Australian Crackdown On Console Modchips Likely To Continue

angry tapir writes "Late last week an Australian court issued an injunction against a handful of retailers selling or importing hardware — commonly known as 'mod chips' — that allows unauthorized software to run on Sony's PlayStation 3. The court also required that the four parties that were the subject of the injunction actually hand over to Sony any PlayStation modchips they have. Sony's PlayStation 3 mod chip lawsuit could be just the first of many such cases in Australia, according to a lawyer who defended a client against Nintendo in a similar case earlier this year."

Comments

Re:What's With Australia?

[Anonymous Coward]

You're asking that about a country who had their elected prime minister axed and replaced earlier this year by his own party, and where recent elections resulted in a hung parliament where neither of the two major parties could form a majority.

Answer: no, they don't, and Australia is generally getting pretty sick of it.

Re:What's With Australia?

[mjwx]

What is it with Australia? They want to filter the Intertubes in was that make Iran look like an island of freedom,

That was a small group of religious extremists, who have since been smacked down. Getting a filter now is impossible, since the greens control the senate and the independents control the house (we had an election a few weeks back). The best they got was a "voluntary" filter from Australia's worst ISP's (most people in Australia have the choice of 5+ ISP's). In the mean time, my Amcom and iinet connections remain unfiltered.

Would you like it if I said all Americans were naive blubbering vagina's like Rush Limbagh? (I cant be arsed googling the correct spelling). Not fair using the worst example of a people as the average is it?

Are the people that propose these law actually elected and represent the views of the average Aussie?

Is Joe Biden or John McCain a representative of the average American, how about Sarah Palin (no wait, dont answer that). Polly's always live in a world of their own and always seem surprised when reality crashes in on them. Same in every country mate.

Generic dongle?

[SharpFang]

AFAIK, the modchip is a generic microcontroller ( ATmega164PA ) in a simple USB-pluggable board, and the actual jailbreak code is in the wild.

It could be easily done that the microcontroller board is given some minor extras and some legal, common, generic functionality, say, a USB-RS232 converter. Then the customer can buy the dongle, and turn it into a modchip using a PC and a simple package downloaded from torrents.