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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.
And why, exactly, is region coding something that should be protected? *insert "buy a book in New York, read it in Paris, sell it in London" arguement here*
Perhaps Sony missed a payment?
Steve's Computer Service, Hobbs, NM
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.
Video games down - next step, region-encoded dvd's? If only...
Nobody thanks me for being a loser yet again! :P
(j/k)
Unpretentious Sydney reviews by unqualified Sydney reviewers
Australia led the way instead of being the global village idiot. I wonder what effect (if any) this will have on xbox-linux etc.
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.
Nice flamebait. You didn't even read the summary, never mind the article, did you?
The ruling was that mod chips are OK because they're used to bypass region coding. Australia has a problem with region coding, and Australians generally don't see why they shouldn't buy the cheaper legal releases from their neighbours in Indonesia and Hong Kong. You seriously never met anyone who liked to play import games?
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
I think you miss the point.
If Sony *hadn't* tried to tie multiple things together (region coding + copy protection) and only used their chips for copy protection then they would have won.
What the court said is that if there is a legitimate use for mod chips (and bypassing region coding is legit) then they're legal even if they also bypass copyright protection as a side effect.
By my reading of this (IANAL) all the games industry has to do to get around this ruling is to remove all the extra nasties, like region coding, with a new system and then sue the mod chip maker who gets around this new system. Then the chip would *only* be for copyright protection and so the modchip would have no other valid use.
Thats quite a nice solution the court did. Without that DMCA lets any company create its own laws, simply by attaching them to a technical measure for enforcing copyright.
"Sony to stop distribution of PS2 in Australia, citing quality control issues"
End of lesson. You may press the button.
Yes, at least if you don't buy Sony. Pioneer used to mark their region free DVD players with a green dot sticker on the box. no advertising, just the sticker. Don't know what happens lately though. BTW. This judgement is almost certainly short lived as a result of the free trade (sell out) agreement with the US. Don't get over excited, it aint going to last.
Regional lockouts and restrictions always struck me as a potentially risky idea for the companies precisely because there is quite a reasonable argument that they prevent people from doing perfectly legal acts. Therefore circumventing them shouldn't be a crime. It's nice to see the Australian court more or less agreeing with me.
I wonder if this may make them reconsider regional lockouts for the next version of their console. Piracy must cost them a lot more than grey imports. At least the grey imports count as a sale, and it's a lot more hassle to get hole of them than copying a disc from a friend.
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.
========
CINC, 4th Penguin Legion
... person with a legitimate reason to own a modchip? I am Australian and I bought my PS2 in Australia. I've never owned pirated games or DVDs. This year I moved to Finland and if I want to buy new PS2 games I would have to get a friend in Australia to send them (it's not easy to get online companies to deliver region specific things internationally). Also, I can't watch DVDs I buy here on my PS2. I'm pretty sure I didn't break any laws by moving to Finland, Why am I being punished?
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
It's sony's fault for integrating region enforcement into the same chip that also prevents burned copies of games from playing.
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.
Your reading, while a sense making interpretation, worries me.
Sure, removing region coding, etc, would be great. But that doesn't mean that the only use for a mod chip is bypassing copy protection. What about homebrew apps?
I have a modded Xbox. I use Xbox Media Center on it. XBMC is great, I can stream music/video from my PC, get news/weather, view my digital camera pics on my HDTV, along with a host of other cool features.
Even as far as bypassing the copy protection is concerned, yes, it also allows me to copy my games onto the HD. But this is legal. I own the game and I can make a backup copy. I just elect to play my backups and leave the discs on the shelf as much as possible. It lets me access my games faster and not risk the DVD's as often (which is good when you have kids in the house!).
Could I copy games? Sure. Do I? No. I like playing on LIVE occasionally and you need the real disc to do that. 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?
Even hating the developer (cough EA cough) isn't a good enough excuse for that.
Though, music, is different. Why? In Canada I have to pay a levy to the music industry for every piece of recordable media I buy. Given that I use tons of discs for non-music related things it seems I'm already paid up. Besides which Canadian copyright law has some interesting allowances for personal copies. Anyhow, a whole other rant.
The point here is: the mod chip allows for much more than just region code bypassing, and it's all legal. The chips shouldn't be illegal, using them to pirate software should be(and is!). Just as I can legally own a radar detector in Canada, I just can't use it to try and dodge speed traps (which makes them pretty useless I grant).
Blockwars: free, multiplayer, head to head game.
"They do not preach that their god will rouse them, a little before the Nuts work loose." Kipling, 'The Sons of Martha'
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.
But Britain, Germany, and Japan, three countries with wildly different rules and regulations about content and three different ratings/censorship systems, are all in the same DVD "region"!
Not necessarily. A lot of DVD players (notably the PlayStation 2, which was the most popular DVD player in Japan when it first came out) are incapable of converting between the 480i signals of NTSC and PAL60 and the 576i signals of PAL50 and SECAM. This has the effect of segmenting Japan (480i) and Britain/France/Germany (576i) into two separate markets. It isn't perfect, but it is a step.
So, uh, exactly how is region coding supposed to have anything to do with helping governments enforce their local content regulations
Region lockout on movies and console video games might be designed more to protect exclusive territorial licensing, which tends to follow the map of regions and TV systems used by the DVD CCA, than to strictly enforce government abridgments of freedom of speech.
nerve of those assholes.
saying you can't take steps to ensure you own your property.
if you paid for the chips, you have a right to access them any way you please.
fuck sony, fuck microsoft and fuck nintendo.
under the guise of "fighting piracy" they !steal! your access rights to your own property.
get a clue... it has nothing to do with "piracy" but with control. their business model requires them to deny you the customers the ability to control your property so they can convince developers to pay them for the privilege of making games. but the problem with this is that IT'S YOUR PROPERTY because you paid for it and it's ILLEGAL for them to prevent you from accesssing your property.
fucking incompetent and bought judges/legislators.
their business model requires them to rent you machines under the premise of buying it outright. but if you buy it outright, you have every right to have unrestricted access... car dealers/manufacturers don't require you to get permission when you want to take a drive. and this is a physical product so the analogy holds.
fuck off and die you leeches. i fully endorse people taking back their property using any means necessary.
if you want to rent consoles, call it renting and then behave accordingly. what you are doing is unethical, immoral and illegal (bribed officials don't count). and you can go bankrupt for all i care. you treat your customers like shit and take away their lawful property rights.
the console business model almost makes the RIAA/MPAA's model look valid by comparison.
Science : Proprietary , Knowledge : Open Source