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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."
And hundreds, if not thousands, of violent crime offenders go without jail time every week. I love a functining legal system.
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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.
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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.
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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
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.
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?"
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.
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.
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.
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.
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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.
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.
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.