[PW] Re: copyright issues--PAL to NTSC

[John Franklin]

On Dec 11, 2006, at 11:58 PM, Mary Towner wrote:

> I'm away from work this week but did some preliminary 'net searches.
> Legal reference isn't my specialty. Has anyone else run into this  
> issue before?
> Is it a copyright violation to convert PAL to NTSC?

I am not a lawyer, so you can take this with a grain of salt, but PAL  
and NTSC are not digital rights management schemes or copy  
protection, they are just encoding forms. Copyright law should not  
care about them -- what's a violation under the DMCA, at least, is  
deliberately working around a system designed to prevent you from  
using something. If you were dealing with a piece of text instead of  
video, the equivalent question would be "this is saved as ASCII text;  
can I re-save it as Unicode?" And, of course, it doesn't matter --  
what is copyrighted is the images on the screen and the sound coming  
out of the speakers, not the exact sequence of zeros and ones  
recorded on the DVD. (Otherwise, copying the thing to a videotape  
would not be a violation.) The issue is the copying, not the  
encoding. If you are sure that it would not be a violation to make a  
copy and watch the copy instead, it shouldn't matter whether the copy  
is the same format or not.

-John Franklin