My understanding is that importation of anything not actually illegal for personal use is entirely legal. It's a different matter if you are importing for the purposes of sale or showing to the public. Things may of course get into a bit of a grey area with ISPs because they are often not viewed as being the same as the postal service.
Why do we even need a local classifications board when the games have already been classified by more competent overseas organisations? You see up to three different age restrictions when you buy a packaged game in SA.
Who decides which overseas organisation is more competent? Perhaps we should use Germany's or maybe it should be Australia's.
I see numerous ratings on region 2 DVDs, which makes perfects sense because a particular release version is typically targeted at several countries, so they'll print the ratings for each on the packaging and disc.
I don't know why you guys are complaining about the FPB. I'd say in general they've been quite liberal and their ratings are pretty sensible. Then again maybe many of you are too young to remember the religious nutters we had in the bad old days. There have been some disturbing religious-type statements from the FPB in the recent past, which may be an indication of a disturbing trend, bu so far they haven't demonstrated themselves to be as barking mad as those they replaced.
When Xbox Live SA launched here we had a very empty marketplace with only a few games and DLC available for download. Microsoft stated that the reason for this is that the FPB first had to rate all the content before it could be placed on the Marketplace.
Frankly that is entirely Microsoft's fault. It demonstrates extremely poor planning on their part. In the US, UK, Australia and so on they would have had to get what they wanted to sell checked and rated. It's Microsoft that is responsible for endlessly delaying launching an SA Xbox Live, and it is they that failed to get all the products rated before launching. If they had done the launch sooner there would have been less to rate and the new products could have been rated as they came out.
Microsoft is also solely responsible for overcharging South Africans for Xbox Live.
That is ludicrous and I have queried this a few times and asked if the FPB literally sits down and rates new DLC like CoD maps.
Why not, certainly some other countries seem to do this?
The funny thing is that all you have to do is register a UK or US Xbox Live account and all this content appears and is available for download.
No it doesn't and that has been part of the reason for continued calls for an SA Xbox Live.
People with Xbox's and PS3's who want to download Rockband and Guitar Hero DLC will know that our offerings are very scarce due to the sharks at RISA not allowing it because they also want their finger in that pie.
So it's OK for the music mafia overseas to operate their extortion racket, but suddenly the racket's a bad thing if it is happening in South Africa. And you're telling me they did not have to sort this convoluted mess out in each country?
The FPB should be abolished and we should just adopt recognised international rating systems. (Just not Germany or Australians')
Why not Germany or Australia? Their retarded rating system not good enough for us? So now we're going to need an organisation that figures out which overseas rating to use and keep re-assessing the choice to make sure they haven't suffered major brain damage and become Australian or German.
There are like 6 titles available on Xbox Live South Africa because our rating department cannot keep up, ie too busy watching youtube all day.
Did Microsoft allow enough time? They're solely to blame for waiting so long. Maybe the local guys can't keep up because the clowns at Microsoft left this for years allowing material to build up and on top of that did not arrange rating assessment in good time.
