DVD Regional Encoding Legal?

[ant80]

I know that it is not illegal to flash a dvd rom drive to a non-regional encoding standard. However, is it legal for CCS (or whatever they are called) to enforce dvd regional encoding? Considering that it is against WTO trade agreements? I just read about this in doom9 and this was a pretty interesting question.

Hypothetical Qustion: What if someone sues them for WTO violation?

 

[Mingon]

In the UK it is not illegal to have/buy region 1 dvd's but it is illegal to watch them. The reasoning is that the film has not had approval from the film board. For example the nunchucks in way of the dragon had to be edited out.

 

[ant80]

But apart from the censors, is it legal to even require that one region dvd's can't be played in another region's dvd players?

 

[KenGr]

It would probably be illegal to require that all disks be region coded. Many disks are "all region". The region coding by the makers is completely voluntary. You can choose to buy or not buy region coded disks like any other form of copy protection.

It is also perfectly legal for manufacturers to produce region free DVD players and there are a number being produced. Of course, patent owners may charge different licensing fees for region free players also which probably accounts for the limited number of these available.