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Man Jailed for Selling Modchips
JoeCotellese writes "The Register is reporting that the man accused of selling Mod chips for the X-Box was sentenced to five months imprisonment and a $28,500 fine." Yet another sad abuse of the DMCA.
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I agree with all your other points, and believe me, I loathe Dubya as much as you most likely, but the DMCA passed under Clinton's watch, so...
Then again, the economy wasn't in the shitter back then, so who really gave a rat's ass? *looks down at his DeCSS shirt*
More or less. It is a flash memory chip, similar to the NVRAM on your motherboard. In fact, I hear that is how a lot of people flash them, putting the chips in an older motherboard and flashing them with a BIOS image for the Xbox.
But that is the catch: If this guy was selling just the chips, with nothing programmed on them, then he would have a legitimate defense. If he was selling them programmed with a hax0red BIOS image, it most likely contained Microsoft copyrighted code, which IS a copyright violation. How that falls under the auspices of the DMCA I don't know.
That said, if there was a legitimate BIOS image, mod chips probably would fall under the interoperability clause of the DMCA. IANAL, but you could at least defend it that way, with all the homebrew software out there.
The DOJ posted their press release about this case on the seized isonews.com website.
"I'm The Bounty Bear. I will find him anywhere. I'm searching."
The problem with most mod-chips is that they usually contain MS's copyrighted code - and therefore violate copyright law pretty much wherever they're sold. Only way around this currently is to sell them blank with the capability for the end user to load on whatever code we wants using his computer (e.g. Xecuter Pro) or sell them with an Open source Bios installed (e.g. Cromwell). The problem with the later is that it's currently pretty fiddly to swap it for the one you most probably want on your mod chip.
Most Xbox-modchips comes with a hacked version of the Microsoft BIOS. The Enigmah is the exception because it only contains the positions of the original BIOS to patch, and does that on-the-fly.
The Enigmah has been considered to be the legal modchip, together with the blank ones (XII Pro, OpenXbox)
it's in my head