DISQUS

Ed Felten · 4 years ago

It's too simple to say that people think price discrimination is unfair because they don't understand it. I'd bet that many people who understand the basic argument for price discrimination still think it is unfair.

You write:
"Of course, many [consumers] don't understand that there are perfectly sensible reasons for drug companies to price discriminate by regional markets or countries. But that doesn't stop consumers from traveling by the busload up to Canada to purchase certain drugs below-cost!"

You imply that this is somehow inconsistent on consumers' parts. But I don't see the inconsistency.

We both know that airlines price-discriminate by charging different rates depending on your itinerary, when you buy, and so on. We understand why that they do that, and why it's efficient to let them do it. But that doesn't make us hypocrites for buying the cheaper tickets when we can. Similarly, consumers who understand why drugs cost less in Canada aren't being hypocrites when they buy drugs in Canada.

Mark Casazza · 4 years ago

I don't think the region encoding or the presence of sub-titles will make any difference whatsoever when it comes to Americans or Europeans acquiring reasonably priced CDs/DVDs from other parts of the world. Most modern DVD players are produced for an international market so the default region coding can be set (usually at the factory) for the intended market, but it can also be changed by the end user. And, many players can be set to ignore all region encoding and some even do on-the-fly conversion between the NTSC and PAL video standards. For example, my Phillips DVD player at home (I forgot the model number) plays both NTSC and PAL disks with my NTSC television and I've long since set it to region 0 so it completely ignores any region coding on the disk. The player was less than $100, some of the best money I ever spent. As for the subtitles, those are easily turned off.

However, one possible (probable?) result of reasonably priced disks anywhere in the world is that more people will be able to acquire "originals" from which to make decent quality copies, so from Big Content's perspective, this may well backfire.

FWIW, I haven't bought a "new" CD or DVD in the last 10 years or so--all my disks are purchased used so that Big Content doesn't get a cut. If they want any of my money they're going to have to bring reasonable prices here as well.

Bob Killingsworth · 4 years ago

I second Mark Casazza's comment about the ineffectiveness of region coding. The Philips DVP642 player (I bought one at Target for about $70) can indeed be set to play DVDs from any region, in NTSC or PAL. The keycode sequence to make it multi-region is an undocumented feature not mentioned by the manufacturer but easily found on the Internet. That the availability of this feature might be unintentional on Philips' part strains credulity.

Tim · 4 years ago

I don't see any reason to think that importing foreign DVDs would be illegal. However, watching the DVDs might be a violatioin of the DMCA, depending on where and how you obtained the DVD player.

Jerry Brito · 4 years ago

Actually, importing these DVDs would be illegal under Section 602 of the Copyright Act. See http://www.copyright.gov/title17/92chap6.html#602

Tim · 4 years ago

That's interesting, I didn't know that. I'd be very interested to know if Roger Pilon considers Section 602 of the Copyright Act a violation of free trade principles.

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