Not for long… heard of Palladium? With Microsoft’s hegemony growing and the rapid balkanisation of the internet, freedom of information transfer is severely endangered. Broadband has not grown and the few companies that offer it are increasingly under the indirect control of media companies.

I’m extremely dissapointed that Bruce Perens backed down on his promise to publicly defy the DMCA and crack a DVD player in front of a live audience last week. It could have been a strong public statement of our right to use information as we see fit.

AFAIK, region locking is a short term solution to stop grey-market selling of entertainment titles. But in a truly globalised world where comsumers have true freedom of choice, such regulations are meaningless.

-”That’s Wrong….. Wrong”

And don’t get me started on Palladium. It’s a cunning MS plan to proprietise the open TCP standard as well as kill Open Source / Free Software and GNU/Linux (there only competitors) in one fell swoop.

Let’s hope that more governments mandate Open Source. Although MS will just make some more “donations” to reverse the decision.

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Now, back to scheduled programme….

Regioning of consoles is evil.

Regioning internally at SONY or Nintendo is fine, it’s a method of tracking and deveoping internationised versions of a game/movie etc. Sending only the Region’s version to that market is also fine….

But if I can speak Japanese, or think the NTSC version of the movie is of higher quality (more features etc, as is often the case - Almost Famous Bootleg anyone?) and have laid down my hard earn payolla on a machine, I should be able to buy any @#$%ing game/DVD I want.

There is NO legitimate consumer reason for region locking players.

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Oh and don’t forget the latest wonder law introduced in the corrupt American congress… It’s ok for a copyright holder to HACK your machine (gross simplification). Eg, MPAA and RIAA can HACK your machine if they believe you may have some copyright infringing material on it.

The funny part is the bill is open ended and would allow you or I to HACK the RIAA and MPAA if you felt they infringed your copyright (perhaps this law is good afterall, the entire music industry could destroy the RIAA and all the record companies instantaneously, especially all those artists from the 60s and 70s who live in trailers and haven’t received a dime for their art. Not much different to now, when the artists make about 2% of the total earnings of their art, then out of that have to pay back the record company for recording costs etc).

MPAA (I believe, might be RIAA) has since backed away from the law, because they are concerned and think that it should only allow Multinational Corporate Media Criminals to HACK consumers, not the other way around.

Also of note is the fact that HACKing is usually a federal offense in the good ol’ US of A.

For those that think so what, if you don’t pirate you have nothing to worry about, think again… Ever ripped your favourite CD to mp3 so you can listen to it at work? or just because it’s more convenient to have it on the PC? Well RIAA and friends want that to be illegal also. But you paid for it I hear you scream! Yes yes you did.

Interesting.

PAL/NTSC/SECAM are a technology barrier that just happened because the everyone wanted to have a different standard.