Will Baude has been inquiring about the DVD industry’s Content Scrambling System (CSS) and its associated region (or locale) coding system. Today he asks:

The question that then plagued me was why DVD-players went along with this system. It makes sense that DVD makers would like the ability to price discriminate in different markets, but wouldn’t Dell disk drives be worth more if they could play discs from all regions? Who gains from the limited switching?

DVD player manufacturers have to license the patents of the DVD Copy Control Association (as well as patents for other systems, like the Macrovision video copy protection scheme) in order for their players to legally play DVDs. The DVDCCA’s licensing provisions require manufacturers to implement the region locking scheme—thus, you can’t get a license to produce a DVD player if you don’t implement the scheme.

Now, some far-east manufacturers evade this requirement by conveniently “forgetting” to lock the DVD region settings of their players, or by leaving secret menus available to allow people to break the DVD region coding scheme. And, it is my understanding that unlicensed players based on the “DeCSS” code circumvent this region lock scheme completely, but I don’t own any DVDs from outside region 1 (USA/Canada), so I’ve never tested this for myself.*

Arguably, the whole system is illegal under WTO rules, which specifically prohibit schemes like region locking and rules against “reverse imports” that are designed to maintain regional price differentials. But given DVD manufacturers’ interests in maximizing their profits (particularly in often egregiously overpriced Region 2 markets like Great Britain) don’t expect this to change anytime soon.