[Prestidigitweeze]

The point of DVD regions was never to enforce a legal directive and so create a new class of petty criminal. It was to control the timing and pattern of distribution of a given product for the benefit of a group of companies, and to make circumventing said control a hassle for consumers who didn't want to deal with incompatibilities (standard-region players and burners) and the possible need to install special firmware or even hunt down a pattern of numbers to input into a Philips remote. It was about maximizing profits by discouraging people from bypassing that strategy. It was the geographical equivalent of Apple's walled garden: Hardware-enforced, not legally imposing.

Personally, I'd love to see Sony try to go after someone who moved to a Region 2 area and insisted on playing their Region 1 Blu-Ray discs on their Region 1 player. The media would orgasm over something that ridiculous. It's a case that will never happen because intellectual property and region-locking are two separate issues.

The same principal is now being used to bind Samsung smartphones to a particular region and to enable the detection of the installation of custom firmware so that a phone which has run, say, cyanogenmod will not be serviced by Samsung even if it's a day old because a Galaxy S5 cannot be restored to its default state without the user leaving an ineradicable record of having installed different firmware (though people are working on this).

Finding ways around Knox (and Samsung's new region-locked SIMs) is not illegal. In fact, some people I know are deserting Samsung because no other smartphone company -- not even Apple -- is annoying customers with SIM region locks. Perhaps companies like HTC and Nokia will get more business because of that. The M8 deserves a bit more market share.