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More on Microsoft vs. Lik Sang
Levendis47 writes "CNET's News.com is running an article on Microsoft's legal manuevers which have successfully shut down the Lik Sang ecomm store where they've been selling various game system mod chips including the OpenXBox Mod Chip. This leads me to two questions (and I'll admit my ignorance, faux or not, in order to get discussion on this topic): 1) When a customer purchases an XBox (or any game system for that matter) are you intrinsically "signing" an end-user agreement in the purchase that makes modding the device illegal? 2) Could a non-profit org setup an effort to have mod chips produced and "distributed" at the cost of production w/o legal repurcussions? (i.e. would not making a profit on XBox's hardware mods protect you from their wrath?) 3) I understand the whole DRM aspect of mod'ing for playing copied games, BUT, what about legit gray-hacks like the Mandrake Linux XBox project and such? It would seem to me that in the long haul, Microsoft would support such efforts because they could sell more devices (and potentially more software if they licensed an opensource validation library)... "
Threatening a big US corporations profits is so illegal, they'll go after you no matter where you are in the world. The "law" is just the excuse used.
>> I've seen so many people blame the corruption of money, but I see no proof.
Lik-sang is shut down, Microsoft isn't. QE-MF-D.
25% Funny, 25% Insightful, 25% Informative, 25% Troll
Laws aren't applied retroactively you poltroon.
Microsoft will argue, however, that the main reason people want these chips is for pirating games.
Don't delude yourself, they're right. The primary function of these mod chips is to facilitate game piracy. If Lik Sang was selling ANY Mod Chips with Microsoft's copyrighted BIOS on them, they had every right to get an injunction against Lik Sang to stop them from selling Microsoft's copyrighted code.
P2P (I suppose you mean file sharing) increases music sales? That's the biggest, fattest, baldest, and funniest lie that /. can't seem to kick.
Come on, people. You like free music. Admit it. Stop trying to pretend you have the best interests of the music industry at heart and you're only trying to help them sell more music if only they'd let you.
You're stealing. You steal. It's theft. It's wrong. You do it anyway. Just be honest for once.
What's that? Oh right, you know all kinds of people that downloaded a few MP3s and then bought the album. For every one of those, I can name three people that haven't bought a CD since Napster went beta.
The music industry is the most focus-grouped, consumer tested industry this side of politics. They know *exactly* how much downloads hurt music sales. If downloads and filesharing really fattened the bottom line, they would be making it easy for you instead of sending Ulrich goons to break your knees.
People do things and some of those things are wrong. Here's the justification for stealing music: it's easy, it's free, it makes you happy, and you really don't care whether or not the music industry or the artists get paid. End of story, end of rationalization.