DRM kills award chances for Munich

Since opening last month, Steven Spielberg's Munich has been touted as a possible Oscar contender. Hopefully for Spielberg, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences will actually be able to watch a copy of the movie before having to vote. The British Film Academy (BAFTA) couldn't, thanks to a DVD mastering screw-up.

All 5,000+ BAFTA members were to be given copies of Spielberg's latest for consideration. However, due to a customs screw-up, the DVDs weren't distributed in time for the first round voting deadline. After getting the customs snafu fixed, the DVDs were finally sent out to the BAFTA screeners. Problem solved, right?

Wrong. The DVDs were encoded for Region 1 (US and Canada), not Region 2 (most of Europe). As a result, only those who had seen Munich in the theaters were able to vote on it.

Making DVDs unplayable outside of arbitrary, industry-defined geographical regions was one of the more nonsensical decisions made by the movie studios. The studios wanted the region encoding to protect revenues from staggered releases of both theatrical and DVD releases and as an antipiracy measure. However, it has the added bonus effect of allowing them to control pricing in different parts of the world.