Arrests Made Near D.C. Over Modded Game Consoles

multiOSfreak writes "According to this Reuters articl, two video game store employees have been arrested for modding video game consoles. From the article: 'Authorities arrested two store employees on charges of conspiracy to commit copyright infringement and conspiracy to traffic in a device that circumvents technological protection measures, the ESA said.'" It's not clear from the article whether the modded consoles were sold without copies of the games which had been installed on their hard drives, which would seem to be the most important distinction between convenience for buyers and actually ripping off game makers. Update: 12/08 22:43 GMT by T : This thread on boing-boing includes a comment from a would-be customer who says (among other things) that store employees "were also preloading the XBox systems with tons of emulators (arcade and console) and as many ROMs as they could find."

Comments

Aye...

[Vthornheart]

Any business should know not to participate in such behaviour, especially openly. What people do in the privacy of their own homes is one thing... but selling Pirated material? Sorry, no matter what side of the fence you stand on, and wether you think it's right or wrong, it was pretty stupid of them.

Let's make something perfectly clear

[jaxon6]

Presenting the tools to a user to allow them to infringe on somebodys copyrights: Legal

Using those tools and infringing on somebodys copyright: Illegal

Hardware that circumvents restrictions put in place to keep me from accessing my legally licensed software should always be legal.

This reminds me of the old PS mod chip stuff I used to do for my gfs mom. I modded a few PSs, and copied rented games for her. It worked out great, because I _knew_ her. If you're going to do this kind of thing for pocket ching, keep it discrete. Like when you get offered Gillette Sensor Excel Titanium Pro(whatever) blades at the local barbershop at like %30 of cost because they fell off a truck somewhere. That's relatively discrete. Putting those same blades in the store window, not discrete.

Darwinism applies to illegal activity also. The stupid get busted, the smart don't.