Slashdot Mirror
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 misread this as "California Student Arrested for Console Hating."
I imagined a college student having an impassioned argument with a police officer on whether the ps3 or the xbox 360 is better. The student goes too far and insults Halo and he's lead away in handcuffs.
"Computers are useless. They can only give you answers." - Pablo Picasso
And hundreds, if not thousands, of violent crime offenders go without jail time every week. I love a functining legal system.
As our way of thanking you for your positive contributions to Slashdot, you are eligible to disable Slashdot 2.0.
It's terrifying to me (and a sign of the times) that we can't do what we please with the material we've paid for. Sure, violating copyright is counter productive in the long-run, which is why we have it, but tinkering with stuff has a long proud history. Imagine if the guy who invented pneumatic tyres was taken to court because it violated the bicycle company's right to sell him replacement solid rubber rims? I doubt this guy was doing anything innovating, but he sure won't be doing so now.
Scientists point out problems, engineers fix them
altslashdot.org: The future of slashdot.
The land of the free. On less Trollish note, it's time you do something about this corporation laws, I can't understand how the freedom of a business comes before the freedom of the people.
Love many, trust a few, do harm to none.
This is behavior you'd expect from the Mafia. It just underscores the fact that there's not much difference between our government and an organized crime syndicate.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Industry and trade associations estimate that counterfeiting and piracy now cost the U.S. economy as much as $250 billion a year and a total of 750,000 American jobs.
I mean, aside from being pulled out of thin air that is?
I Am My Own Worst Enemy
And Now they expect you to only lease hardware as well?
If he owns an xbox he should be able to do whatever he damn well pleases to the xbox, it is the same as any other computer. It's fair for the company (microsoft/sony/nintendo) to make it so that their games will not work on a hacked system, they shouldn't have to guarantee the games will work unless you use their specifications, but it's not fair to take him to jail even if the modifications allow him to use unsigned software. hell, I build computers that have the capability to play pirated games all the time. How is this different?
PS: in before RTFA, he's modifying consoles for financial gain, how is this different from building a computer for financial gain?
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.
This is insane. This kid is looking at 10 years for modifying hardware while another story linked right at the bottom of the same article describes a cop getting a one day suspension (with pay) for running down a child with his car
Uh huh. Let's not bother to read the article, shall we?
Look, the sentence this guy is facing is ridiculous and the law needs changing, but we don't have to pretend that he's just some nerd modding a console or two for his homies.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
From the article
Counterfeiting and piracy have grown in recent years in both magnitude and complexity, according to ICE.
That's nice. Now how is that connected to the "crime" of modding a console? How is what he did connected to piracy other than the strained connection that modding consoles inevitably leads to piracy which he should be held responsible for? Even if you buy that, how is any of it inolved with "counterfeiting"? No one is stamping out illegal copies of games to be sold as the real thing here. Wrong issue entirely.
Some estimates indicate that 5 percent to 8 percent of all the goods and merchandise sold worldwide are counterfeit.
Again, a completely irrelevant fact mentioned only for the purpose of trying to connect his "crime" to a larger and more obviously illegal sounding one.
I wish mainstream news outlets would hire people to do research and write informed articles, because the alternative seems to be just parroting whatever the alphabet soup of government agencies tells them about the issue. Though, I guess now I know to watch out for those counterfeit modded game consoles.
If you build it, nerds will come. Soylentnews.org
I'm sure glad that the Homeland is secure from this miscreant.
Joe Public will read this story and think "so what, some kid who helped destroy game company profits got his comeuppance," but the technically astute on this site will notice that this law, while currently applied to a trivial domain like game consoles, will be affecting the whole computer industry for years to come. The iPhone, like most game consoles, has a mechanism to prevent unsigned code from running. It is protected by the DMCA. The Kindle from Amazon is probably protected by the DMCA.
Your legal ability to do what you want, with the hardware you own, is slowly being eroded by new hardware with DRM baked in, and lawsuits like the one in the article. The issue is about personal freedom as much as it's about piracy.
From the article:
"Playing with games in this way is not a game -- it is criminal," said Robert Schoch, special agent in charge of the ICE investigations office in Los Angeles. "Piracy, counterfeiting and other intellectual property rights violations not only cost U.S. businesses jobs and billions of dollars a year in lost revenue, they can also pose significant health and safety risks to consumers," he said.
Emphasis mine. What health risks are there? Pac Man fever?
From the percentages you post, I deduce there had been exactly 6 votes posted, so we now know there are at least 3 assholes on the internet.
Yes, he broke the law and got caught. What's your point? That we shouldn't be outraged? I'm not surprised this happened, but it's still outrageous. Every person involved in the investigation and prosecution of this act, and the passing of the legislation that criminalized it, is complicit in evil. They are far more dangerous than the "criminals" they claim to protect us against.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
I've been involved in a Civil Liberties group that reviews and lobbies legislation for appropriate changes prior to them becoming law, something quite different from the EFF. From my initial conversations organisations like this are in need of people with a technological bent to advise them on the ramifications of technology legislation before it passes into law.
It's not the first time I've done it and I've found that if you you are polite to the ministers involved they are quite responsive and will listen to what you have to say and if they see your name often enough they will ask you for advice, they asked me. It's interesting to see the changes you suggest actually either make it into law or not make it into law due to your lobbying.
Thing is, it's not a game. If you don't act then, incrementally, freedoms will be whittled away. If it's not by the lobbying of a special interest group (for example Microsoft with the Xbox) then it will be by a knee jerk reaction to something else that has happened. Once it's passed into law it's very unlikely that it will *ever* be rolled-back.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
What? How about taking your own advice Anonymous Coward. I see you post on every feckin story I read. You always take this tough guy stance and say exactly what you mean without fear of karma or being modded to oblivion. I wish you would just shut the fuck up and quit posting in every article I read..
Don't think of it as a flame, more like an argument that does 3d6 fire damage.
Would you rather have police interpreting the laws as they see fit and only enforcing the ones they agree with?
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
All too often, they already do...
Good thing you made that correction...socialism is the exact opposite of corporatism. Fascism, at least the way it was implemented by Mussolini and Hitler, was very much corporatist, though. It's really kind of funny how much people scream "socialism" these days when we're so much closer to corporatism than we are to socialism. In socialism, the government controls the industry. In corporatism, the industry (the corporations) control the government. We are much closer to the latter.
You don't want to go to jail? Don't break criminal laws.
You don't want people to break criminal laws? Don't write shit laws.
"Welcome to our world. We are the wasted youth. And we are the future too." Yes, I know these are stupid lyrics.
Because there is a HUGE difference between liquefying people and copying someone's game.
SOYLENT GAMES ARE PEOPLE! THEY'RE PEOPLE!
Official Heretic from the "Church of Global Warming". Proven right thanks to whistle blowers. AGW = Flat Earth Theory
I can't comprehend how this should be a *criminal* offense.
Really? This person is so dangerous we need to lock him in a metal cage for ten years?
I agree if we allowed people to completely, freely, brazenly enable piracy on a commercial scale, there might be some damage to the production of video games that might hurt us all. Confiscate the guy's hardware, take his profits, and figure out how many consoles he sold, and fine him the cost of, say, two or three video games per console.
Honestly, it's this kind of batshit-insane loss of all perspective that makes young people hate The Establishment so much. I swear, if prison times reflected actual *physical peril* that someone represents to society and fines represented *actual damages* (plus a slight disincentive (like 10%, not 10,000%)) the relationship between authority and youth in this country would be dramatically different.
He wasn't comparing copying games to Nazi war attrocities, he was comparing ARRESTING him to Nazi War attrocities, like this:
Judge: Why did you shoot 15,000 Jews, Gays and Arabs?
Nazi Soldier: I was just doing my Job
Us: Why did you arrest that kid for modding his X-box?
Govt. Official: I was just doing my job
It pays to be obvious, especially if you have a reputation for being subtle.
And hundreds, if not thousands, of violent crime offenders go without jail time every week. I love a functining legal system.
It functions as it was built to function.
In the American federal system, violent crimes are traditionally prosecuted at the state and local level.
The federal government has no general criminal jurisdiction outside of Washington D.C., its island territories, military bases, Indian reservations, and similiar enclaves.
The Secret Service was orginally organized to fight counterfeiting - a purely economic crime with an interstate dimension. ICE is the criminal enforcement division of the customs and immigration service - and these are not guys you want to fool around with.
Violent offenders who do enter the federal system get hammered. There is little willingness to plea bargain. When the judge says twenty-five years to life, you serve twenty-five years to life.
Quantity doesn't really mean anything, I've got 6 computers, that doesn't mean that I am selling 5 of them. How many of those "...more than a dozen..." are actually running? or in a closet? covered in 3mm of dust?
...Microsoft, Nintendo, and Sony video game consoles.
Well MS hasn't been involved that long, but what if some of the "Nintendo's" are NES/SNES, are the "Sony's" PS1's? I'd still have a Commodore64, Atari, NES, Sega Genesis, etc if I hadn't moved, and I likely wouldn't be doing anything with them.
...illegally modified Xbox, Playstation, Wii and other video game consoles
Fine, but what constitutes "illegal", are they all modded? or were some of them just sitting there without there shells "potentially modified" or some shit? I'm not saying the guy is innocent, only that the article is full of fuck all, and uses the classic tactics to enrage (frankly, idiotic) people like trailing off into
"Piracy, counterfeiting and other intellectual property rights violations not only cost U.S. businesses jobs and billions of dollars a year in lost revenue, they can also pose significant health and safety risks to consumers," he said.
Like this guy modding consoles caused your favorite store to close, and is going to make YOU lose your job, and hell fuckit, he might even give you cancer. KILL THE BASTARD.
He deserves a fine, and nothing more.
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.
Would you rather have police interpreting the laws as they see fit and only enforcing the ones they agree with?
If the law is unfair, unjust, or just plain disproportionate, then yes, I'd prefer to see the enforcers refuse to do the law's bidding.
I am not a crackpot.
But the comparison is still dumb because of the differences in "moral wrong." It's very clear that what the Nazi's did was wrong, but it's not as clear when it comes to modding consoles (especially since the officers probably didn't even know what "modding xboxes" was).
We really went to Godwin's law fast, eh?
It interests me when a geek equates the enforcement arm of US customs and immigration to the SS. That his right to a hacked and modded PS3 seems to count for as much as what a prisoner lost in the Nazi death camps.
The Nuremberg defendants were charged with crimes against humanity - and, and among the specific changes, the crime of institutionalized murder on an industrial scale. That is why the defense of "just following orders" does not work. They were the ones giving the orders.
Your apologies to Godwin are fraudulent.
If you agree that the actual facts of the case don't matter and it's fine to just make shit up, why not say he's blind and has never touched a console in his life?
Yes, the law itself shouldn't care, but let's not pretend some random falsehood for no reason, when the law is perfectly stupid on its own.
-- 'The' Lord and Master Bitman On High, Master Of All
Eh. Its' hard for a cop with a associates degree in CJ know that the law is wrong in the eyes of /. members. They're job is to conduct the arrest, not to determine guilt or sentencing. It's for the judge to throw out the case, for a jury to not convict, for the judge to decide the punishment, for the legislators to craft just laws and the supreme court to evaluate those laws.
Sometimes those charged with enforcement don't understand the why and wherefore. Sometimes they even... agree with the laws. Sometimes they opt to keep their jobs and pension rather than lose their job and possibly go to jail.
The fault here lies with the laws and our culture's values (specifically, valuing the rights of companies over the rights of citizens).
i get your point as a matter of a more general principle, following orders is a cheap excuse. In this case, i'm willing to let the arresting officers off the hook. We don't know what is going to happen with this case. Like others have said here, i don't want cops that pick and choose who to arrest and for what, aside from the most dire cases. Ordering a cop to shoot a shoplifter, yeah... that's wrong and all out of whack. Bringing in a kid for an investigation is hardly gross misconduct.
Utilizing the synergization of benchmark e-solutions to pre-workaround action items!
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.
Uh, they do that. There are thousands of laws. Many not enforced in practice.
If they enforced them all, they might not even get out of their neighborhood. Might be a bit like Robocop when he was loaded with hundreds of directives :).
According to the laws in Michigan, committing adultery would get you a life sentence. Seems the courts and prosecutors there are talking about repealing the relevant law. So that's selective prosecution as well.
But you know, maybe one should take a poll of betrayed spouses (and maybe even their children) and ask them what their opinion on adultery is. Do they view it as less or more negative than being mugged at gunpoint? How about being beaten up (but resulting in no broken bones or major scarring)? I won't be surprised if many of them would get over being mugged at gunpoint far more easily.
The average sentence for robbery in the 1st degree when armed with a deadly weapon (not necessarily a gun) appears to be 10 years.
http://www.cga.ct.gov/2000/rpt/olr/htm/2000-r-0510.htm
Of course one has to factor in that a robber could in theory more easily rob more people than a person could commit adultery with. Perhaps a robber is a danger to more people and thus should be put in jail for longer?
Exactly, and it just shows how dumb most people are, especially those enforcing the law. They apply it without a single thought. You could make a law about people having to wear specific colors every day of the week, and you'd have officiers enforcing that the next day without asking themselves if it makes sense or not.
Morals have very little to do with it, the nazi soldiers were obeying orders without questions, just like our soldiers and policemen are. Cases like this guy being arrested for modding consoles just shows how corporations are really running the show in america, and our freedoms can be taken away at any time. They're temporary privileges at most.
Oh and remember, Hitler was elected in a democracy. I wouldnt be so quick as to compare them to us and make them the bad guys and we the good guys, the line between our two societies is very thin.
Do you D?
Would you rather have police interpreting the laws as they see fit and only enforcing the ones they agree with?
YES. Absolutely.
The law only works as a system when every single person enforcing it applies common sense to the situation. Without that injection of common sense, "law" is nothing more than tyranny and oppression.
- Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set him on fire and he's warm for the rest of his life.
No one accepted these arguments of "just doing my job" in the Nuremberg trials -- why should we now? (Sorry, Godwin.)
It interests me when a geek equates the enforcement arm of US customs and immigration to the SS. That his right to a hacked and modded PS3 seems to count for as much as what a prisoner lost in the Nazi death camps.
The Nuremberg defendants were charged with crimes against humanity - and, and among the specific changes, the crime of institutionalized murder on an industrial scale. That is why the defense of "just following orders" does not work. They were the ones giving the orders.
Your apologies to Godwin are fraudulent.
This is a common logical fallacy I see all the time -- that just a comparison differs in degree that the comparison is invalid. In this case, the term Nuremberg Defense is a commonly used term to refer to a specific legal/moral argument, the "I am not morally/legally responsible for the actions in question because I was just following orders."
You are creating a blatant straw man in arguing that the commenter is honestly considering a modded PS3 equal in worth to a death camp inmate, he is using a commonly accepted figure of speech.
To get more to the heart of the issue, you do have a right to a hacked and modded PS3, it is absurd that the government can get away with passing a law telling me what I can and cannot do with a piece of hardware that I own, never mind mandating a decade of jail time for it. This young man's civil rights are being violated, and EVERYONE down the line is responsible for it, from the arresting officer to the prosecuting attorney, to the jury who convicts him and the judge that sentences him, and the politicians and lobbyists that pushed through the DMCA. "Just doing my job" is NO excuse, and the legal precedent for this was set during the Nuremberg trials, that is all that is meant in the comparison.
To the haters: You can't win. If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine
Because the OP was taking a shot at the officers arresting the kid and not the people making up the laws, maybe the point then is the ignorance of the officers involved. While everybody (hopefully) knows the "wrongness" of killing people (thus making the "I was just doing my job when I killed 30 people" argument null), it's different here.
Obviously us slashdotters (who are 100% right all the time) know how silly the prescribed punishment is for an offense like this. However, people in other areas of expertise don't really understand the laws they are enforcing (currently modding consoles IS illegal... whether it should be is another story). All the officers know is that a kid was doing something against the law, thus they arrested him for it. They probably don't know what console modding is, nor are they the ones deciding the punishment.
The real question is - should we expect law enforcement officers to be the interpreters of "moral right" and not enforce the law when they take issue with it? Clearly we'd have many issues if each officer were to do this. Should we expect the officers to know and understand every facet of the law, as well as the technicalities of very specific offenses? I'd argue that this is too much. This is why we have the justice system, and not Robocop.
So yes, it is definitely a legal grey area. Basically, it is illegal to sell/make modchips and provide modification servcies in the United States IF their primary and only real purpose is to get around a copy protection measure.
Console modification has the primary purpose of enabling the play of legal imported games and fair use backups, as well as enable the use of homebrew code that GREATLY expands the capabilities of the system (a perfect example of this is Xbox Media Center for the original xbox) and thus isn't just about bypassing a copy protection measure to enable piracy. In fact, if you have an original xbox and your hard drive dies, the only way to replace it is with a chip or with a TSOP flash, as the stock bios doesn't recognize non-locked hard drives (and the drives don't just have to be locked, they need to be locked with the key stored on the onboard eeprom). A modchip/tsop flash with a modified bios lets you bypass all that nonsense and just use any standard IDE/ATA hard drive with the system.>
The DMCA is a seriously terrible law to begin with. It fundamentally changes the way traditional copyright has always worked, and violates consumer rights in the name of helping big business. To quote one of my law textbooks on it:
As a side note, nowhere does the DMCA say it is illegal to USE or BUY modchips, just to make and sell them. So that leaves the end user (you) in the clear so long as they're not using it for piracy.
The sellers and makers of "anti-circumvention" devices and services on the other hand seem to be where the law is aimed at, and while I honestly don't believe the DMCA applies to chips and modding servcies, apparently the US government and the gaming industry disagree.
The only precedent for chip sales and the DMCA I could find was a September, 2006 case in which Sony sued Divineo (SCEA vs Divineo Inc, et al(457 F. Supp. 2d 957; 2006 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 74878; 81 U.S.P
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.
A while back, I considered going into federal law enforcement, based on their need for computer scientists and my fascination with criminal investigations. The ~50% pay cut ultimately dissuaded me, but I spent some time thinking about issues like this.
For example, I'm generally in favor of drug legalization, but I would have had to enforce the current drug laws in this job. I'm okay with busting drug traffickers (and people selling alcohol without a license, for that matter), but would I have a problem arresting someone for personal drug use? After some contemplation, I decided that I wouldn't have a problem doing so. Law enforcement officers don't make the law or even interpret ambiguities in the law. This is the job for the legislatures and the courts, respectively.
Simply put, I don't want a cop to refuse to enforce a law for personal reasons. I have to qualify this, though. First, although selective enforcement of the law can be dangerous, there should still be some room for common sense (i.e., it's not necessary to ticket someone for jaywalking on an empty street.) At the other end of the spectrum, if a cop considers a law truly immoral, then they should resign rather than fail to do their job. However, there's a huge difference between laws one might disagree with and laws which are truly reprehensible and immoral. We shouldn't conflate a law like the DMCA with a genocidal regime like Nazi Germany; the Nuremberg references are way overblown here.
Yes because unjustly incarcerating a person is the same as murdering thousands of people in cold blood.
I would highly recommend that you pose rational and logical arguments, instead of emotionally based hyperbole if you want anyone to take you seriously.
it may not be the same, but it's evil, anyway. And it sets a precedent: Circumventing a copy protection device is now a criminal offense, even if you do it for fair use purposes. The law is completely wrong, it was lobbied by a monopoly, and helping enforce it is evil.
Since when was The Law supposed to benefit the rich?
The worst part is that if I wanted people to rebel against this unfair law, suddenly I'd legally become a conspirator.
Really? There's a reason it's called "pound me in the ass Federal Prison". I suppose you could argue that sending someone off to be tortured and raped for no good reason is not morally equivalent to sending them off to be killed for no good reason, but there isn't _much_ moral difference.
No. Most likely, he'll be offered some sort of plea deal, which he'll almost have to take because the stakes are just so high. If he gets a trial, it'll be a trial by a jury of those who agree with the law and who have agreed in advance to convict even if they feel it is unjust. Silliness about probation, a fine, and community service is just wishful thinking; violation of the DMCA is a felony.