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

[FERGUSON Timothy]

-----Original Message-----
From: project-wombat-bounces at lists.project-wombat.org
[mailto:project-wombat-bounces at lists.project-wombat.org]On Behalf Of
swguardian-stumpers at yahoo.com
Sent: Wednesday, 13 December 2006 3:52
To: list at project-wombat.org
Subject: [PW] Re: copyright issues--PAL to NTSC

> As with others, I am not an attorney, except in representing myself in my own court matters.
   
>  I see here and interesting question. You are speaking of a PAL encoded DVD that you wish to copy to NTSC. The first question I would ask is where is this DVD
>  copyrighted? If it is sold only in the DVD format of PAL, then it is quite possible it is copyrighted only in the areas that use that format. 

I've avoided commenting as I'm an Australian and my opinion of what may or may not be legal in the US is of no value, but as to the point above, this is incorrect.  Under the Berne convention, to which the US is a signatory in a modified form, your publishing of a material in NTSC gives you immediate copyright, in all participants to the convention, over expressions of the material in other electronic formats.

So, for example, just because an American studio releases a DVD in Zone 1 does not mean I'm allowed to burn it to Zone 4 even if they just refuse to publish in local format for many years.  Which, by the way, American studios sometimes do.  It's rarer now that we have criminals and torrents perfectly willing to break the embargo, but there have been some DVDs that I've found it impossible to get in Region 4, because the studio who owns them chooses not to backlist them.





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