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Australian Federal Court Overturns Legal Modchip Sales
An anonymous reader writes "Yesterday, the Australian Federal Court overruled the previous ruling on modchips in Australia. I am pretty sure the overruled case is the mainstay for the 'legal' use of modchips in Australia (predominantly Linux on the Xbox). Haven't seen this hit the media yet, with the exception of the Australian Financial Review referring to it in the Free Trade Agreement context. The ruling can be found here. Although not a lawyer, it appears the original judgement was made on the basis that Sony did not provide a copy protection system. Also noted is that there is limited commercial use for the mod other than circumvention. Wonder what will happen to modchips for the Xbox, given that it can be argued that running Linux could easily be seen as commercial."
Reader silne adds "According to the article in The Australian's IT section, it's not illegal to possess or use a mod chip, just illegal to sell them. Looks like another win for Sony. Hopefully the ACCC is going to appeal this one." Bigthecat supplies a link to coverage at news.com.au, as well.
They've got a new boss, Graeme Samuel, who is widely perceived as more business-friendly. If mod chips are truly going to be banned, this might be an interesting indicator of whether the ACCC is about to become less of a public enforcer of individuals' rights than before.
MOD chips on the playstation were only good for circumvention. Sony itself released a linux pack for the PS/2, so running linux is definitely not an argument.
The PS and PS/2 modchips basically allow pirated game discs to be played, without any other real use. The XBox case might be handled differently.
..that i should be allowed to create, buy and sell any tool i want, even if that tool can be used for illegal purposes. If the people buying the tool from me use them for illegal purposes, that's illegal, but THEY are the ones who committed the illegal act.
Everyone tells me that this is a bizarre, extremist, stupid idea, and would never work.
Unless the tools being described are weapons designed to kill people. In that case, having a right to make, buy, and sell these things even if they're going to be used for illegal purposes seems unquestionable, and it's extremist and stupid to state otherwise.
Of course you don't have a right to bear arms in Australia, right? But still I wonder if you'd get help from gun advocacy groups in Australia and told them about the plight of modchippers, and explained to them that modchippers and gun owners have common problems. I doubt it.
Well it won't actually take much for the Australian Police to find them. Some people at a place I used to work ordered XBox mod chips from overseas, and before they were allowed to receive them through customs they had to give their name, residential address and I think drivers license number to ensure that they as recipients were properly identified.
At the time however it wasn't clear as to why this information was needed, other than the fact that they ordered mod chips of course. At the time they did this mod chips were considered legal.
I hope the ACCC in Australia does something for the Australian people, as we all know that the primary purpose of the "security" of consoles is to provide for the construction of artificial markets to decrease competition and raise prices for consumers and revenue for the companies that manufacture them.
The thing that that hacks me off, is that console makers bundle the region encoding along with their security. Region encoding has nothing to do with security and everything to do with creating false markets which is something that should not be tolerated. Its about high time that the manufactures of these devices were forced to abandon region encoding all together so that consumers have the choice of what to purchase and where. The same goes for DVDs.
I will of course freely admit that most peoples use of mod chips however is for piracy which is not an act that I condone or participate in. I would be more than happy to have a console with strong security and no region locking. Its high time that these companies realise thats whats good for consumers is good for them. Stuffing consumers around will only hurt these companies in the long run.
Rant over
Q.
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"Free Trade" - what a misnomer.
Australia already has 0-5% tariffs on nearly all imports - the real sticking points here are removing PBS (Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme), removing australian TV content restrictions, full privitisation of Telstra (the now half state owned telecommunications giant), removing distilled liquor duty, relaxing food labelling laws, relaxing quarantine restrictions, and basically anything else that a major American lobby group objects to...
So basically - we have to remove all of the things that Australians believe in and have spent many decades nurturing - for a marginal at best gain...
Let us hope negotiations progress...
Btw, I'm not anti-american, I would feel the same way if any other country tried to dictate australian domestic policy.
Q.
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It sets a precedent. Will it still not matter when you can't buy the tools to uncripple a DRM "enhanced" PC and run/write your own software on it?
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
It's bad enough that companies are simultaneously claiming copyright protection under the law while trying to make their content uncopyable even for fair use; companies should have to choose between enjoying copyright protection or employing copy protection. Copyright law loses its meaning and purpose if the content being copyrighted never has a prayer of making it into the public domain.
But this ruling goes even further: in addition to copyright protection, the legal system is now also being burdened, at taxpayer expense, with prosecuting people who circumvent copy protection. If Microsoft or Sony can't figure out how to make their boxes unmoddable (it's not that hard technically), why should the taxpayer pick up the tab for their incompetence? And, no, it's not just Australia: of course, this nonsense is even more widespread in the US.
What really infuriates me is that a lot of the companies that create these false markets (which allow them to charge the highest price a particular area, rather than the global market, can reasonably sustain) are often the same ones that are right now shipping as many jobs as possible "overseas". So they can take advantage of cheaper markets, but we can't.
The ruling doesn't make owning mod chips illegal, it makes selling them illegal.
Of course in this specific case they guy was selling copied games as well as mod chips. If he would have just sold mod chips and not sold the obviously illegal games things might have turned out different. The circumstances show his intent.
Of course with the Australian legal system he now gets to pay Sony's costs (and QCs don't come cheap). And of course then there's damages, but that comes later (and of course there's still room for appeal to the High Court - but losing there would further increase costs).
Oh well, I'll have to stick to PC games and skip on the PS2...