WHEN TOM LE Goff put a DVD his mother sent from France in his computer, the only thing he saw was an error message. 'My PC is a real IBM, the DVD is real, so why shouldn't it work?' says Goff, who works in financial risk management in Hong Kong.
Le Goff was aware of software he could download to override the regional encryption that prevented the DVD from being viewed. But rather than risk infecting his computer with a virus, he bought a pirated version of the film, Akira Kurosawa's Seven Samurai. 'Film distributors want to protect the DVDs, but they end up making it so you can't watch them,' he says.
Like many consumers, Le Goff is frustrated when he buys CDs, DVDs and computer games from authorised sources only to find he can't enjoy them the way he wants to.
As movie and music companies bring in more restrictive measures to combat piracy and illegal downloads, consumers complain that their rights are being trampled on.
Some CDs are encrypted to prevent them being copied to computers, from where users download songs to portable players such as iPods. Or the sound suffers when played on a PC. Songs bought from online sites can be delivered in a format that makes them incompatible with some music players, or they lose quality when copied.
But to content providers, such measures are needed to stem huge losses from illegal recordings. According to the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI) business lobby, major music companies lost US$4.6 billion worldwide to piracy last year. During the same period, movie distributors claim losses of about US$300 million from piracy on the mainland alone.
