That said, please let me go into more detail. Today I tried to watch a Russian DVD (title “Сёстры”, on IMDB) that I bought from a shop in Germany. Now, the shop certainly imported that DVD from Russia according to the imprints and (Russian) seals on the DVD case. Those seals are meant to distinguish pirated copies from licensed ones. Why exactly is it, I can’t watch this DVD on my Philips DVD player, purchased here in Iceland?
The laconic statement on the screen reads: “Wrong Region”.
Guess what, I just started to sympathize with the guys from “The Pirate Bay”. I have a DVD – one that I bought – and I can’t watch it because some overly greedy people always need to segregate humanity in order to increase their own profits.
Oh wait. Instead of getting the licensed and legal version I probably should have asked some Russian friends of mine to get me an “underground copy”, right? Is that what this is all about? You want to get people to do illegal things in order to be able to punish them later on? Where’s the old saying that “the customer is always right”? To restate the obvious: you suck!
Haha, customer. Yeah … a similar feeling I had when I had bought the first DVD of the “Lord of the Rings” trilogy just to find an ad on it that explained to me how cool the extended cut was and that it would be out shortly after the time I had bought the DVD. Back then I decided not to watch the other parts of the trilogy and I never did. If it wasn’t a whole industry doing it, the guy doing it would be locked away … but since everyone does it, it’s okay. I call it organized deceit, though.
“Спасибо большое” и пошли все на…!
// Oliver
PS: The movie is several years old, so the stupid argument about different release dates in different regions is moot. Just get a grip on reality and let customers watch what they want. You could even introduce some kind of expiry date for the region lock that is, say, one year after the planned release. No problem with me. But as a matter of fact it is near-impossible to get Russian movies in Western shops, so there is no alternative …