Mark Thomas + ECHELON?

[Peter Gutmann]

Alec Muffett <Alec.Muffett@UK.Sun.COM> writes:
 
>DVD Region Format encoding!
>Encryption in the name of filthy lucre!
>Artificial barriers to trade, and indirect censorship!
>When may we expect to see a programme about that?  Anyone?  8-)
 
NZ has an interesting situation with region coding.  Many manufacturers are 
quite openly shipping non-region coded players to their NZ vendors (they're 
even advertised in papers and whatnot as being able to play all regions).  
Others will take your player out the back when you buy it and bring it back 
with the region-coding disabled.
 
The justification I've heard for this is a recent law change which legalised 
parallel importing.  Until not too long ago, one company could obtain a 
monopoly to sell a certain type of imported product, adding massive markups to 
the price and taking anyone else who imported the same brand from overseas (at 
a fraction of the cost) to court.  The reason for this, it was often claimed, 
was that the appointed dealer was using the inflated price to cover tech 
support costs.  Microsoft NZ was often used as a counterexample to these 
claims :-).
 
Because this simply created a government-mandated, charge-what-you-like 
monopoly for whoever got there first, it was abolished not too long ago so 
that now anyone can act as an importer and dealer.  The pros are that in many 
cases prices dropped, the cons are that there were claims that anyone could 
import a product from whatever dodgy source they could locate, but this 
doesn't seem to have happened (the customer is still covered by the same 
fairly strong consumer protection laws which cover everything else).
 
Anyway, because parallel importing is legal, it's possible for anyone to 
import players region-coded for anywhere.  It would be pointless trying to 
sell Asia-Pacific region-coded players here because everyone would buy US or 
European-coded ones, the manufacturers saw the writing on the wall (either 
sell non-coded players or none at all) and are shipping non-coded players.
 
Peter.