No less a personage than Nigel Travis, the president and COO of Blockbuster, is calling for the end of region coded DVDs (that annoying system which makes it difficult to play DVDs from other parts of the world on a DVD player here), saying they encourage piracy:
“The extra time on windows created by regional coding is an opportunity that pirates exploit.” Travis, the keynote speaker at the annual two-day Perspectives in European Video conference taking place here, cited “Finding Nemo,” which was released on video and DVD in the United States on Nov. 4 but will not be available in the United Kingdom until March 18. “That is a five-month gap and an obvious case where people are going to take advantage,” Travis said.
We agree that region encoding should be done away with, but mainly because we want to be able to buy DVDs from overseas and be able to watch them without having to track down a region-free DVD player.
