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After moving to Paris a year ago, I had to buy a new home-entertainment system. TV and video standards are different here, but friends told me I could buy a multi-standard VCR that allowed me to play both European and American tapes. That turned out to be easy: Nearly all VCRs sold here can show videos recorded in the North American NTSC format, as well as in the local PAL and SECAM standards.
When Christmas rolled around, I decided finally to jump on the digital bandwagon and buy my first DVD player. Alas, I was surprised to discover that DVDs -- unlike their audio CD ancestors -- can't be played all over the world. Disks sold in different regions are encoded with security schemes that keep them from being played on most machines outside their region.
North America, for instance, is Zone 1, while Europe and Japan are Zone 2, and non-Japan Asia is Zone 3. The studios argue that zoning protects their ability to roll out films around the world on a staggered schedule. After all, box-office receipts could be hurt if a new theatrical release were already widely available on DVD. But in truth, zoning was mostly designed to make piracy more difficult.
SECRET CODES. Problem is, the system is a sieve. To keep down engineering and manufacturing costs, most makers of DVD players create worldwide models that are technically capable of playing disks encoded for any zone, then configure them at the last minute to play only DVDs from the area in which the machines are sold. Thanks to a pervasive global hacker culture, the Internet abounds with sites providing secret codes that you can send to your DVD player through a remote control. The codes fool the DVD into playing disks from other zones.
Is this legal? In some places, yes. In others, maybe not. The law is murky, varying from one country to another. While manufacturers don't sanction such downloads or describe them in owners' manuals, they seem to turn a blind eye to the practice. After all, they're more interested in selling boxes than in protecting the profits of moviemakers. One major exception is Sony, which also happens to own a major studio. Most of its players can't be re-zoned, even through modifications to the hardware by experts.
Hacking DVD players might seem like an obscure sport limited to expatriates and extreme film buffs. But a trip through any Parisian video shop speaks otherwise. At the Virgin Megastore on the Champs-Elysées, shelf space given over to Zone 1 DVDs -- those ostensibly usable only in North America -- nearly equals that devoted to European Zone 2 DVDs. These Zone 1 DVDs, many of them old films not available in Zone 2 format, are openly displayed, not hidden under the counter. Clearly, a lot of Parisians must have tinkered with their DVD players to play these disks.
When I bought my machine at a big department store, I specifically tried to find one designed from the get-go to play movies from multiple zones. I would have been willing to pay more for such a device. No such luck. "Ça n'exist pas, monsieur," I was informed gravely by the salesman, who then added sotto voce that he or any of the other clerks on the floor would be happy to come to my house in their off hours to hack my player for a small fee.
CREEPY. I decided to poke around with the help of Google's search engine and quickly found several Web sites (I'm not going to provide the URLs because I don't want to endorse anything) that contain step-by-step instructions for how to convert your DVD to a "Zone 0" machine, which can play disks from anywhere in the world. Some of these DVD-hack Web sites -- chock-full of alienating jargon and worrisome stories about procedures that invalidate the warranty or codes that cause players to freeze up -- are creepy, frankly. At the very least, they reinforce the sense that you have to do something vaguely illicit and dangerous just to watch the out-of-region movies you have legitimately bought and paid for.
My question: Isn't the movie industry unintentionally abetting a culture of digital lawlessness? By allowing, even forcing, customers to defeat the DVD zoning scheme through technical tricks, movie studios are sowing the seeds of more pervasive and damaging behavior in the future. After all, once people feel comfortable, even justified, reprogramming their DVDs, they may be less hesitant to download illegally copied material over the Net or swap stories about breaking copyright protection.
The last thing content producers need is to turn their customers into the unwitting partners of content pirates. But if beating the system becomes an acceptable norm, that's exactly what will happen. The implications can only get worse as more content goes digital and more consumers have speedy broadband Net connections.
LANGUAGE BARRIER. Producers should go out of their way to make it easy for people to buy and use legitimate content. That means doing away with silly schemes like DVD zoning. Instead, studios can and should rely on human nature to accomplish much of what zoning was meant to do. Language, for instance, is probably the single greatest barrier to content distribution. With minimal extra effort and cost, studios could release DVDs initially only in a film's original language, which would curb piracy and discourage the vast majority of people in other countries from buying the disks. Later, after a film's theatrical release in each region, studios could roll out subtitled and dubbed versions.
Likewise, studios can influence sales patterns through good old-fashioned marketing and distribution. After all, the majority of consumers don't buy DVDs until after a movie has been promoted and shown locally. The point is, there are lots of ways producers can control their product and profit. Making paying customers feel like malefactors, though, has to be the worst tactic of the bunch.
Reinhardt is Paris-based correspondent for BusinessWeek Edited by Douglas Harbrecht
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Copyright 2002 , by The McGraw-Hill Companies Inc. All rights reserved.
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