http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1192...googlenews_wsj

Wow. Somebody must be reading these forums, they got a lot right although Basic Instinct is screwed up...I'm surprised they didn't mention Terminator 2 HD DVD..this article is a few days old, surpised it hasn't shown up yet here, and if it has sorry for the repost.

uh-oh for xploitedcinema.com


I hope this doesnt mess with what I've got going on with them.

Anyone smell a cease and dessist order?

No.

What's the situation with foreign SD DVDs being sold in US video stores.

Interesting. I doubt xploitedcinema.com would get into any trouble at all. HD-DVDs aren't region encoded meaning they are legal to sell anywhere. Now if he was selling Blu-ray imports he could get into trouble, especially since Sony and Fox are such pricks about it.

Region coding has nothing to do with the law. The issue, at least as best as I understand it, is that a company owns the rights to distribute a title within a certain territory. By directly selling that title in the US where a different company owns the rights, apparently Xploitedcinema is violating the law because it is going against the distribution rights of the company that owns it in the US. The studios probably see this as akin to bootlegging, because they're essentially selling "unauthorized" copies.

Shipping from another territory is allowed because the sale is being made within the proper territory.

you may wanna check out the site here shortly. I was told at Cinema Wasteland that they will be carrying Japanese and Canadian BD because of the region coding being the same as the US.

I guess we'll find out here shortly.

Drexl is 100% correct. The article even has a quote from a copyright lawyer saying as much:

Buying DVDs from overseas is generally legal. "Anyone can lawfully purchase a single copy of a DVD from outside the U.S. if it is for private use and not for distribution," says Owen Sloane, an entertainment lawyer at Berger Kahn in Los Angeles. However, setting up a business based in the U.S. that sells these imports "would be illegal from the get-go," says Paul Supnik, a copyright and trademark lawyer in Beverly Hills, Calif.

This issue has nothing to do with how a DVD is region-coded. Region-coding was created as a way to help enforce these restrictions, not supplant them.

For example, Miramax put the kibosh on domestic importers selling foreign DVDs of both Shaolin Soccer and Hero before Miramax had released them theatrically in the US; both of those foreign DVDs were all-region.

Most of the time, studios don't care too much about what relatively small stores like Xploitedcinema.com sell on DVD, especially if the studio already has a domestic DVD release of the same film. However, if the studios feel that these stores are selling something that will hamper the studio's own release of the product, or if a larger retailer gets the idea to carry them, then they might "request" that certain items be removed from these retailers.