An article by Ken "Ceasar" Fisher on Ars Technica reports that several movie studios are suing Samsung for producing DVD players that enable circumvention of the regional player code. The RPC is used by the studios to support the release of a movie on DVD in different regions at different times in support of their world-wide marketing campaigns. The contents may differ in some respects by region as well for certain releases. In addition, the Samsung players in question may allow exporting of movies in HD format. Snippets:
Samsung's player allows users to completely disable region encoding compliance, meaning that the player can handle any DVD without the need for resetting geographical locations, or other such inconveniences. While Samsung does not provide a menu option or instructions on how to do this, news quickly spread that a code entered by remote control under the right settings would rid users of this annoyance.
But Samsung's offenses did not stop there. Similar codes could also be used to turn off HDCP compliance, making it possible to use DVI-D interfaces with non-HDCP compliant sources. In short, users could output high-quality digital HD content (including upscaled DVD content, no less) to any interface they wanted, completely stripped of encryption. The upshot of this is that Samsung released a player that would be ideal for pirates (although pirates already have myriad ways around these protections, anyway).
