I believe that the other poster was trying to say that there were Geo-restricted DVD's, i.e. DVD's that were only suppose to be sold in a certain area, and region encoded DVD's where the producer didn't really care where they were sold, but for some unexplained reason, sold them with a specific region code.
I personally don't really care what other people do. Personally, I always make sure that I buy the products that I want, rather than download them from the dark-net. My point is that local legality isn't the final arbitrator of what is right and wrong.
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Originally Posted by mgbino
I don't know that I think think of them as the same thing. I view geographic restriction as a block on the importing of an item and region encoding, like DRM, as a method of blocking the use of the item once its been acquired. I can also say, with 100% certainty, that there are different legal issues at play with both (at least in the U.S.).
To be clear, there is no law on the U.S. books that prohibits a consumer from importing an item unless the item itself is illegal or otherwise ineligible (like Cuban Cigars, for example). At this point, no court has ruled that it is illegal to bypass a geographic restriction to make a digital purchase. Maybe at some point they will, but it doesn't seem to be a big concern.
Circumventing region encoding is a different issue. Removing DRM is not legal. Period. But, there is no law against purchasing a region free DVD player, nor using a menu to change the region of a DVD player. Using a method to clean the DVD of region encoding, like ripping and coding removal, could be construed as DRM removal, and thus not legal.
Now, the store selling the product may be violating the rights of copyright holder, depending on how the product is licensed, but the consumer that is bypassing geo restrictions isn't doing anything illegal.
I don't see how it's immoral either, but I'm not the arbiter of people's morality.
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