*NEWS*WHAT ZONE IS YOUR INK CARTRIDGE?

[Anonymous]

What zone is your printer ink cartridge?

PARIS:At just
the time when the Internet seems to have lowered the world’s digital
borders, technological innovations keep raising them back up.

As has been the case for feature films on DVDs for years, all kinds of software, games, Web sites and even ink-jet printers now are being zoned.
Advances in digital technology allow media companies to divide up the
world into regions so that one geography cannot use products made for
another.
For consumers who do not travel extensively, zoning does not matter
much. But for the global business class, top policy makers, students
abroad and others who travel extensively, zoning is an irritant, a
phenomenon that is disenfranchising them precisely of the seamless
globetrotting that is their stock in trade.
“We live in a world today that’s frantically erecting walls, even as
those walls keep being dissolved,” said Mark Hachman, a columnist at
ExtremeTech, a Ziff Davis publication. “Technology should facilitate,
not impede. Region encoding is just another wall.”
While many have adapted to DVD regional locks by purchasing players
that can read discs from any zone, that work-around is harder to
accomplish with the new products. At the same time, laws and trade
agreements around the world increasingly ban ways to get around digital
locks.
While Sony’s new PlayStation Portable games are not region-coded, its
PlayStation 2 games are, as are the movies that can be played on the
portable game machines. Thus, PSPs purchased in Australia will only be
able to view movies coded for Region 4. The United States is in Region
1, and Britain is in Region 2.

But it is the arrival of
Hewlett-Packard printers that can be used only in the region of origin
that is catching many people by surprise. Kim Holm, the European HP
executive who oversaw the start last year of region-coding for printers
and their replaceable ink cartridges, said the reason was to help the
company better set prices and thus help consumers know how much it
would cost to print with HP products. The company has gone from
adjusting global prices six or eight times a year to twice a year.

All new HP ink-jet printers,
except those designed to be portable, are regionalized. With them, ink
cartridges bought outside the region won’t work. A customer who moves
outside an area can, however, call HP support to find out how to
manually change the region coding on the printer

[Author]

October 5, 2005 at 12:32 PM