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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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This is sad.
I have a friend of mine who, way back in 1991, had dissecated his HP calculator (HP-48S). He had found a way (by chance) to read memory through one of the HP-48S functions, and, knowing the chip used, was able to disassemble the ROM of the calculator.
This allowed him to create new functions like ".." to move up the directory hierarchy of the calcultor, or even setup a password-protected login. Cool nerd things.
Anyway, he published his book in France. A few weeks later, he was contacted by HP. They wanted to know how he got those information. He told them and was no further bothered.
Now imagine it would have been in the USA with a DMCA law. This kind of reverse engineering and publishing could have been sanctionned, despite the fact that it did not harm HP a bit, nor did it reveal trade secrets. It merely gave a way for geeks to use the HP-48S in cool new ways.
Back to the topic, I would say that this case shows us how a law can be used against the people that elected their representatives, who in turn voted such a law. Sometehing did not get right here.
The law is the law, it must be applied. At the same time, people must realize that this law is a bad one, that it gives too much power to companies, and that it prevents "fair use".
Selling mod chips is not an activity I would blame. It does not hurt my values, nobody is hurt in the process, and people modify hardware they bought. Yet it is unlawful. If it chokes you as well, it means we both agree the law needs to be changed.
If you don't like that, don't buy this company's hardware. And write to your representative to have the law revisited.
So why isn't the Xerox management in jail?
"It's too bad that stupidity isn't painful." - Anton LaVey
Huh? That's going to be news to all of the third party parts manufacturers. If you want to make a replacement headlight for a Mustang, you are free to do so. It would be insane to take any other approach really, which doesn't seem to stop Microsoft.
Now you can't sell "Offical Ford Mustang Parts," but that's an entirely different area of the law. But you can sell "Viral Fly-by's Mustang head gasket replacement kit."
I read the internet for the articles.
This is plain stupid (at least from my European point of view)
If the law wants to be consistent, then these and these guys should also be arrested as they sell "protection circumventing devices".
Selling a tool which allows to break the law should not be punished, only breaking the law should be.
XBOX mod chips ARE NOT ILLEGAL! They never have been! I just bought one last week. The mod chip is nothing more than a regular PC bios chip with some circuitry to override the on-board bios. The bios that I downloaded from IRC and flashed to my mod chip IS illegal. It's just a slightly modified version of the COPYRIGHTED xbox bios. Now, you can argue about the legality of copyright law, but this has nothing to do with the DMCA.
Moving onto the case in question, this guy was selling mod chips with the modified (illegal) bios already installed. Big mistake. If he had been selling blank modchips like the rest of the world, he would have been fine.
Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm gonna go play my pirated copy of DOA: Beach Volleyball...
The last thing you want is for the guy to be out in the community. When people ask him what he got sentenced for, he might tell them! That would only draw the public's attention to DMCA. Putting him in a jail where he won't be talking to "normal" people, can help to keep things under wraps so that the law doesn't get repealed so quickly.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
Actually, if you know anything about the American prison system, he'll spend little - if no time in jail.
Assuming this is his first criminal offense, he'll likely have to serve as little as 1/5 of his sentence. I worked in a court house in NJ where I saw a women, who was a supervisor for the state's child abuse welfare agency and who had pleaded guilty for beating her 5-year-old son to death with a club, sentenced to seven years in jail.
She actually served 17 months in jail before being released on parole.
The guy in this case may serve less than 30 days. I think that qualifies as a slap on the wrist.
-dj
- dj
I'd like to bring up another thread - the appropriate use of prisons in our society.
Thank you. But you have only identified half the problem. The real issue is the criminalisation of civil wrongs. It is _extremely_ distressing the extent to which wrongs, and I too choose not to decide if what this guy dud was actually wrong, of a commercial nature are being treated as criminal acts. The issue of the correct form of punishment is somewhat late after the fact.
Even up until the 18th and 19th century there was imprisonment for debt, a truly nefarious practice whereby debtors were sent to gaol fro their inability to pay debts, the absurdity of this in that being in gaol robbed most of them of their capacity to repay the debt first incurred eventually lead to statutory prohibition on IFD. Have a look at any UK derived commonwealth (including most all of the US states) and you will find such a prohibition. The trend we are now observing with the DMCA etc is just wrong, eventually (and if we actually get off our asses, me included, it might be sooner) this will be fixed, but it's going to be later rather than sooner.
"The first thing to do when you find yourself in a hole is stop digging."
I don't know about where you are but here, unless you make less than $11K a year you are not entitled to an attorney paid by legal-aid. You are determined to be able to afford one (and its my opinion that those bureaucrats were on crack...I make a LOT more than 11K a year and I couldn't afford an attorney at 200$/hour to defend me from a criminal charge...)
"I'm not a procrastinator, I'm temporally challenged"
This is crap. This reminds me of the Netpliance iOpener debacle. They sold something that could be easily hacked and made to do something that it wasn't necessarily designed to do(Run regular PC operating systems like Linux and Windows). They realized they screwed up. They also charged way under what they should have for the hardware. Oh sure, they tried to prevent users from modding them, they tried to bill you for the whole thing if you used a charge card and did not login, they tried almost every sneaky thing to try to make it work. In the end, the choice of hardware and the price they chose to charge was their undoing. Now they are out of business. Don't piss of the ones who would have been willing to pay the higher price (the geeks). They will instantly undo any thing you have done.
Oh, question.....do your really need a mod chip to run Linux on a Xbox? Seems to me I saw a post here celebrating not needing one any more.
Gorkman
"He was going up against a prosecutor who is funded by state/fed."
Kind of a moot point really. The corporation bought the law and now they don't even have to pay for the lawyers to enforce it.
"I think he had a horrible lawyer to plead guilty to this."
Most people can't afford good lawyers. They either use the court appointed one who sleeps through the trial of they flip through the yellow pages.
War is necrophilia.
I think this is moral gray area. What the person was doing was distributing a derivative work when he did not have rights to the original, but claiming it was okay because he only distributed it to people who already had the original work. It would open a box of potential issues if this sort of thing were permitted.
Take for example a work of fiction. Authors generally have a copyright on the fictional characters in their book. But say someone wrote a book using the same fictional characters and this new book could be created by rearranging paragraphs in the original work, adding a few extra chapters, and expunging a few more. If the book is only sold (note the for-profit nature of the enterprise) to owners of the "original work", arguing that they could have reassembled your story themselves, has a copyright violation occurred?
It's an exaggeration of the xbox modchip issue, but if you start allowing people to sell derivative works to owners of the original material, it isn't an unlikely scenario. You can always sell instructions on how to construct the second book from the first... just as it is legal to sell the blank modchips and instructions for ripping the original bios.
I'm not overly fond of Microsoft and I don't like the DMCA, but I think the decision was correct.
Education is a better safeguard of liberty than a standing army.
Edward Everett (1794 - 1865)
I just saw a story that the US has over 2 million people in jail right now.
By FAR, the highest percentage of prisoners to population of any country in the world, except maybe China, who has unpublished numbers.