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.

Before I start this post, I want to just clue people in to what kind of person I am if they don’t know me very well. I consider myself a citizen of the world. I was born in the US, I have friends of different nationalities, many of them I consider close friends. I hold no grudge towards someone based on ethnicity or social group. My only prejudice is against stupidity. If you are stupid enough, I will frown upon you.

I would also like to say that only one time have I ever shed a tear for someone I didn’t know. That moment was hours after 9/11 when things started sinking in. 3,347 died because of a conflict in the middle east that in my opinion shouldn’t be our problem, but because our government has decided we are responsible for policing the world, we are stuck in the middle of it.

Earlier today President Obama gave a speech in Egypt. The target audience was the muslim nations of the world. It was a speech typical of Obama. A speech aimed at mending fences instead of tearing them down. In my eyes a speech aimed in the right direction.

Now I am not one for taking sides, but I have to agree with President Obama that the Israeli people need to stop settling in the west bank. This area was given back to the Arabs by Israel in 1967. Now they take it upon themselves to settle there, and when asked to stop so that the peace process can try to move forward they basically say, no we’ll do what we want. Its no wonder the Palestinian’s are prepared to fight, how would you like it if you’re neighbor decided that your swimming pool looked nice, and decided to fence it off as part of his yard, then have the city/town/legal system take his side and say too bad. If Israel really wanted peace, they would work towards it instead of allowing their people to slowly take over the west bank.

Now I am a registered Independent, I have voted both Republican and Democrat in the past. Recently though the GOP has not been in my favor. They are far from it. They keep saying stupid things, that put us in bad light with the rest of the world. Let’s take House Minority Leader John Boehner’s blasting of President Obama’s speech. Then there was former Governor Mitt Romney ( as a Massachusetts resident’s opinion (that’d be me) needs a big spoonful of STFU) who decided to further criticize President Obama. Israel gave back that land to the Arabs after some conflict in the 60s they should not be moving into that territory and trying to settle there. President Obama is right in demanding that Israel not move into that territory. It’s not theirs, and the GOP has to figure that out, or else STFU. If Israel wants peace concessions should be made whether they have made too many or not. Going in and further taking land from the Palestinians will just continue the conflict, and we’ll get nowhere.

Again I would like to thank the British for starting this mess some 90 years ago, then handing it off to the U.N. in the late 40s and leaving it up to the rest of the world to figure out. I would just like to go a week without hearing about crap in the Middle east….