PS3 to share region encoding on Blu-ray

New information has been released suggesting that the Blu-ray disc format, which will be used by Sony on their upcoming Playstation 3 console, will have only one encoding for both the US and Japanese game markets. From the article: "Japanese reports are surfacing that Blu-ray disc will adopt a new region encoding scheme that will put Japan and the rest of East Asia into the same region as North and South America. If this region encoding applies to Blu-ray games, this would mean that PS3 games could flow easily between Japan and North America."

If the reports are true, there will be the following four regions:

Region 1: North America, South America, and East Asia (excluding China)
Region 2: Europe (including Turkey), and Africa
Region 3: China, Russia and others
Region 4 (null): no region specified, playable anywhere.
Let the mod-free trade of PS3 imports begin.