave up (and quietly watched the profits soar from home video rentals).
Then DVD came, and the multimedia mafia decided to do two things: make fake “zones” to keep control over their individual digital fiefdoms, and encrypt films using a secret code — to make sure that no one could copy their releases.
After spending millions to do this, their code was cracked by a Swedish teenager. The mob took him to court, and tried to keep the few lines of code secret. Read Wired magazine on Why the DVD Hack Was a Cinch. For a cluster of news items on aspects of the mob’s fight to keep its code secret, see DECSS.
The mob kept hoping that its “zone” idea would continue to be the way to divide the global consumer base, but thanks to multiregion DVD players, this fake compartmentalising of the world has been almost completely bypassed. The mob operates on consumer ignorance, for the most part. Fix this. If you have a DVD player that “can’t” play other zones’ DVDs, then browse for your specific model name and number, and follow the instructions at DVD Player Multi-Zone Codes. And here’s more, at DVD Region Unlock Codes. Then browse through this forum.
As a case in point, (and I have nothing against this local distributor), look at this local forum created by distributor Take Two, for instance: Take Two. Here’s a thread on the forum about DVD box-set prices. (Someone’s complaining that the box set of season eight of The X-Files costs R1 400 locally, and the United States price, by the way, is $69 — or R436.)
Note the post by the person in charge of the site (and thus in the pay of the distributor) midway down the page, saying: “These days the prices have come down quite nicely, and even with the rand being so strong lately, the prices are so much the same now (if you factor in the shipping to get the stuff from overseas), that you might as well buy the DVDs locally.”
Oh really? Note their price for X-Files Season 9 (R739). Whereas over in “region one” it is going for R467 — or $74,99.
(When browsing prices in other regions, bookmark and Use this Online Currency Converter.)
The “zones” seem to be in place purely to allow the regional parts of the global mob to set their own prices. As long as you don’t know much about how their system works, or how to get cheaper and quite legal DVDs from other regions, they can continue this charade of “local” price settings.
To make a commercial DVD, including all packaging, costs perhaps R5 — let’s be kind and say R10. Here’s a link to a local decent distributor of PC equipment: Frontier Electronics. Scroll down the page to its blank DVD prices. Its blank DVDs are selling for between R1,50 and R3 each, and the distributor is quite clearly making a profit as well. So, the cost to the large commercial makers of DVDs, who print tens of thousands of titles, is probably down to a few cents per disk. (The DVD boxes themselves cost about R1,60 each, at this supplier, and most DVD originals’ covers are a just basic colour-photocopy sheet of paper slid into the box.)
Naturally there are many sites online providing these covers for easy printing. For example, look at Cover Target or DVD Covers.
So, when local distributors compile press releases about the quality of their products and “drop their prices” to R109, they’re probably “only” making R99 profit, per disk. The so-called “pirates” who aren’t soaking up as much of the profits as the official companies, sell perfect digital copy DVDs for anywhere from R40 to R80 — and they too, are still making as much as R70 profit per disk.
The local “piracy problem” is mostly all about the greed of local distributors and their high prices — it’s not nearly as much about crime and copyright theft as they’d like you to believe. If you try to sell an overpriced product, naturally those who can see the gap will try to provide a much cheaper alternative. Simple logic suggests that if you lower your prices to a genuine non-rip-off price, the majority of humans who are law-abiding will most likely buy your “legal” product.
(It doesn’t matter how many adverts you make trying to somehow link violent crime to pirating DVDs and games — if your product is so overpriced that someone else can sell it for 60% to 70% cheaper than you, and they can still make a profit, it says something about your own profiteering to start with.)
Slight gear change. Let’s raise your awareness. First, if you don’t know much about DVD, go learn the language at DVD Basics and Glossary and More.
Now, let’s have a look at software you can use to make copies of your legally bought DVDs (if you’ve spent serious money on a fragile DVD, the last thing you need is for it to get damaged.) This is where the concept of making a back-up comes in. I’ve spent lots of money importing originals of assorted zombie movies and art films I like; there’s no way in hell I’m risking scratching them. Again, this is what the mob would like. It does not want ignorant consumers to realise there are ways to protect their purchases. Here’s a free one-step program that can back up your DVD to your hard drive, and let you simply burn a copy: DVD Shrink.
And for the mother of all DVD back-up software and resources, you can do no better than Doom 9. Another site to bookmark and browse is the Digital Video Forums.
Until the next time, if the mob doesn’t get me.
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