Multimedia
Blogs
Forum
Affordable HD
Whitepapers
Newsletters
Events
Advertisers
Blogcast
MillimeterOur Modern Times
Mar 22, 2006 2:37 PM, D.W. Leitner
In London a few days ago a writer friend of mine loaned me Warner Home Video's superb 2-DVD set of Charlie Chaplin's "Modern Times" featuring, as an extra, Octavio Cortázar's "Por Primera Vez" ("For the First Time"), a delightful short Cuban film about remote villagers, adults and children alike, watching a film for the first time in their lives. On the screen, flickering in their amazed eyes was the famous sequence in "Modern Times" in which a time-saving automatic feeding machine repeatedly grinds a spinning corn cob into trapped assembly-line worker Charlie's dentures. The Little Tramp tortured by 1936 technology run amok.
For me it was not "Por Primera Vez"-I had seen this classic short before-but I almost didn't get the chance to re-experience the bursting smiles and raw excitement felt by that virginal audience in 1968: the DVD drive in my iBook informed me that the disc was Region Code 2. Region Code 2 discs are meant for European consumption only. I'm based in New York, so I'm geographic Region Code 1, that is, USA and Canada.
Since the disc's Region Code 2 is fixed, would I like to change the Region Code of my DVD player, asked my laptop? Investigating further, I encountered the following: "IMPORTANT: You can change the region code of your DVD drive only five times (this includes the original setting). The fifth setting of the region code is permanent."
My laptop, of course, readily plays both NTSC and PAL DVDs, nicely evading the analog broadcast geopolitics of the last century. I take great delight in my laptop's agility to do this. No longer do I have to scramble to obtain both a PAL player and PAL monitor every time a colleague from abroad sends a sample of their latest project to my New York address.
Had my London friend instead shared a PAL VHS cassette whilst (that's how they write it) I was in London, I would have encountered no obstacle. Any hassle playing the same cassette in New York would have stemmed from incompatible video standards rather than the sabotage of intentional copy protection.
Nor did the ICAIC (Instituto Cubano del Arte e Industria Cinematográficos) film crew, who so lovingly captured that long-ago rural audience's rapturous response to the indefatigable spunk of Chaplin's Little Tramp, encounter copy protection obstacles projecting their 16mm print in the field. (Whatever the provenance of ICAIC's print, the idealistic Little Tramp would certainly have approved of this screening.)
For over a century the farthest-reaching technical accomplishment of film has been its open, universal, and stable standards, which have endowed the entire world with a hundred years of audio-visual culture and historical record. Any long lost can of 16mm or 35mm dug up anywhere in the world can be readily viewed or restored if physically intact. Will the same hold true for electronic recorded media a century from now?
What imperial arrogance carved the globe into six geographic markets anyway? (One nation, China, got its own code, Region Code 6, which, let me tell you, froze those dastardly Chinese video pirates right in their tracks.) Those of you old enough to remember a world before Internet video streaming will recall the answer: Hollywood's MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America) under the colorful Jack Valenti, which insisted in the 1990s on a world balkanized by Region Codes to stem the tide of DVD piracy.
Hollywood's nightmare was that costly theatrical releases of expensive blockbusters in foreign markets would be undermined if DVDs arrived there beforehand. This was in the days when foreign box office revenues were outstripping domestic, when DVDs were strategically released well after theatrical, not months afterwards but a year or more.
On this basis Hollywood conditionally signed on to the DVD format, which set the stage for DVD players to be snapped up by consumers at a faster rate than any newly introduced electronic product in history and pushed home video studio profits to new highs.
What a difference a decade makes. Last year Mark Cuban of HDNET Films grabbed headlines by announcing a radical business plan of releasing DVDs simultaneously with theatrical release. Subsequently floating a trial balloon of the same idea were several indie studios (who, with the exception of Lionsgate, are all subsidiaries of the majors).
It does seems quaint to revisit the topic of DVD Regional Codes as millions worldwide discover the joys of downloading (questionably) free Flash movies of recent Saturday Night Live skits or "Brokeback Mountain" parodies from the likes of YouTube, DailySixer, and GorillaMask. Or as a brave new world of online content accumulates at Google Video and Amazon.com.
More topical is the media industry's other approach to what is now called Digital Rights Management (DRM), namely the marriage of proprietary formats to restricted devices as epitomized by Apple's (unimaginably successful) trinity of AAC audio compression, iPod, and iTunes downloading. On an iPod, for instance, you cannot play a tune digitized using Microsoft's rival WMA compression. DRM is at the front lines of our times. No, I don't mean the fact that it continues to bollix up industry-wide launches of HD-DVD and Blu-ray. I'm writing this in Paris where bottles are being thrown, windows smashed, and tear gas released. Students are resisting proposed changes in the rules of being hired and fired.
Several days ago the French government launched a broadside of a different sort when it announced a new copyright bill, under debate in the National Assembly, that would outlaw proprietary digital music schemes. The papers here are full of references to Apple Computer. "France Debates New Tunes for iPod," reads one headline.
The French cultural minister, Renaud Donnedieu de Vabres, was quoted as saying, "I want to give the Internet world and the cultural industries a secure legal structure to permit a real development-or even explosion-of online cultural offerings. Everyone will be able to choose." (The U.S. has no counterpart to France's cultural ministry.)
A Molotov cocktail hurled at DRM police lines, or a first ripple in the changing tide of world sentiment? France is, after all, the third largest digital music market in Europe. The bill would also turn individual digital piracy into a misdemeanor equivalent to a parking ticket.
By the way, I did reset my iBook DVD drive to Region Code 2 in order to watch my London friend's copy of "Modern Times." That means after I switch back to Region Code 1 in New York, I will be able to flip my Region setting one more time only.
Just one more annoyingly mosquito-like technical gotcha buzzing around my face in these Modern Times. Better than a spinning corn cob, I admit.
Continue the discussion on “Crosstalk” the Millimeter Forum.