You can't change the codec - it's being used in other places as well,
e.g. for use cases where you need to have an 8-bit encoded readable
version of a Unicode object (which happens to be Latin-1 + Unicode
escapes for all non-Latin-1 characters, due to Unicode being a superset
of Latin-1).

Adding a new codec would be fine, though I don't know how this would map
raw Unicode strings with non-Latin-1 characters in them to an 8-bit
string. Perhaps this is not needed at all in Py3k.