I noticed this years ago, but I never paid much attention to it.

Now, I'm educating myself on DVD rippers 'cuz I want to be able to put movies on the hard drive/USB stick for travel. All of them seem to mention getting around the region encoding.

What is/was the purpose of this? Is it for copy protection/anti-piracy or what? All my DVD players warn me I can only change the region something like 6 times and then I'm SOL.

I'm not sure, but I don't think data or audio disks have this sort of folderol on them. Who decided this was a big deal and why?