> I wouldn't consider that "piracy", and certainly at the launch of the DVD player it wasn't considered piracy either.

It was definitely treated like piracy at the time (if for no good reason other than that DVD distributors demanded that it be treated like piracy.) At the consumer level it wasn't at all criminal, but pressure on retailers was pretty absolute. You had to shop at weird stores to get out of region DVDs or region-free players, or be in the know about how to hack mainstream models.

It was notable that amazon began to ship you DVDs from other regions the more international it became. It was the most mainstream place that I had seen that would do that.

Ignoring the region code didn't enable DVD piracy (like for example putting a modchip in your Playstation enabled game piracy while allowing you to play games from other regions) so the industry didn't have an argument that would aid them in making region code violation an actual crime.