Meezan writes with a perfect example of why DVD Region codes have no place in the future:
I live in Taiwan (region 3), study in the UK (region 2), but am from Canada (Region 1). Today my 5 region switching limit was reached and I couldnt play any but the US DVDs ordered through Amazon.
Anyway, the point is I found the answer on your page… I downloaded Region X and thought I would let you know that it does in fact work.
I think it was this DVD post from June, they didn’t mention what kind of Mac it worked on… [update: Taiwanese Powerbook G4 400, OS X10.1.5]
This reminded me of something I started writing last week but never finished:
The most perversely hopeful thing I’ve heard recently about the copyright and digital usage fight was from Jonathan Taplin, President and CEO of Intertainer (from a presentation at Digital Hollywood as reported by Doc Searls in LinuxJournal)
AOL Time Warner is $30 billion in debt. That means the first $3 billion of profits goes to pay the banks. Vivendi Universal has $20 billion in debt. Disney has $25 billion in debt. These are companies that have been leveraged to the neck. If you think about the deflationary economy, which is where we are going, the pricing power–whether for VoD, or DVD rental, or for advertising–is not going to happen. Viacom was smart enough not to do anything stupid in the Internet space, and will probably weather this. But I am here to say that it is going to be a very rough two or three years for the media sector.
- Disney has $27B in debt with a market capitalization of $32.247B.
- AOL has $32B in debt with a market cap of $50.123B.
- Vivendi Universal appears to be completely underwater with $24.7B in debt and a market cap of only $13.136B.
Anybody want to buy a big media company? (talk about a money pit). I hadn’t realized exactly how badly these companies were doing, but I won’t be surprised if all three file for bankruptcy protection sometime within the next 2-3 years.
Crappy products and too much money spent trying to stop progress, this industry is going to look completely different in 5 years. At first I’m sure they’ll blame the internet and piracy, but then everyone will forget about them as better and more open content becomes available.
