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It hasn't been all plain sailing of course and there have still been the usual share of IT fiascos along the way, but they've certainly done a lot more for the industry and consumers than the previous National-led bunch of IT-ignorami.

However, it appears that they're about to move into the foot-shooting business.

Yes, the NZ Government has obviously been subjected to intense lobbying by the motion-picture industry who must have told them that something needs to be done to stop the proliferation of "gray market" distributors.

These evil "gray market" villains commit the awful sin of importing legally purchased copies of DVDs and selling them NZ before the "official" channels are ready to release their own copies.

Let's be quite clear about this -- nobody is pirating anything here. These gray-market copies are legitimately pressed DVDs for which the copyright owner has received their full entitlement.

Readers Say (updated irregularly) Public not the priority... - Mike A conduct that stirs ... - Dominic From Yesterday... Skymail... - Nigel Sky TV... - Ian Sky digital... - Stan Sky... - Richard Have Your Say

Never the less, the government is intent on passing legislation that will make it an offence to import and sell otherwise legal copies of new release movies on DVD.

I wonder if any of Aardvark's cyber-savvy reader have spotted the obvious flaw in the government's thinking?

Yes -- clearly the government has been advised by self-interested individuals that are not long out of the primordial ooze.

I'm afraid I have bad news for both the government and the little cartels they're seeking to protect through this legislation.

Do they not know that a DVD can be "ripped" and encoded into a modern digital format such as DivX in just a few short hours?

Do they not know that, thanks to broadband internet, that ripped copy can then be sent around the world in just a few minutes or hours?

Do they not know that once one person in NZ has received that copy, they can then transcode (convert to MPEG) and burn it to CDR in SVCD or even recordable DVD format so that it can be played on a regular DVD player?

It strikes me that this proposed legislation smacks of protectionism -- and aren't we busy arguing to countries such as the USA that such things are bad?

Perhaps it's time that the government woke up and smelt the coffee.

If you stop people from buying legal copies of a new-release movie on DVD then, if they want to watch it without going to the theatre, they'll have no option but to download it from the Net or get a ripped copy from a mate who has imported it privately.

Should the government really be promoting piracy in this manner?

I don't think so.

Could this once again be a case of trying to fix broken business models by way of ill-advised legislation?

If the goal is to protect our movie theatres from lost revenues due to these imported DVDs, surely someone might have realised that perhaps those theatres aren't providing the public with the right level of service at the right price.

Could the ready availability of large-screen home theatre systems, complete with digital surround-sound, be rapidly turning the movie theatre, with its attendant hassles, into just a relic of the past?

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