James Andrews

Anyone who knows me knows that I have traveled far beyond the boarders of the US. I have had the ability to experience a culture that most Americans only see through hollywood’s eyes. In most cases incorrectly. The best way to accurately experience culture of a foreign land without visiting it, is through their eyes. Whether it be books, music, or video it can more accurately depicts what that culture values.

Back in the 1980s we had the video revolution. People could go to the store and buy a VCR, rent movies from a local shop. You could go on vacation overseas and bring back movies to enjoy with your friends, or if you knew someone over seas you could even trade movies. The ability was also there to buy “import cds” from music stores. I remember as a teenager, there were many European bands that had 4-5 CDs and only 1 released in the US, so if you wanted those CDs you had to special order them.

The problem began with the Playstation. Sony’s hit video game machine that won over the heart of the video game world in the 90s. Sony had built in a protection schema to prevent people from buying video games in Japan from other countries in the world by making it so that other players couldn’t read discs from other regions. Many games that were released in Japan never made it to other countries, so if you wanted to play that “Castle of Cagliostro” game you needed a Japanese playstation.

Eventually the electronic nerds of the world figured out how to modify the play station to allow playing of any region game. At the same time they broke the copy protection schema, so that you could now copy playstation games with CDR media.

Soon there after came the DVD. The MPAA decided that it also wanted to use region protection on it’s DVDs. There are 13 regions. The US is region 1, Japan and UK are region 2. If you buy a region 2 disc from the UK it will not play in your DVD player. Destroying any fair use that you have to the media you legitimately own, and forcing you to buy a DVD player from the UK. Again soon after the nerds came to the rescue and did a couple things. Many hacked their machines to play multi region discs. DVD Jon broke the encryption schema called CSS and allowed you to copy DVDs to blank DVDs and remove the region protection.

Now we have blue ray discs. The media companies have smartened up a little though. They have internet connections and once a Discs key is broken they no longer produce discs with that key and update your blue ray player. Blue Ray keys get broken all the time, so this is also pretty ineffective.

The RIAA tried to do the same thing with DVD Audio, but since MP3s came out and took over digital audio, the DVD Audio plans fell on it’s back and have never been heard from again.

This now brings me to my point. The inclusion of region controls is bad. It prevents the people of the world from sharing their culture with one another unless an entity licenses the rights to distribute the media. While we have been lucky in the US with Japanese animation. There are other aspects of other cultures that I personally would love to see. I saw a great Korean film on a flight to Japan. Will I be able to buy it on blue ray and play it in the US? Probably not. We are stifling the ability for other cultures to understand each other. We can listen to President Obama praise or scold some foreign country, but until we have the ability to see what their people see first hand. To see what values they hold without restriction from the media conglomerates, we the people of the world miss out.