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

[John Franklin]

On Dec 12, 2006, at 11:55 AM, Craig Miller wrote:

> 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.

That was my point. The legal issue isn't format, it's copying. (And,  
incidentally, the region coding on DVDs IS a DRM scheme, so  
reformatting a DVD to region 0 to avoid it IS definitely illegal.  
It's also designed to fight a vast flood of import DVDs which was  
anticipated but which never materialized, which is why many people  
are predicting that region codes will not be present in next- 
generation video, but that's another story.) You'll notice that I was  
responding to the section of the original question that said "would I  
be violating any extra copyright law by changing the format?"

Possibly a better solution for those who want to play DVDs with  
multiple region encodings would just be buying a Region 0 DVD player.  
Amazon has one for less than $30 right now, along with somewhat more  
expensive options. (Just search for "Region 0 DVD Player", or "Region  
Free DVD Player" and it will be in the list.)

-John Franklin