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California Student Arrested For Console Hacking
jhoger writes "Matthew Crippen was arrested yesterday for hacking game consoles (for profit) in violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. He was released on a $5,000 bond, but faces up to 10 years in prison. This is terribly disturbing to me; a man could lose 10 years of his freedom for providing the service of altering hardware. He could well lose much of his freedom for providing a modicum of it to others. There is no piracy going on, necessarily — the games a modified console could run may simply not be signed by the vendor. It's much like jailbreaking an iPhone. But it seems because he is disabling a 'circumvention device' it is a criminal issue. Guess it's time to kick a few dollars over to the EFF."
I remember back when the WIPO copyright treaty that would lead to the DMCA was being quietly passed by member nations. Only a few of us were even talking about it at the time. But the implications were pretty clear to me even then. Making it illegal to even CIRCUMVENT copy protection measures would inevitably lead to people being prosecuted for even the most innocuous and widely accepted activities (at that time, it was mostly stuff like bypassing Macrovision, copying videotapes, copying CD's, and taping stuff on cable). It was quietly outlawing activities most people considered sacrosanct, and we let it happen. The U.S. signed onto the treaty, the Congress passed to DMCA to implement it, and everyone just sort of ignored it--figuring that the local guy in the neighborhood who copied a CD or VHS for you would never be effected. But it was always only a matter of time before they got down to enforcing it in at the local level. It may have started with the big pirate operations, but it was bound to come down to local modders too. It was only a matter of time.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
on the right hand side of the article, did anybody notice the poll that allows you to rate the story?
... "We are ..." a.) Laughing b.) Furious c.) Bored d.) Sad e.) Thrilled f.) Intrigued
... cause the charges are kinda ridiculuous ... and I'd be pissed if it happened to me.
... Laughing 50%, Furious 33%, Bored 17%, Sad/Thrilled/Intrigued 0%
your options are
I voted Furious
But the current scores are
I can't understand how the freedom of a business comes before the freedom of the people.
There is a quote attributed (perhaps erroneously) to Mussolini, but he is alleged to have said "FASCISM should more properly be called corporatism, because it combines the power of the business sector with the power of the state".
I do believe America is suffering now under a kind of corporatism. The term seems more accurate than capitalism. At least since we are also a democracy there may be hope.
Those are my principles, and if you don't like them... well, I have others.
this is far less of a moral grey area than downloading is.
I think you have that backwards.
downloading (as implied in your post) is specifically to avoid paying for content.
Modding an Xbox can lead to playing homebrew games, apps, and other very cool stuff that has little to nothing to do with piracy. Hell I modded countless Xbox 1's to run linux.
whois gawk date unzip strip find touch finger mount join nice man top fsck grep eject more yes exit umount sleep dump
Downloading a game ISO has only one purpose. The playing of that game, without paying for it.
No, it doesn't. Optical media is delicate.
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
Link
The 750k jobs is a dubious claim from 1986 about counterfeit goods. The $250 billion is a 1993 figure given for the worldwide market of, again, counterfeit goods.
Bad analogy. Building bombs is indeed illegal. So is possession of drug paraphernalia. Bongs may only be sold for purposes other than smoking marijuana; namely smoking tobacco.
I disagree it was the kid's fault. The cop was responding to a "disturbance call without starting his lights and sirens" and he "sped around a short curve". So he was speeding to the call without putting on the safety devices that allow him to break normal traffic laws. He caused the accident by driving carelessly on a dangerous road. A 1 day suspension for what is basically reckless endangerment is laughable.
Unless you're talking .50BMG when you say "high powered rifle" Level IV body armor will stop most high powered rifle rounds. I believe level III will stop most as well (in areas reinforced with ceramic plates). Also, to the GP, read Newtons laws of physics some time please.
Reverse engineering is against the DMCA.
Woah, I think you need to re-read your DMCA.
I clicked your link... The kid was struck crossing a busy, unlit road at night, by a car coming around a blind corner. Sounds like tragic accident to me. If anybody is to blame it's the kid's parents for letting him out at night on a bike, without proper safety instruction.
Read the article. The cop was speeding around a blind corner without his lights or siren on. Yes, he was responding to a call, but he was breaking police protocol, and probably state and local laws, by speeding and by failing to turn on his lights and siren. Should the kid have been in the street? Well, there's no law against riding your bike in the street that I've heard of. How do you know that the child had no safety instruction? It seems to me that the cop is the one without adequate safety instruction. Hitting and killing that child seems to have been caused by the officer's negligence - driving too fast without his lights and siren on.
So what's your point? That we should be punishing people severely for things they have no control over? I presume you believe the punishment for violating the DMCA to be disproportionate, but you picked a poor example.
My main point is that there is a severe lack of parity in the US justice system. Those with money and/or power (cops, giant corporations) can basically do what they want while the little guy (kid on a bike, hardware hacker) get screwed or worse. A side point would be that a crime that has actually caused significant harm (the cop killing the kid) goes basically unpunished while the "crime" of modifying game consoles which hurts basically nobody can be punished by 10 years in jail.
The problem is that in the video game industry, when you boycott by simply not buying, you instantly become a "pirate". We are way beyond this type of boycott having any kind of positive desirable effect.
There is no -1 Disagree mod. Slashdot.org/faq defines mod options. USE IT.
they're trying to put a kid away for ten years of his life for tinkering with a console. I'd say the moral wrongness of that is quite clear.
Just for clarification, the 'kid' is actually 27 years old. More importantly, as is often the case in these reports, the maximum penalty for the charges would be 10 years. As the case hasn't even gone to court yet, there is no indication as to what the actual sentence (if any) will be.
Not saying I agree with the charges, but at least let's discuss the facts.
Except he wasn't using a hacked and modded console, he was SELLING them, a LOT of them. No matter how you look at it, even if you agree that you hacking a console yourself should be legal, reselling consoles that are basically being designed to pay illegally copied games rather than imports is NOT ok.
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This thread is PedoBear approved!
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