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Australia-U.S. Trade Agreement Takes First Strike
inflex writes "With the recent AU-US Federal trade ageement coming into force, the first signs of what is to come have started appearing with Sony unleashing a legal bid to clamp down on previously legal mods chips in Australia."
I bought my PS2 in London when I was living there the past 3 years, Ive now returned (to Sydney) and want to buy and play legit games that are sold at my local stores. WTF should I buy a new console when a mod chip will do the job? I guess im the 0.01% your talking about but thats no reason I should get shafted.
serenity now!
I was personally questioned by the french police and my flat was raided 10 years ago when Nintendo France made a lawsuit for the SNES/SFC game copy machines (the nice thing that plugged in the cartridge port and had ram and a floppy drive). So the police searched my flat while I was away, seized around 5 copy machines, about 50 games on floppies, my 2 computers and all they thought was of interest, besides that they emptied the trash in the bathtub and let it like that, it was nice when I came back home from holidays 2 weeks after that... So I had to go to Paris to talk to the police and explain myself, of course I was importing the copy machines from Hong Kong and selling them in France, the only problem for the police was that I was doing this in an "open" way, sending the goos by FEDEX "game copy machine" written on the customs decalaration and paying the customs and VAT tax. First they told me I was questioned for "importation of material being used for illegal copying" but when I showed them the customs paper they changed this to "selling of pirated games" arguing that I HAD to give games when I was selling a unit, at the time we had a pre internet way of coimmunicating in France called minitel, basically a chat BBS with incredible speed (1200/75) and so they had minitel logs of my conversations with buyers, but since I NEVER sold games after 2 hours they had to let me go, give me ALL my stuff back and pay for the damages they had caused in my flat... Bottom line is that since the modchip or device can be used for private copying and so on, it's going to be VERY difficult to put someone who's not selling pirated games in jail, at least in France, and even with the P2P hype, the judges are starting to realise that and the situation is MUCH more calm than it was 6 months ago... Now how is the law and the judges in an hysteric environment such as Fox news-USA and Murdoch land is another question...