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Successful capitalism relies on symmetrical 'rules' that apply to sellers and buyers. One such pair of rules is that sellers are allowed to charge whatever they like; while buyers are allowed to buy from whoever they want. Over the years media corporations have been particularly good at defending the first rule, while doing their best to infringe the second. One such attempt has been the use of regional coding for DVDs.

DVD regional coding is a response to the global free trade movement, and particularly to increasing pressure from governments and citizens to remove all bans on parallel imports. Back in the Seventies and Eighties, a media company that sold worldwide could legally appoint an 'exclusive agent' for a particular country or region. Anyone wanting to purchase from that company in that region had to go through the exclusive agent, and in fact anyone else selling that company's items could face criminal prosecution.

So reseller X could sell books in India, say, for a dollar each, but if anyone bought up a stack of those books and started selling them in Australia where reseller Y was the exclusive agent, they would be in deep trouble. And this meant that reseller Y could sell the same books for five dollars and make a stack of money without fear of being undercut.

Alas for media companies; those days are over. So manufacturers looking for a way to prevent undercutting have to resort to technological methods. When DVDs of movies and TV shows started appearing for sale some media mogul had a bright idea: encrypt the disks and twist the arms of the DVD player manufacturers so that DVD players sold in a particular region would only play disks encoded for that region.

Unfortunately for them, some governments -- like those in Australia and New Zealand -- have deemed that selling encoded DVDs is just banning parallel imports by another name, and equally illegal. Worse still, DVD player manufacturers who want to sell their players worldwide -- that is, nearly all of them -- usually make it as easy as possible for the devices to be reprogrammed from one region to another, or to turn off region coding altogether. And it doesn't usually take long for 'trade secrets' about how to reprogram a DVD player to escape into the wilds of the Internet.

So we have an enormous waste of time and money, a few alienated customers, and another monopoly-protection system which has quietly collapsed under the weight of people doing what comes naturally. How many more will there have to be before media companies get the point?

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