It would be nice if that regional coding had an expiry date. For example a DVD could be played anywhere 2 years after release. This would accomodate such market protection, while allowing full use of purchased DVDs. As it stands now, what happens when someone buys several DVDs and moves to a different area? If they move from Europe to North America, they'll likely have to buy a new player and won't be able to play their movies.
I have 2 DELL Laptops, one with WinXP (cough) and one with Linux 9.3 (hurrah). The Linux one plays DVD's from any region and does not affect the region code of the player. The windows does and lets me change it up to 6 times before it fixes to the last one. I can even run a DELL option to manually change this. As there are region free DVD players when is someone gong to come up with a way of flashing and DVD player and make it region fee???