On Friday I wrote about DVD region coding, which allows the manufacture of DVDs that (in theory) can only be played in certain regions of the world. U.S. public policy, in the form of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), plays an important role in shoring up the region coding mechanism. Is this good public policy? Should the U.S. want DVDs to be region coded?
Let’s look at the economic effects of region coding. These days, the main effect is to allow the studios to price discriminate by selling the same DVD at a different price in the U.S. than overseas. Generally, we can expect the U.S. price to be higher – let’s assume the price is Pu in the U.S. and Po overseas. If it weren’t for region coding, this differential pricing would be hard to sustain, because people could buy DVDs cheaply overseas and resell them in the U.S. Region coding prevents this kind of reimportation.
(Similar issues arise in the debate over drug reimportation, where we also see U.S. producers wanting to price discriminate, and reimportation posing a threat to that price discrimination strategy. The drug reimportation issue is more difficult – there, policy decisions take on a moral dimension, because drug pricing is literally a life and death issue for some patients.)
If region coding were abolished, then the U.S. price and the overseas price for a DVD would equalize, at a level below the current U.S. price and above the current overseas price. The studios could no longer price discriminate, and so would be worse off. U.S. consumers would be better off – they would spend fewer total dollars on DVDs, and would get more DVDs for those dollars. Overseas customers would see a price increase, and so would be worse off. Total welfare would decline, with the gains of U.S. consumers outweighed by the losses of U.S. studios and overseas consumers.
But we shouldn’t expect U.S. policy to care much about the welfare of overseas consumers. And if we focus only on the impact on U.S. people and companies, then region coding doesn’t look nearly as good – it looks like a deliberate policy of boosting DVD prices in the U.S. Indeed, region coding acts just a like a tariff of Pu-Po dollars on each reimported DVD. If we didn’t have region coding, would Congress enact such a tariff? I doubt it.
(Note: My analysis above assumes that all movie studios are located in the U.S., so that the U.S. economy captures all of the producer-side benefits of price discrimination. If overseas studios use region coding to boost their prices in the U.S., this hurts U.S. consumers while providing no countervailing U.S. benefit, so region coding looks even worse.)
(Another note: Some readers may object that the U.S. shouldn’t be so selfish as to ignore the welfare of people outside its borders. Point taken. But surely you would agree that, whatever level of U.S. aid to the world community is appropriate, that aid should be used to attack a problem more pressing than the high price of DVDs.)
