If they are Finnish specific DVDs with Finnish covers and such, I would favor the country specific distributors.  If they are Finnish imports of US DVDs, I would favor generic distributor such as Universal Pictures without the country specific name.

Whenever possible, do NOT use country identifiers in the studio fields. We have the locality of the profile for that; the country really doesn't need to be repeated somewhere else. There's really no advantage in having, for example, a dozen separate 'Paramount Home Entertainment' studio entries, one for each locality... That's just tracking the locality in the wrong field.

So I guessed right that opinions are going to divide in two camps... This has to be solved _before_ new beta, where we have a separate field for distributor, as we can expect a lot of updates for that field then. A lot of ping-ponging coming up if this is not mentioned in rules. Personally I think that we will step into a mine if we keep the country indicator. If we take Scanbox for example, It's a Scandinavian distribution company which has offices in all scandinavian countries (Scanbox Finland, Scanbox Sweden, Scanbox Norway etc.) So even if the cover says  that the disributor is Scanbox Entertainment, it's actually different "company" in each country. Sometimes we get joined scandinavian releases where overviews are on 3-4 languages and then it will get even messier. In this case I have to agree with T!M and Patsa. Country indicator doesn't add any value, just more possible problems. Do we really want to have data base full of

Put any studio here, Put your country here
Put same studio here as above, Put your country here
Put same studio here as above, Put your country here
....
...
..

Quoting Kulju:

Quote:
So I guessed right that opinions are going to divide in two camps... This has to be solved _before_ new beta, where we have a separate field for distributor, as we can expect a lot of updates for that field then. A lot of ping-ponging coming up if this is not mentioned in rules. Personally I think that we will step into a mine if we keep the country indicator. If we take Scanbox for example, It's a Scandinavian distribution company which has offices in all scandinavian countries (Scanbox Finland, Scanbox Sweden, Scanbox Norway etc.) So even if the cover says  that the disributor is Scanbox Entertainment, it's actually different "company" in each country. Sometimes we get joined scandinavian releases where overviews are on 3-4 languages and then it will get even messier. In this case I have to agree with T!M and Patsa. Country indicator doesn't add any value, just more possible problems. Do we really want to have data base full of

Put any studio here, Put your country here
Put same studio here as above, Put your country here
Put same studio here as above, Put your country here
....
...
..

Indeed! Now that we're getting a separate distributor field, tracking that data will finally become USEFUL. Let's not mess it up by repeating the locality in that field, which would virtually destroy its basic usage. I have "Paramount Home Entertainment" from up to a dozen different localities, and I want to the program to be able to show me a list of all "Paramount Home Entertainment" DVD's in my collection, not just the Danish ones, or the U.K. ones, or the Spanish ones... Again: we have a separate field for the locality - repeating that in the distributor field only diminishes the value of the distributor field.

No, we don't. Ken should indeed address in this in the rules update that hopefully goes with the upcoming new version.

Quoting T!M:

Quote:
...and I want to the program to be able to show me a list of all "Paramount Home Entertainment" DVD's in my collection

What do you want to follow T!M?

The USA Distributor

The International Distributor

The local Distributor

The production company that bought the film

Paramount Home Entertainment
PARAMOUNT PICTURES
Paramount Pictures Corporation
Paramount Home Entertainment Company, a subsidiary of Viacom's Paramount Pictures

Quoting T!M:

Quote:
Whenever possible, do NOT use country identifiers in the studio fields. We have the locality of the profile for that; the country really doesn't need to be repeated somewhere else. There's really no advantage in having, for example, a dozen separate 'Paramount Home Entertainment' studio entries, one for each locality... That's just tracking the locality in the wrong field.

Its part of the companys official name. Removing the country name means its not the same company anymore. So what you are saying we add the original distributor, not the actual distributor? What if e.g. Paramount sells the distribution rights to another company here, do we still add Paramount?

Quoting Giga Wizard:

Quote:
I think distributor is locality bound:
N = Scanbox Norway
SE = Scanbox Sweden
FIN = Scanbox Finland
you're seeing problems where there are no problems.

No it isn't, often it's the same for the whole of Scandinavia, which of course doesn't exist as a locality anymore than Europe or North America does. Scanbox Entertainment works for all these localiities, unlike what you propose. Including a country identifier adds nothing of value, just like we don't include AB in the company name (same as Ltd.) If you look at the company homepage, you will see the local offices listed under "departments" with no unique names attached to them. Do we add departments now? I think not...