Tit for tat
Lest I lead anyone to think I condone every action of our fine film industry, I wanted to elaborate on the trials required to watch a DVD on my computer this afternoon. I finally received my copies of the first two seasons of Futurama today. As they are only available in the UK, they are of course region 2 discs. I was neither hot nor bothered by this, as I expected to be able to use trusty copy of DVD Extractor to copy a disc at a time to my hard drive sans region code and simply watch it from there. Needless to say, that didn't work. I tried a total of three different programs from both Mac OS 9 and X and found that none of them were able to rip from the first disc I wanted to watch. My hypothesis is that even though all of these programs are able to remove the region code from the saved disc image, none of them are able to circumvent the restrictions posed by the drive's firmware itself, as evidenced by my various attempts to duplicate the folder structure of the disc itself using one of these programs, an operation which consistently failed at the same point during the process. After more investigation, I was able to find the tools necessary to reprogram my DVD-ROM drive with RPC-1 (non-region locked) firmware. After several hours of effort, I can finally watch the DVDs I legally purchased.
It's important to note that I do not support efforts to illegally distribute content of any kind but that current copy protection methods make no effort to distinguish me from those who would freely redistribute copyrighted media. I should additionally point out that region coding was not designed for copy protection per se (that is the job of CSS), but to customers it is indistinguishable from pure copy protection. It's very conceivable that avid fans of a particular series or whatever might buy recordings of that series in multiple forms, merely to run into artificial restrictions which limit them from enjoying their purchases, as happened in this case. I don't mind going to certain lengths to enjoy one of my favorite series; what troubles me is that in the eyes of the MPAA I am a criminal.
Posted by ned at November 16, 2002 07:22 PM