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Mod Chips Legal In the UK
An anonymous reader writes "Good news out of the UK! Techdirt reports that an appeals court has overturned a lower court ruling and has now said that mod chips do not violate copyright laws. The case involved a mod chip seller, who imported mod chips for the XBox from Hong Kong and would sell the chips or mod the Xbox's himself. He was charged with copyright infringement and found guilty by a lower court. The appeals court has dismissed all charges, however."
Don't expect them to give up. Just like Bush was recently lost his third case in the US supreme court for the third time over Gitmo prisoners, they keep coming back and is considering new legislation to "solve" the problem.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
At least, not by any sensible person's definition or understanding of the term "copyright". That is, there may be some legal jurisdictions where a piece of hardware can be considered a violation of copyright law, even if that hardware is not in and off itself a violation. (If you know what I mean.) However, in no sensible place could it be considered to break copyright, anymore then region free DVD players could be considered tools to break copyright.
(I believe in Australia both are perfectly legal.)
Of course, what the law says, and what a sensible person would expect the law to say are often two completely different things. Where the law is too complex for the average person to understand, then there is something wrong with it. (Resists temptation to explain why all laws are wrong, complex or not.)
I wank in the shower.
If it is licensed not sold it is subject to a different taxation regime.
The vendors and especially the software ones cannot have it both ways. It is either a sale or a rent.
It it is a sale it is subject to appropriate financial regime for sales (VAT, can be registered as a capital asset, depreciation, etc). Income from sales can be taxed in a different jurisdiction. Even if the sale has taken place in a "nasty taxation" place like UK, Scandinavia, New York, etc, all taxation can be done in a place with lax taxation like Ireland in the EU or Texas in the USA.
If it is a rent it cannot be depreciated and cannot count for capex. It is opex, period. Similarly, income from rent in nearly all countries in the world must be taxed locally. The usual tax evasion practices of big software and hardware vendors are outright illegal and forbidden by law.
So frankly, if it is licensed and the licensing contract is valid - come on, try to prove it. All the defendant needs to bring are the taxation statements of company X. If X wins it will lose its taxation regime.
Lose-lose.
Baker's Law: Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it
http://www.sigsegv.cx/
... or WILL, when it comes to all this "copyright stuff".
:(
The EU is just preparing more and more ridiculous legislation. Prepare for impact
It's overboard to dissalow GNU/Linux to fully use the hardware you bought by default. Mod chips are here to insure proper balance. Actually, I think explicit locking of hardware with an OS is illegal in many countries. Maybe mod chips are part of their business model: they say mod chips are bad, but behind the scene if you look carefully, they actually sell them! Because at the end, that makes people spending more money on their hardware...
I once saw a conference with bill gates, where a child popped his hand up to ask a question. We never got to hear the question. He got as far as "my dad bought me a copy of windows". He interrupted to say "he didn't buy it, he /licensed/ it" before going off on a diatribe that instead of owning a tangible object (a CD with windows on it), you are licensing the 1s and 0s on it. He was about 12 years old. What a cunt.
I wrote my first program at the age of six, and I still can't work out how this website works.
Copyright is different. A photocopier, a camera, a computer and in fact a brain,hand and piece of paper are all that are needed to violate copyright. These are all long established to be legal pieces of equipment. The same applies to contract law. If it was illegal to possess a piece of equipment that facilitated allowing you to break a contract, we would have to get rid of our brains as well as our computers.
You can get through your entire life without ever needing access to a rocket launcher or a gun, (My grandfather, a Methodist, was in a reserved occupation during WW1 and lived to 90 without ever so much as holding a shotgun), but it is now extremely difficult to get through life in a modern society without ever using a photocopier, camera, or a computer. Since a computer can be used to violate copyright or break a contract out of the box, it is hard to see how modifying it to change slightly the ways in which you could potentially do so would be illegal.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."