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death from above - romantic rights

DRM and Education
Well, today is the International Day Against DRM, and going through some emails i got a rather sad reminder of how digital rights management hurts us all.

First, backstory on DVDs and region-coding for the uninitiated:

DVDs are "region coded" - they have a code on them that marks them as sold/marketed in a particular area of the world (e.g. the US, EU, etc.). Now, if that was just used for identifying purposes, fine, no big deal, but it's used to lock DVD players to only play *one region* of DVD. What this means is that, without modifying your player and possibly violating the DMCA, you can't buy a French DVD and play it on an American DVD player, or vice versa, even though many DVD players are fully capable of dealing with both US and worldwide signals (NTSC and PAL). The companies go *out of their way* to block you from doing it so they can force people to buy different versions of a movie at different prices in different countries. If they didn't do this, well, someone might just import a movie from another country where it's cheaper or get the version of the movie that has the ending they preferred -- and God forbid global market forces be allowed to work when there's money to be made in locking the system down.

Normally this isn't a big deal - most of the people i know who buy Japanese DVDs have the know-how and the not-caring-about-the-DMCA-how to make their dvd players/computers region free (or else they just buy/download the pirated version to avoid the difficulty, which is a great example of how the MPAA is encouraging piracy, not discouraging it). And in that case, the region-limiting only hurts their own personal entertainment - which is still bad, but doesn't have an immediate effect on society that can be pointed to and measured.

My friend marsinthestars has just moved to France to teach English in a town of 11,000 in the French countryside. She's been trying to find teaching materials to immerse her students in English and American culture (hold back on the oxymoron jokes on that, please). In this case, region-coding is going to be negatively impacting the learning of dozens of French schoolchildren trying to learn English.

Here's the email from my friend:

Tomorrow I begin observing classes. I'll be teaching 10 hours a week and holding an 'English Club' 2 hours a week, but first I get 2 weeks to observe each class I'll eventually be teaching, team teaching, or assisting in..

I've got a lot of ideas already for lesson plans; the idea is for me to bring in as much "authentic American culture" as possible, and get them to speak in English a lot. So I need a little help, since a lot of my ideas require American materials. I'm looking for mad libs books, some children's games (anyone have a mini-boggle they could send me?), Garfield cartoons or others with easy punchlines and few characters - ones I could white out and have them write dialogue for, children's books (not Amelia Bedelia, as she unfortunately depends upon weird problems in the English language they won't understand), American candy and American foods (I'm going to do a Halloween presentation), and any other ideas you might have. I'm avoiding DVDs as they might not work in the French DVD players, but VCR tapes might work?

Now, my friend is not particularly technically minded, but the truth is, VHS tapes won't work because French VCRs use PAL/SECAM and not NTSC -- but you can legally get French VCRs that play NTSC or convert the signal (it's simply a technical issue, not an arbitrary DRM issue). On the other hand, a legally purchased French DVD player can't play US-bought legal DVDs, even if it has the appropriate NTSC/PAL conversion chip inside (as many of them do).

So my friend and the school have two choices:

• Import a legal US DVD player and US NTSC TV (or signal conversion box) just to play movies for english class, even though they already paid money for a legal American DVD and a legal French DVD player


• Possibly break the law and burn a region-free copy of the movie - which would require some form of working around the encryption on DVDs, probably breaking several laws, or make an analog copy, losing video quality and generally just being a giant timesink and hassle


• Possibly break the law and modify the DVD player to be region-free, if possible. This usually involves searching around the web on some fairly shady sites to find the proper unlocking sequence of keypresses for your DVD player.

Now how is that modification illegal? Well, as near as I can follow, it's only legal to sell a DVD player that has region-coding -- or at least, any company not doing so would probably be violating a licensing agreement with the DVD format consortium. It's also not legal for companies to tell you how to turn their DVD player into a region-free one. It's not (AFAIK) illegal to own a region-free player... but at some step in the process of turning a region-coded DVD player into a region-free one, something illegal has to have happened - because unless someone magically stumbled on the region-unlocking codes for a given DVD player, at some step someone at the manufacturing company leaked the information. At best, it's certainly shady and a lot of work to do. At worst, it's just plain illegal.

And quite frankly, it's downright ridiculous that while my friend and her school may have to jump through countless hoops and/or shell out cash for a new DVD player to play a legally purchased DVD in a legal DVD player for purely educational purposes, I can download any number of French movies off BitTorrent right now in minutes and watch them on my American TV through my possibly-not-quite DMCA legal modded XBox, PAL/NTSC/region-codes be damned.

Significance here: I can do something illegal for my own entertainment in less time than it takes to work out doing something legal for education purposes, even though my friend OWNS a DVD and the school OWNS a DVD player. They just don't have the right to do what they want with them.

And the fact that pirates have made something that is hard or impossible to do legally into something that is now almost ridiculously simple, and that the MPAA-approved method involves buying something you already own twice or massively hassling around other methods... well, it's just plain silly. Why be good when being bad is easier?
Similarly ridiculous, something which was legal and possible with old tech (e.g. making a copy of a US VHS tape for a PAL TV for personal use) might be illegal now (making a digital copy of a US DVD with a new region code).

(note - i know the laws in France may be marginally different, but for the most part the rules apply, enforced or not - and where they don't apply, the MPAA would certainly like them to. The tendency in copyright law is for everyone to follow the strictest leader nation or risk sanctions).

I'm genuinely interested to hear some input from people here -- is there a legal, MPAA-approved way around this dilemma? She shouldn't have to get special permission or have an engineering degree to be able to use a DVD she owns for educational purposes... but i can't find any way around this.

DRM doesn't help you manage your rights -- it helps corporations limit your rights. That's all there is to it. And when that's misused, we all lose out.