DVD region codes are a digital-rights management technique designed to allow film distributors to control aspects of a release, including content, release date, and price, according to the region. DVD video discs may be encoded with a region code restricting the area of the world in which they can be played.

The American DVD Copy Control Association in California requires that DVD-player manufacturers incorporate the regional-playback control (RPC) system—according to the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission, an Australian government agency.

There are six different official regions and two informal variations.^{[citation needed]} DVDs may use one code, a combination of codes (Multi-Region), most codes (Region 0) or every code/no codes (Region All). The commercial DVD player specification requires that a player to be sold in a given place not play discs encoded for a different region; however, region-free DVD players are also commercially available. In addition, many DVD players can be modified to be region-free, allowing playback of all discs.

Regional lockout is the programming practice, code, chip, or physical barrier used to prevent the playing of media designed for a device from the country where it is marketed on the version of the same device marketed in another country.

Movies, released on DVD, Blu-Ray and UMD may be region-locked.

In the video game industry, Nintendo was the originator of regional lockout. Regional lockout in video games is when a piece of hardware is designed such that only software for that region is compatible. Most commercially-released console video games have region encoding.

The main regions are:

Nintendo Entertainment System is region-locked. Regions are: NTSC (North America), PAL-A (United Kingdom and Italy), PAL-B (other European countries). Game's region is recognized by console using 10NES chip. If the chip inside cartridge conflicts with the chip inside console, the game will not boot. Famicom, which sold in Japan does not contain a 10NES chip, but cartridges for Famicom are different shape than NES ones.

Martha Argerich (born June 5, 1941 in Buenos Aires, Argentina) is an Argentine pianist.

Argerich was born in Buenos Aires and started playing the piano at age three (the provenance of the name Argerich is uncertain: some say it is Catalan, while others maintain it originates from Croatia). At the age of five, she moved to teacher Vincenzo Scaramuzza who stressed to her the importance of lyricism and feeling. Argerich gave her debut concert in 1949 at the age of eight. The family moved to Europe in 1955 where Argerich studied with Friedrich Gulda in Austria. Juan Perón, then the president of Argentina, made their decision possible by appointing her parents to diplomatic posts in the Argentine Embassy in Vienna. She later studied with Stefan Askenase and Maria Curcio. Argerich also seized opportunities for brief periods of coaching with Madeleine Lipatti (widow of Dinu Lipatti), Abbey Simon, and Nikita Magaloff. In 1957, at sixteen, she won both the Geneva International Music Competition and the Ferruccio Busoni International Competition, within three weeks of each other. It was at the latter that she met Arturo Benedetti Michelangeli whom she would later seek out for lessons during a personal artistic crisis at the age of twenty, though she only had four lessons with him in a year and a half. Her greatest influence was Gulda, with whom she studied for 18 months.