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)... "

Comments

Re:If an XBox were a car

[reachinmark]

Dangit, if I buy the hardware and want to modify it, I payed for it--it's mine--why shouldn't I be able to?

What if it's a new car, and you modify it so that it fails to comply with emission regulations? Modding a car is not the best example - a modded car can be illegal to drive.. or worse, kill people. A modded x-box isn't likely to have such an extreme effect (unless, maybe, you play for 86 hours straight..?)

othernews

[oliverthered]

A man has been arrested to taking a sledge hammer to an Xbox after Microsoft said, "modification and disassembly of the XBox hardware is against the EULA"

Re:Nice...

[AlCoHoLiC]

I no sign no agrement. No understand english. I live where english speak nobody.

Re:Someone please cite the XBox licensing agreemen

[glwtta]

If there's a license attached to it, and it prohibits X, then you shouldn't be able to do X, and if you want to do X, you shouldn't buy the XBox. Deal with it.

So if you can't do X, all you have left is a "box" - what's the point of that?

btw, I thought we haven't given in to the whole "hardware license" thing just yet, and maybe, just maybe, we can still buy something and do whatever with it, without the company telling us what we can and cannot do with something we supposedly own (and owning is something I like to do after I give away money)