Region Locking

A "Digital Rights Management" (DRM) system designed with DVDs in mind.

This is a method that the copyright owners of the material use to control the distribution (and price) of their product, which is often a movie burnt on the dvd. With Region Locking, the world has been split up into a number of distribution regions. For example Region 1 is the USA.

Region 1 DVDs will not run on Region 2 locked drives (e.g. the UK)

The system works by hiding a set of 'region codes' on the DVD.

When you place the disk in a dvd drive, that drive will read the codes and either accept to play the disk or reject it because it does not match the region that particular drive is set up for.

 

New drives are region free, but they become "region locked" once you play three or four dvd from a particular region.

Challenge see if you can find out one extra fact on this topic that we haven't already told you

Click on this link: Digital Rights Management

2020-10

back to glossaryback to glossary