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Sony vs Modchips
Cryptnotic writes "Sony
has decided to instigate legal action against companies distributing two new Playstation 2 modchips, the Messiah and the NEO4. Sony has previously ignored modchip makers who made products which were only capable of playing CD-R copies of games. These new modchips, however, have legitimate uses, such as playing original import games or out-of-region DVD's. Aparrantly this is what has angered Sony." If I could read Kanji I'd probably care a bit more ;)
According to TheRegister article, its actually the opposite that has Sony "annoyed".
... free users to use titles from any zone" in regards to playing games and DVDs region free. It continues on to say "However, the chips can also be used to play copied and pirated titles on the console, which is where Sony starts to get annoyed;...".
The article says "Mod-chips
It really doesn't take much to proof read an article quickly before posting a story to make sure everything lines up...
I suspect you're referring to 17 USC 602 (a), which reads as follows:
But one important thing you've neglected to do is to read further. 17 USC 602 (a) (2) goes on to say:There's also exemptions for government use, scholarly, religion, and educational purposes, and for libraries. You should read all of 17 USC 602 (a) before jumping to conclusions about whether it's legal to import games for personal use or to play lawfully imported games.
Hmm.. Actually there are 40 games out on Xbox at the moment.
Why the fuck do uninformed posts like this get modded up at all??
You don't need a license to use software. You only need to have lawfully aquired a copy of that software. According to 17 USC 602 (a) (2), copies imported for personal use have been lawfully aquired. Also, see 17 USC 117 (a) (1), which specificly makes copies made as "an essential step in the utilization of the computer program" non-infringing. 17 USC 117 (a) (1)'s exemption certainly includes copies made while loading the program into memory, a popular excuse used by those who argue that a license is required in order to use software. Your arguments that either obtaining or using imported copies is infringing or unlawful are at best unconvincing.
The text of 17 USC 602 (a) (2) follows:
There's also exemptions for government use, scholarly, religion, and educational purposes, and for libraries. You should read all of 17 USC 602 (a) before jumping to conclusions about whether it's legal to import games for personal use or to play lawfully imported games.
Sony makes a profit on the PS2 hardware.
SONY THEMSELVES MADE THE CONSOLE SO THE TWO ARE LUMPED TOGETHER.
You *cannot* make an 'import/region free only'-mod to PS2. Once you do that, as a side effect, the console also plays CDR/DVDR copies.
There has been lenghty discussion about this in the related websites, and the fact is that when the modchip developers finally had the breakthru and got the imported originals to work, they got the 'copied games work without disk swap' as a free bonus.
There has been disk-swap-requiring modchips for over an year. They didn't work with originals from other regions - to get the game to work you first *had to make a copy of it* (and usually apply a patch or two to the CD image), and do an unwieldy swap trick to boot it up. Sony woke up the moment there was a modchip that ran everything with no disc swap - basically as soon as their 'detecting if the disc is original and from what region'-protection was reverse-engineered and everything could be played without disc swaps.
Reason for this is simple; There are *seriously* more people who just want to import US games to europe than those who want to pirate stuff. Why? Most of the new games releases come here 1-6 months later than US. I *CANNOT* buy Metal Gear Solid 2 for my PS2. I won't be able to until maybe sometime late february 2002. I have really no desire to get a pirated copy on a DVDR - I'm perfectly willing to buy it. I cannot. These new mods would have made it possible for me to import it from the US.
Naturally this would have harmed local Sony Computer Entertainment Europe and their country-specific distributors and their local monopoly to rip off anything they want and release as late as they want. Their options to prevent the loss of monopoly is either to match US prices & do a lot of work to make sure stuff is released simultaneously, or kill the modchip developers. Quess which one is easier to do?
Both known developers of these new modchips are in europe. Market for the chips is mainly in europe. DMCA has very little to do with the whole issue, as it is not an european law. Sony just wants to protect their ability to release stuff in europe as late as it wants and at a price it wants. Cheaper to release late than to spend money to make sure localizations of manuals etc are done by the time the game is ready and shipping.
Just my 0.02 euros...
I for one think that it was definitely right to go after NEO4. Despite being hyped and anticipated by some PS2 people, it is basically a warez mod. At first I was interested in it, but later I found out that it doesn't work with original PS2-imports, only PS2-warez. PSX-imports work though, but NEO4 would be insanely expensive for that feature alone. If modchip makers don't want to get Sony after them they should make mods that work with original games only. I've seen NEO4 being advertised as the chip that makes all the warez possible, sheesh.
I'll probably get a PS2 next year, and I want to be able to play both PS2 and PSX imports with it. I still haven't seen a mod that would do both, and NEO4 isn't one either. I have several imported PSX games that haven't been released in Europe at all (like some of the best PSX titles including Chrono Cross and Xenogears), and those are the only reason I have mod for my PSX. Sooner or later there will be similar titles for PS2.
As for DVD regions, Region X package for PS2 is both cheap and well-working. I don't see why anyone would want an awkward modchip that costs several times more just to watch import-DVDs.
They're probably more worried about the circumvention of DVD region coding.. if they get known to be distributing a multi-region DVD player, the DVDCCA could be down on their asses and take away their DVD decryption license. They probably already had trouble given the backdoor in the DVD software in the first Japanese revision of the PS2.
Sony do seem to have a bee in their bonnets about game imports.. which is a shame, because customers in Europe tend to have a bee in *their* bonnets about games being slowed down to run in PAL. Sony complained that Tekken 3 didn't sell well in Europe and blamed imports. They might have done better to blame the fact that the European Tekken 3 was slow as a lame dog because of the PAL conversion. What's even stupider is that the DC established that a PAL60-capable console is entirely feasible (and it's no extra work to implement, because the binary for the PAL60 version is usually just the same as the USA one), but Sony didn't copy it.
Also, somebody who should know has told me that the protection system on the Playstation 2 actually makes it harder to make an import-playing chip than a pirate-playing chip. The real protection on the PS2 is the DVD format and nothing has gotten around that yet.
Oh, and if you really want to protest, don't refuse to buy a PS2 - buy one and SMASH IT. Sony actually _loses_ money on selling PS2s which it hopes to pay back with games. If you buy one and smash it, they lose their subsidy, AND someone else can't buy that one. This could be especially good near to Christmas.. (actually, I'm surprised console firms don't do this to each other, but they'd probably get sued)
You'll be waiting a while for that price drop -- if Sony won't drop the price of the PS2 for the lucrative Christmas buying season, what makes you think they're going to drop their prices soon after it? You'll be waiting a while for that price drop, my friend.
Buying imported games to you might not be fun, but for those able to read Japanese, it means being able to get your paws on a game just released in Japan, which won't be released in the US for another six months, if ever.
More actsofgord links. People should read this site---in addition to being funny and evil, he really knows what he's talking about. In this case, console manufacturers typically do not lose money on each console. This includes Sony and Nintendo right now. Only Microsoft is losing money on each XBOX. According to his calculations, Sony is making a pretty penny, too. If you really want to hurt them, buy an XBOX (but do you really want to help MS?), or a GameCube (same applies to Nintendo, really).
They're pretty much all evil, I guess. Maybe I'll visit the bookstore. ;-)
Don't think of it as a flame---it's more like an argument that does 3d6 fire damage
there now exists legal precedent for using the DMCA. Before, it could've been hairy..
Thats all fantastic speculation there, save for the fact this is going down IN ENGLAND!!!!!!!
I cant believe you managed to type so much based on absolutely nothing
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
As you say, there's no such thing as a free lunch.
If you sell something to me for $10 you can't stop me from going and selling it to someone else for $15, even if that cuts into your intended business plan of selling it for $40.
If you want to sell it to people in rich countries, price it low enough that it's not worth them buying it in a poor country and shipping it over.
The whole concept of "veteran's discount" and such is that stores are giving this away to generate good will even though they know there's no law to specifically support it. A veteran could buy a product from a store for 20% off and sell it to someone for 10% off, pocketing the difference. Stores know this and don't make the discount too large and don't offer it on items that have a nearly 100% resale value.
It's a completely different topic for AMD to test a batch of chips and sell them at the speed they'll all perform at instead of testing each one individually. They're potentially selling more, for less. They're selling an nMhz chips and if yours works at n+100Mhz, you've got no reason to complain.
The only time this becomes objectionable would be if AMD sold a chip that could be overclocked and then tried to sue you for doing so. Luckily though, the hardware companies (with the exception of Rambus whose CEO is about a smart as a stick of warm butter) know that there's no basic in law for this.
Each of those little companies has to hold their own, even against other Sony companies. Do you think Sony Music allows all it's music to be used on PS2 games without license fees, or that Sony Pictures allows all it's movie IPs (like Spiderman et al) to be turned into PS2 games for free? No, not at all. Some Sony companies have even approached other parts of Sony's direct competitors to get business. It would be like CNN (owned by Time/Warner) doing a joint weekly magazine with Rupert Murdoch to go head to head against Time magazine. That's how disparate and unconnected Sony's companies are.
The Sony companies involved with PS2 are Sony Computer Entertainment America, Europe and Japan. These are not huge companies. Discounting internal studios, they have about 300-400 people per region (probably more in Japan). They are all charged with making a profit for their parent corporation. They don't get anything for free from Sony Corp. They have to buy the hardware from Sony Corp's manufacturing arm, it's not just given to them because they're owned by Sony Corp. They don't have a cheque book from Sony Corp either, and they don't share one big bank account with Sony Corp. So now that you know that, here's the lowdown on modchips, imports and piracy.
1) Parallel imports hurt the local arm of that company. Example. Taking DVD movies as the imported item, lets just say that ALL movies came out in the USA first, then made it over to Europe in 1 year's time. There's good reasons why there's this time delay - the European arm may want to see how the movie performs in the US before allocating marketing funds for Europe, and they've got to have time to dub it into at least 5 new languages. But if the movies are parallel imported from the US, and if anyone can play them, then people (1) won't go and see the movie in the theatre and (2) the revenue generated from DVD sales won't go to the European arm of the company.
Now if Sony was one big company with one BIG bank account, there's not that much damage done, because at the end of the day, you're buying the product from Sony, right?
But Sony is NOT one big company. If people don't buy the movies from Sony Picture Europe, and instead get them from Sony Pictures America, then SPE loses money (and SPA gains). SPA is not about to share those profits with SPE, whatever you might think. Like I said, each company has to hold its own against the others. There's very little collusion between them.
So that's why they hate parallel imports.
2) Modchips that allow you to play import games do have some uses that most would consider reasonable. The NTSC version may be better quality, or the game itself may never be available in your home region. And so hardcore gamers would understandably want such a device.
But how many people are hardcore gamers? You may be, but you read Slashdot, so you're probably computer literate, you were probably brought up with console games. But don't extrapolate that to mean that everyone else is a hardcore gamer.
The PS2 is a mass-market product - there have been 23 million of them sold world-wide since launch. It's a mass market product like stereos and TVs. And just like stereos and TVs, that means that there's a lot of people who know a little about the full range and quality of the products available, and then there's the <1% of the market, the technocrats (audiophiles, film buffs, hardcore gamers) who know practically everything about the subject.
Now, modchips ostensibly serve this <1% of the mass market, and most people would say that they have a reasonable case for import-playing modchips. If you're that into games that you want a better quality conversion from another region, or that you want some obscure game that was released only in Japan and are prepared to learn Japanese just to play it, I can understand why you'd want import-playing modchips. But just remember that you're <1% of a market with 23 million people. You are a minority.
Now, piracy goes hand and hand with modchips. It's just the way they work. Sure, some of them don't allow pirate games to be played. But those are in the minority, and are not in demand. What is in demand are modchips that allow you to play pirated games. Because once you get one installed, you never have to pay for games ever again. So the demand for pirate modchips is far greater than the demand for import-only modchips. The % of the PS2 owners market for import-only modchips is the hardcore gamers market, <1%. But the % for pirate modchips is closer to 100%. So while hardcore gamers complain that the lack of modchips is a bad thing, hopefully they can appreciate that why Sony are concerned about the 'other' effect of putting a modchip into the machine.
What I find incredible is that some of the people selling and fitting these modchips are the games retailers themselves! That's like saying, "I'm a shop that sells razors and razorblades. But I can modify your razor so that you'll never need to buy blades from me again!". Yes, people are that stupid.