Could it work in Europe?
I think I'm going to write WB UK about it. Season 5 of Babylon 5 comes out in region 2 as late as january, so there should be time to fix it before the Crusade set comes in the summer
. Of course, they will get the material from WB US, but
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[*] They might get
unedited content because they need to make PAL versions
[*]
Their word might carry more weight with WB US than ours do
[*] Since the European version mostly will only be seen by Europeans, and because we are blessed with a legal system that isn't quite as absurd as the US one, though they are getting more and more similar
, the
probability of a lawsuit from TNT-Atlanta people being brought or won may not be as high for WB UK as it is to WB US. * , **
[*]Internal
company politics over in the US may not carry over to the UK. (TNT is part of the WB conglomerate, but the UK people may not be as involved with the US side.)
[*] It would be an
added value for the R2 set. Customers could either wait for the R2 set, or the real fanatics could buy both the R1 set and the R2 set. The way it is now, a lot of people in Europe are importing from the US, since the UK sets are so horribly late.
[*]
£££ : We're customers. And highly lucrative at that. Babylon 5 was one of the shows that showed a reluctant WB that TV-shows on DVD made a lot of money.
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*: Since TNT and WB are both part of Time Warner, I think this is more about protecting internal peace, employee relations and studio politics than it is about lawsuits.
**: Libel/slander laws may differ widely though.
In some countries, you might be convicted for lying about somebody (this is how I want it to be).
In the US lying in non-commercial speech is a protected right. You have to show "actual malice" to convict, very hard to do.
In some countries, it's far out on the other end: There, you could be convicted for negative comments about somebody else, even if they're true! In Norway, although lying in non-commercial speech is protected, we have a tradition of disallowing negative true comments about named competitors in commercial speech. In some counties, this ban on true but negative comments even apply to non-commercial speech.
So maybe they would need to make two different versions of the set and chose one for release depending on the country.
