It’s not often you get a chance to add insult to insult, but the Obama administration has succeeded. The other day British Prime Minister Gordon Brown came to visit, and he and Obama exchanged gifts, as heads of government do. You may recall the consternation that echoed around the chattering classes at the present our president gave the prime minister: a set of DVDs. Even if they didn’t come from Netflix, many people would have gone for something more dignified.

But the story doesn’t end there. It turns out that, back in London one evening, Brown decided to watch a movie. So he slipped one of the DVDs into his player. Except it would not play. This wasn’t a technical problem, like if you buy a toaster in France it won’t work on American electricity. No, no. It was to do with the region code on the DVDs. They were set only to play in North America. To play a DVD in Europe, you have to buy it in Europe.

This isn’t even anything to do with copyright or piracy. The film industry in the US wants to be able to sell DVDs at different prices in different parts of the world, according to what the market will bear. It also wants to stagger the launching of its titles in different places for maximum impact.

To make this happen the world has been divided into six regions, and DVDs for one region cannot be played in any of the others. Cory Doctorow is a writer and activist in this field. He is fond of comparing this to the actions of Pope Alexander the Sixth, who in 1493 decreed that the world would be split between Portugal and Spain along the meridian at 38 degrees west, through what is now Brazil. Did the pope bother to consult the peoples he was splitting up? Oh no. He appears to have passed his authority on to Hollywood.

The crucial point about this is that the machine the DVD is being played on has to collaborate with the scheme. The region code is after all just a number on the disc. The player could easily ignore it and play any DVD. So why do the manufacturers include this function in their products? You would expect Hitachi and Panasonic to care not a wit about Hollywood’s marketing plans. The answer is that they can only get a license to the patent on the design of DVDs if they agree to include the region trap.

So it isn’t just Gordon Brown who is being messed about with here. One of the pleasures of travel has always been going into bookshops in foreign cities and bringing back stuff you could not get at home. Likewise with CDs. But not with DVDs.

There are signs of rebellion among the far-flung natives. Australia and New Zealand are already considering laws to outlaw region-code traps in machines sold there. Here at home, the Justice Department could join in. They were very successful in waving the threat of anti-competitive-practice suits against IBM, to make them let people copy their computers, and Microsoft has got into a lot for trouble for trying to make it difficult for other software companies to write programs that run under Windows.

My spies tell me that there are DVD players for sale in this country which say on the box “Region 1 only”, but if you buy one and prowl around in the settings menus, you can tell it to play any region. If I can find one I think I’ll send it to 10 Downing Street, and try and repair some international relations. I’ll have to remember to change the plug on the power cord. That’s what high technology is all about.