The Australian High Court ruled in favour of Eddy Stevens on Thursday. Eddy was one of several hundred small time operators who modify Play Station (1 and 2) to override "region specific coding". He is also one of a group of about 30 such "chippers" who received a letter from Sony warning they risked a $68,000 fine if they kept doing it! So it was off to court for him, and interestingly, his position was backed by the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission, which argued regional coding was detrimental to consumer choice and should not be supported. (The court found making a pirate copy of a game was illegal, but the device which allowed a pirate game to be played was not.)
This raises the obvious enigma: how would you eradicate region coding eg DVDs and books? Even the recording standards for videos around the world - Pal, NTSC and Secam act as region coding of sorts. And if you do remove region coding, how do you set license regions, and help ensure the manufacturers remain profitable and keep producing?
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment