Taming a DVD Writer

I'd always had trouble with DVD writers, never succeeding in getting them to behave, as they are supposed to, like a disk drive to which one can just drag and drop whenever one feels like it.

Several years ago I bought an external hard drive and have relied on that for backup, but I recently decided to try again with a DVD.

I formatted in the way that is supposed to make it behave like a disk drive, and for a while copying seemed to proceed, though rather slowly. Then there was a message saying the disk was read only and nothing could be written to it. Note that the message did not say the disk was full; less than a tenth was used.

I checked all the settings carefully, and finally realised that the drive was set to the wrong zone. I changed the setting to Zone 2, for Britain, and thereafter things have worked as they are supposed to.

The zoning system is only one of many cases where tiresome organisations introduce complications to stop us doing as we please with our own property - in this case to stop people using in one part of the world pre-recorded DVD's bought somewhere else.

I sometimes wonder if we could do away with intellectual property altogether.