Planecrazy, I can't confirm that what you were told by that website is accurate, but on this tangent, the website of one of the largest intellectual property law firms in the U.S. seems to paint a somewhat ambigious picture.
Specifically, there appears to be a critical "first sale" element involved in all of this. To violate U.S. copyright law, you have to be engaging in violating first sale rights (it is perfectly legal, as example, for me to sell you my used CDs of copyrighted music, because they are not new, I am not the first seller of them).
So, in regard to SOTS, the issue gets murky real fast, complicated by the fact Disney seems to want to have things both ways: burying the movie domestically since 1986, but selling home video versions in regions that apparently don't share our refined racial sensitivities (ergo, backward, unsophisticated countries like Britain, France, Germany, Holland, Japan and Korea) until 2001.
How murky? Well, as example, if an individual in Britain sells a previously retailed official U.K. Disney-released PAL copy of SOTS to someone in the U.S., is that a violation of Disney's first sale copyrights? Some legal experts would argue yes, since the tape is being sold for the first time in the U.S. Others would just as quickly say no, the previously retailed tape remains a previously retailed tape, it doesn't become a brand new wholesale item just because it crossed a border.
The whole discussion becomes additionally complicated if one goes off on the tangent of "if a copyright holder isn't even distributing an item in the U.S, how effectively can they pursue damages for copyright violation, given laws that presume projections of lost sales as the primary basis for remedy?"
Interestingly, all that legal ambiguity adds to the story here, e.g. being a potential additional explanation of why the black market SOTS sales haven't been more heavily targeted/litigated.
