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PS2 Mod Chips Legal In Australia
Buccaneer-American writes "Over here on Groklaw, PJ is reporting that PS2 mod chips are now legal in Australia. The highest Australian court decided in Stevens v. Sony to overturn a lower court ruling that PS2 mod chips were 'technological protection measures' which would run afoul of the Australian DMCA-equivalent. Because they do not protect copyrights per se, but are rather region coding devices, they were ruled to be regional coding devices. In short, we have Sony to thank for being a loser yet again and establishing some of our rights in case law, albeit sometimes inadvertantly." The High Court's decision is online, with some legal commentary from the Australian court. More coverage of this story available at The Age and SMH.
While this is a pleasing decision, as an Australian I am still appalled by the lack of even fair use rights in our copyright laws. It's technically illegal to backup our CDs or tape shows off of TV. It's absolutely ridiculous.
Actually, in Australia, region-coded DVDs have already gone. That's the precedent that was used in this argument. Multiregion DVD players are definitely legit in Australia.
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
Two separate issues:
Region Coding has to do with price discrimination, i.e. the desire of the media companies to charge different prices in different countries depending on what people will pay by preventing you from buying a DVD in Africa, and reselling it in the US. It is a techonology that they apply for economic reasons, and has nothing to do with the consumer. It is perfectly legal to buy a DVD that will ignore the coding (though they are much more expensive than regular ones). Computer programs that play DVDs ignore this coding too.
Making personal copies (warning: link discusses the copyright regime of the USA) has to do with copyright law. It's not about giving your copy to someone else, but about creating more copies. Just because you're allowed to modify your PS2 (for example, to play games bought in other regions) doesn't mean you are allowed to freely copy the games without paying for them.
Here down under, region free DVD players are quite legal AFAIK. The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) has stated previously that region codings are anti-competitive and should be banned.
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CINC, 4th Penguin Legion
Except that it's from the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission, the watchdog responsible for matters that are our equivalent to that of 'antitrust'.
Jeremy
Melbourne, Australia
Jabber Australia
Lets face the facts here. People who buy mod chips do so to pirate games and to play pirated games. It's a reality that no slashbot could deny. How many people do you know mod a system to play "homebrew" games or do something that doesn't involve piracy? You can argue mod chips are in of itself legitimate, but almost nobody uses them for legitimate purposes.
Utter crap. I had my PS2 chipped so I didn't have to see that fricking "This disc cannot be played due to regional restrictions" message on my screen. After shelling out good legal tender for a DVD.
:wq
This is a case where it's very important to at least read the press release, since the posting is somewhat misleading. This ruling and the jurisprudence it represents are fundamentally different from US court's views.
To start with, it's important to note that the guy was mainly selling illegally copied games, and was selling the modchips together with them so that these games would play. Thus the appeal was about whether the sale of the modchips was legal, even though they were sold to allow pirated games to play on the system.
Next, the brunt of the ruling is that while the act of copying the games was illegal, the modchips have no effect on that. The modchips only affect the loading of games to the console memory. And now comes the important bit:
Note that in the US, running a program is thought to include an act of copying it from storage to RAM, and hence fall under the purview of copyright law.Now, companies are allowed to use technology to restrict the loading of programs (this is about price discrimination), but you are allowed to modify a device you own, so modchips are legal even though they allow you to play copied games, indirectly helping you violate copyrights.
The poster didn't understand what the story is about.
...". That's totally wrong, the court decision and story on groklaw are saying that the chip inside the PS2 , the one that enforces the protection, was known to be a 'technological protection measures' until now. This chip and the modchip are two very different things ;)
In his post hee says "... PS2 mod chips were 'technological protection measures'
They are not illegal because they are just flash RAM chips with some control logic so they can be soldered on a PS2/XBOX or GC mainboard. They are not flashed with anything illegal or copyrighted when you buy them. As it is not illegal to sell flash RAM, it is also not illegal to sell modchips. It is also not illegal to flash them with a free BIOS like cromwell and use that to boot linux on your XBOX. However, it *is* illegal to put them in your console and flash them with a copyrighted, reverse-engineered and cracked BIOS to bypass content protection...
Lets face the facts here. People who buy mod chips do so to pirate games and to play pirated games. It's a reality that no slashbot could deny. How many people do you know mod a system to play "homebrew" games or do something that doesn't involve piracy? You can argue mod chips are in of itself legitimate, but almost nobody uses them for legitimate purposes.
Wrong. One of the worst things about modern consoles is the fact that the medium used for distributing the games is DVDs. DVDs are slow compared to hard drives, so one solution popular among PS2 people is to copy images of their games to a large-capacity hard drive and boot a game loader directly off their memory card that will then load the games from the HD instead of from an optical disc. This is as fair as fair-use gets, and it requires a modchip.
See this post at Weatherall's Law.
What about homebrew apps?
The major console makers' official position is that you're not supposed to do homebrew at all on their consoles. Instead, learn video game development by developing games for PCs and PDAs, learning the Allegro, OpenGL, and DirectX APIs along the way. The GameCube, Nintendo DS, and PSP all use OpenGL for graphics, and the Xbox uses DirectX. Once you have already made commercially successful games on PCs and/or PDAs, then you're deemed worthy to be hired by a licensed console game developer. If you can't become commercially successful on PC because PC gamers tend not to buy the kinds of same-screen, overhead- or side-view multiplayer titles that are popular on consoles, instead preferring titles with LAN play that require parents to purchase one computer and monitor per simultaneous player, tough shit. I don't agree with that, but that's their position.
I have a modded Xbox. I use Xbox Media Center on it.
Microsoft would claim that you bought the wrong Microsoft product. In Microsoft's view, you're supposed to buy a PC with Microsoft Windows Media Center, not an Xbox console.
Besides which, I write software for a living. Do I want people copying what I write? No, so why should I do it to other developers?
Sony and Nintendo say that you're supposed to "write software for a living" for a PC and then graduate to consoles.