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

[Craig Miller]

At 08:21 AM 12/12/06 -0600, John Franklin wrote:
>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.

Actually, while your theory sounds good, it doesn't deal with 
the purchase of licensed product -- encoded by format and 
(in the case of DVDs) region.  You are not allowed to 
duplicate DVDs (or video tapes or text books or novels or 
computer software etc.) because you have purchased a 
single copy of a copyrighted work.  Making more copies can 
be (but is not in all cases) a violation of the copyright holder's 
rights.

Craig.


~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Craig Miller         Wolfmill Entertainment        craig at wolfmill.com
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