This clearly did not materialise and now region encoding is simply an annoyance and a legacy battle much like IPX/SPX versus TCP/IP which we all got over with ease albeit having to plumb in Gateways (now there’s an antique) to convert protocols. I remember having to mess around with .ini files to provide Microsoft/Novell integration. [Utilmately ensuring that corporate infrastructures were complex and costly and of course lucrative for Integrators and VaRs.] Now they are all history!

Nowadays, a region chip is a simply, cheap commodity but somehow Sony, Ninetendo and of course Microsoft try to forget that the same generation they tried to trip up in the early days still exist and are the buying power for our kids which are their main taget market.

Blue Ray versus HD-DVD is just another Betamax versus VHS. When will they accept harmony?

It’s the sort of thing that makes artistically concerned and law abiding people go out and buy some device that let’s them get around crazy rules. We have a DVD collection which we bought and paid for in American and now live in France. Are we supposed to go out and buy them again? Of course not. One gets a “dezoned” DVD player and goes from there.

Over time I expect individuals and companies will need to spend much more time understanding and figuring out how to deal directly with abrogations of their rights and privacy by media, governments and the technologies that make it possible.

I think the International Space Station is still “illegal” — there’s supposed to be a separate region for international waters and other outside-a-country travel, but they were running a US-region DVD player at one point.

Small computer/AV services businesses will get just as much work as a result of DRM as they do as a result of bad manuals, confusing interconnects, and dumb security designs.

The reason I read, several times for the codes regions was to reflect market sizes – but they don’t reflect the way the markets function.