Hollywood’s attempts to stop digital video disk piracy are being undermined by eager European film fans. The New Scientist reports that film buffs, keen to view American films not yet released in their home country, are finding ways around the regional code installed in every DVD player to prevent the disks being played outside their allotted market area. Early DVD players had an encoded chip for this function but it can be bypassed or overridden. Indeed, in London it is possible to buy modified players or pay for the modification to be done. Engineers working on the latest DVD players expect that a special disk could be used to allow owners to remove the factory programmed regional codes of the newest models. The British Radio and Electronic Equipment Manufacturers Association says that any law passed to prevent the modification of DVD players in this way would have to be pan-European to be effective. As there is currently no European consensus on this issue, a law could be years away.
