Play Station and copyright

[wlt4@mindspring.com]

> by creating these five (?) artificial zones and creating a >Macrovision (copy-guard) system that will 

There are eight DVD regions, though two of them are "reserved" and "special international venues" (ie planes, cruise ships, etc).  Macrovision definitely pre-dates DVDs: it's been messing up my TV set for years now.


>At the same time, as soon as this is discovered, the US Customs >officials start banning the importation of these machines -- the Apex >model coming into the US next month is supposedly going to be >different than today's model.

Mainstream media reports have stated this but it's a bit unclear how accurate it is.  US law apparently doesn't make it illegal for a player to *disable* the copy protection as the Apex does, only illegal to make machines that have no protection at all.  And many industry people have stated it can take up to six months to do the kind of hardware changes necessary for this.  (In any case, there are other brands with what appear to be the exact same circuitry, a model from Raite for example.)  Still, who knows what the MPAA will try to push through.


> It was estimated that over 100,000 copies were purchased in the >United States from Amazon UK and other British and Canadian internet 

It's key that these are estimations since Amazon UK didn't release any sales figures (at least according to the news reports I saw).  They're probably vastly overestimated since even a US printing of 100K is phenomenally high and based on printing numbers of the earlier Harry Potter books this would mean something like one in five of every copy of that third book in the US was ordered from England.

LT