Can anyone explain the reasoning behind this? Economic?
Economic/marketing: Market segmentation, price discrimination.
Japan and the USA both operate on the NTSC format. “Finding Nemo” has already come and gone in our theaters and now sits on the shelves of many homes in DVD form. In Japan the movie wont be released for until late next year. Since the US is in region 1 and Japan in region 2 none of those discs should be able to be imported and viewed in Japan. Thus when Disney releases “Finding Nemo” into Japan they can release it to a public who hasn’t seen the movie.
This is also why I can’t go to Amazon.com’s Japanese or British site and have them ship DVDs to me in the US.
Of course it’s amazingly easy to modify most DVD players region code. I wouldn’t be surprised is the majority of DVD players outside region 1 were already modified to play any region. It’s a system with nearly no teeth.
Huh? I’ve got a region-free player and Amazon UK ships me DVDs all the time - the director’s cut of Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, the season 1 box set of Spooks, Saint Etienne’s Smash the System…
Or did you just mean that regioning keeps the honest people from ordering from overseas?? Also, FWIW region-free players are much more “mainstream” in Europe. Even Amazon UK sells them.
Are you sure? I buy Region 1 DVDs from Amazon US all the time, and they ship it to me in Japan. Also I purchased a region-free DVD player from a seemingly legitimate mail order shop here. As far as I can tell, there’s no law against it.
But the reason for region control is, as already mentioned, to control the price and availability in different regions separately. Thanks to region codes, they can charge the maximum price each market will bear. For example, the Seven Samurai was not available in Japan until this year (I don’t know why) and even now, it costs 8000 yen ($70) in Japan and $35 in the US.
Note that Regioning has nothing whatsoever to do with piracy; rather it is a pure greedy money-making tactic for leveraging advertising and distribution of films. And while I do support the film industrys efforts to reduce piracy of movies and TV programmes, I feel that telling people who have legally purchased DVD players that they cannot watch legally-purchased DVDs just because of what country they are in is ridiculous, and has my contempt.
Fierra and I commute back and forth between the UK and US all the time, and have run into the heartbreak of Fierra not being able to play her $100’s worth of legally purchased DVDs all because she dared to come to the US. Thus, we now have regionless players - and the MPAA did not lose one penny of real or potential sales. In fact, we now are able to buy more DVDs, since many that I wanted from the UK were only Region 2. Everyone wins.
What the industry is worried about here is not piracy but the “grey market,” which is perfectly legal. They want to be able to charge different prices in different countries and control the availability dates. They don’t want to release a movie in the U.S. and then have a secondary distributor buy a bunch of copies and sell it in the U.K., for example, because they might want to charge a higher price in the U.K. (actually, it’s usually the other way around, I think).
Something doesn’t seem right to me. I mean how hard would it be to program in a DVD something that says if the DVD player is a zero (meaning region free) or has more than one region listed simply don’t play it at all.
It’s already being done by Warner Brothers and Columbia. There are work arounds for these though. 
Yeah, the best region workarounds allow you to simply select what region to report, so you can still play any DVDs but don’t have to rely on being region-free. A little less convenient, but more reliable.
In fact, every computer DVD drive that I’ve seen allows you to do exactly this – you can switch from one region to another. But they limit it to a number of changes – usually five – so once you’ve changed it five times, you’re stuck on the last region.
Region-Free DVD players. Play DVDs from any and all regions, no restrictions, no expirations.
How to play DVDs with diff region codes on Win 98
I think region codes are doomed to failure. With the globe shrinking, how can Hollywood continue to justify releasing shows in different countries at different times?
Hmm, maybe it was just the type of movie I wanted. I thought they were just going along with the scheme. Interesting.