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for double the U.S. shelf-price. When I’m done with it, I can sell it
or give it away in the UK. Copyright lawyers call this “First Sale,”
but it may be simpler to think of it as “Capitalism.”
The keys to decrypt a DVD are controlled by an org called
DVD-CCA, and they have a bunch of licensing requirements for
anyone who gets a key from them. Among these is something
called region-coding: if you buy a DVD in France, it’ll have a flag
set that says, “I am a European DVD.” Bring that DVD to America
and your DVD player will compare the flag to its list of permitted
regions, and if they don’t match, it will tell you that it’s not al-
lowed to play your disc.
Remember: there is no copyright that says that an author gets
to do this. When we wrote the copyright statutes and granted
authors the right to control display, performance, duplication,
derivative works, and so forth, we didn’t leave out “geography”
by accident. That was on purpose.
So when your French DVD won’t play in America, that’s not
because it’d be illegal to do so, it’s because the studios have in-
vented a business model and then invented a copyright law to
prop it up. The DVD is your property and so is the DVD player,
but if you break the region-coding on your disc, you’re going to
run afoul of anticircumvention.
That’s what happened to Jon Johansen, a Norwegian teenager
who wanted to watch French DVDs on his Norwegian DVD player.
He and some pals wrote some code to break the CSS so that he
could do so. He’s a wanted man here in America; in Norway the
studios put the local fuzz up to bringing him up on charges of
unlawfully trespassing upon a computer system.
When his defense
asked, “Which computer has Jon trespassed upon?” the answer
was: “His own.”
His no-fooling, real and physical property has been expropri-
ated by the weird, notional, metaphorical intellectual property
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