Watching DVDs from other regions is definitely legal, but selling them here in Australian might be a different story. Sorry IANAL nor do I know the laws. I know legitimate DVDs in countries such as China can be as cheap as pirated ones (and I do get friends to buy for me when they travel there)…

Anyone has any idea?

region coding of dvd’s is done mainly by the big distributors (Warner, Fox, sony etc), as long as you not selling their stuff from another region then your all good cause those big distibutors buy the sole licence to sell those DVD exclusivly in region 4 land, so if you want to retail those dvd you got to buy from them only.

I remeber a video store down the road used to rent out Region 1 discs and they got a warning by Sony distubtor to stop or face action, again reason being that sony Aust own the rights to Sony film distributon in Aust so you have to buy from them and not from a cheaper country.

ChrisG, would this not be Anti Competitive.

If a product is commercially released, it is totally legal to buy it and resell. While it is possible to have an Australian Version, in any other case excluding DVD it is legal to import and re-sell (they just make it difficult to do so).

Thusfar by searching DVD is no exception, and if you are importing legitimate, legal products you can not really be stopped. The only loophole is you may not be able to sell R4 encoded (but can sell regionless).

-A

With movies and music I think it all comes down to coypright laws.

I dont know the in’s and out’s of the current legilsation but I am pretty sure when it comes to DVD you will have to check if exclsuive copyright licences to the material you are selling has already been sold to a local distibutor/wholesaler for the exclusive distribution rights to Australia.

However I think some of those competition barriers have recently been thrown out the window when it comes to music cd’s, cause couple years ago new legislation was brougth in for the import of Music CDs which opened the market to let in overseas manufctued CD’s to be sold freely in Aust thus we have the ‘$10 Dirt Cheap CD stores’ and all those $9 cd’s on Topbuy and Deals Direct etc, most of those you will notice are imported from Asia where its much cheaper to manufacter.

Exactly,

I am thinking I will risk it and import some on ebay. From what I can personally gather the exclusive copyright licenses can only legally be sold for Region 4 Disks. Other Region Disks could not legally be covered under that. The only way they could get around this would be to restrict each regions exclusive Distributor (ie ONLY sell in this region), but that hardly comes down to my problem. I am just a bulk buyer from such a person.

They are certainly legal to import, NO question there. You can even sell them here in Australia. There are just copyright laws if you want to DISTRIBUTE certain DVD’s here in Australia.