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Xbox 360 Jailbreaker May Need Real Jailbreak
An anonymous reader writes "Back in July, the Librarian of Congress officially made it legal to jailbreak your iPhone (or any phone). So why is it that the government is trying to prosecute Matthew Crippen for jailbreaking Xbox 360s? If convicted, he could face up to three years in prison, and lawyers are trying to prevent the author of a book about jailbreaking the original Xbox from testifying in Crippen's defense. What kind of law says it's okay to jailbreak the phone in your pocket, but not your gaming console?"
Gah, Apple! Making all these locked down devices like the iphone and the xbox...
What kind of law says it's okay to jailbreak the phone in your pocket, but not your gaming console?"
The kind of law "sponsored" by Microsoft, Sony, and other industry lobbyists.
As long as I am not publishing their source code, or distributing their copyrighted binaries, then fuck'em.
On the other hand, if I am publishing their source or binaries then I should expect a response, although jail time seems extreme to say the least.
I still cannot find the droids I am looking for...
The Library of Congress specifically made Iphone jailbreaking permissable, for the reasons given above. As with all things legal, a specific permission isn't just instanlty transformed into general allowance to do whatever the hell you want. The Xbox was not included in the permission granted and therefore such hacking is a violation of the current statute until found otherwise in a court.
The fact that Crippen is making money from breaking the law, and in likelyhood abetting a little casual piracy, suggests he's going to get made an example of.
Jailbreak is fine, otherwise the old media will go back to calling it 'hacking', in the bad context.
Good-bye
As far as I'm considered, when I buy something (phone, game console, computer, whatever) it's mine to do with as I please.
Whether I want to modify it, or throw it off a cliff, is no longer any of the company's business. That's not to say it excuses piracy (which is an entirely separate matter altogether), but put simply, they have my money, and I have their product. Our relationship should there be at an end.
I really don't care what the lobbyist-bought-and-paid-for law says on the matter.
Come on, the law is so weird, it has to be real. Fiction has to make sense.
An example: ever hear of Relevant Conduct? I've talked about this before. Here's the scenario: you get caught with a small bag of weed. You get arrested. While being booked some Fed sees you and says "hey! Aren't you the guy who mowed down all those nuns and orphans with an AK at McDonald's last week?" You deny it, but he's sure and you are charged with mass murder. You go to trial, and win. You are found not guilty after two minutes of deliberation. There was no evidence and the witness said it wasn't you.
But since the McDonald's was in another state, the case is federal, and you get six months for the weed. Think you'll do it in some easy Club Fed? No way, you have mass murder as relevant conduct. I am not kidding: your custody can be affected by dismissed or acquitted charges. You have been found not guilty, but it's on your Pre-Sentence Investigation and the Bureau of Prisons will send you to a much tougher place: after all, you're a murderer! So, you go to a USP, and are dead in a week.
As I've posted, I recently did five years in the feds, and rather than be close to my home in a Camp, I was sent to a disciplinary FCI as far away as they could send me, due to charges which were dismissed. The xBox thing does not surprise me in the least...there is so much bad law on the books, which is one reason we have so many people in jail.
"The pie shall be cut in half and each man shall receive.....death. I'll eat the pie."
Not all laws take intent in to account, but many do. Why you do something can be as important as what you do. If you kill someone it can be anything from justified self defense, which isn't chargeable, up to 1st degree murder, which can net a death penalty in some places. What it depends on is the specifics of your actions and what you meant to do. In all cases the other person is dead, the major action and outcome are the same. However WHY they are dead matters.
If someone is trying to kill you and you kill them, justified. If you kill someone through an accident perhaps involving some negligence (like you hit them with your car because you weren't looking) manslaughter 2. If you kill them through direct action, but didn't mean to (like you are beating them up and it goes too far), manslaughter 1. If you mean to kill someone, but don't plan it (like you catch a guy with your wife) murder 2. If you plan out and execute killing someone, murder 1. They are just as dead in all cases, but your reasons and surrounding actions matter.
Things can also be legal or illegal depending on their intended use. Water pipes/bongs/hookahs have a long tradition of use with tobacco and they are legal in the US for that use. Smoke shops can sell them, and people can buy them. However they are drug paraphernalia and thus illegal if used to smoke marijuana, or other controlled substances. So go in to a smoke shop and ask for a bong to smoke weed, they'll toss you out. Reason is they can get in trouble for selling it if they know it is intended for illegal use.
Lockpicks are similar. You can own your own lockpicks, no problem. All locksmiths do, and you'd want them to learn. However if you imply that you are going to use them for something illegal, they won't sell them to you and if you do use them for something illegal they are burglary tools and thus not legal.
Our legal system takes intent in to account, and takes other circumstances. So there is nothing contradictory about saying "An individual can jailbreak their phone for the purpose of adding functionality and that is perfectly legal," and also saying "A person cannot sell Xbox 360 breaks for the purpose of enabling the illicit copying of games."
There's also the question of what a jailbreak does and doesn't do. In the case of the iPhone, it allows for fairly significant functionality, like installing Flash. Legally this is called a "substantial non-infringing use" and hence is a DMCA exemption. The 360 hack? Does it do anything other than let you play copied games? If not or if the uses are only superficial, then it probably isn't legal.
Now if you don't like the law, think it should be changed, the answer is to let your representatives know. They are the ones who make the laws, they can unmake them.
He modified his own property. That is what he did. Now, whether this allows others to potentially 'steal' money that only exists in the future of an alternate dimension where the artist/business made more money (the piracy is bad because they steal "potential profit" argument) is irrelevant. It can be used to play backup copies, yes. Now, no one can legally play their backed up games in fear of getting in legal trouble because lobbyists have an illogical fear of 'piracy'. Useless. Pirates will do this whether it is legal or not, and people who have legitimate uses for it could suffer. In some ways, it sounds similar to DRM.
Filthy, filthy copyrapists!
Just what MIcrosoft always wanted, rentable software. This is progress?
It takes a sick groupie to keep buying stuff from people who are trying to put you in jail for using your own paid for product. Just say no with your wallet. There are plenty of inexpensive desktops, laptops and other devices that officially support Linux or even come with it pre installed. Or you take free old hardware from your friends, coworkers, Goodwill and other situations where the original vendor doesn't benefit or the indirect benefit is offset by public good. Eventually some company, big or small, will get the message that there is a need for a different kind of product. And serving even one in 100K people on planet earth can sustain a small business.
In this case jailbreak is not fine. He wasn't jailbreaking the Xbox, he was charging people to mod it to play backups/pirated media. Jailbreaking is generally accepted as removing device enforced limits on what 3rd party software can run. The mod he was using still will not allow homebrew or other non approved software to work.
I would challenge your view that the only "real usage" of moding a game console is to play illegally copied games.
Of course I can only speak for myself but my intent when I modded my Xbox was so I could copy the games I already owned onto its hard drive and no longer need the easily damaged disks, that in some cases cost me $70+, to play the game. The originals are now stored in a safe location and will only be used to reload the hard disk should it fail at a later date.
My action also allowed me to extend the life of my console since I no longer needed to use the optical disk drive, which was already starting to fail, and maximize my investment in the games. If I had to keep switching the disks, risking damage to them every time and causing wear on the optical disk drive, I would buy far fewer games than I have. From that view the modding actually led to the sale of more games by the distributors.
If Microsoft chooses to ban me from using my modded console on their network I do not have a problem with that, they own the servers, but I own the Xbox and will do with it as I please with it.
And I still fail to see how jail breaking a game console is any different than jail breaking an iPhone, in both cases it allows the owner to do what they want with device they own. If anything I see more of an argument against jail breaking a phone that was discounted pursuant to a service contract and therefor not fully owned by the purchaser until the terms of the contract are fulfilled, than a game console which was purchased outright.
There really is not a difference between jail breaking your phone to allow you to run pirated games, and selling Xbox 360 mods to allow you to install whatever apps you like. I don't know what unapproved apps are available for the 360, but I still run XBMC on my XBox1. In fact, XBMC has always been the most used app on my Xboxes.
Note that as far as I'm aware, that's only the case in the US.
In Europe, you are given explicit rights to circumvent DRM for fair use. In France, there even was a proposal to force the manufacturer to provide information on how to circumvent it for that purpose, but of course it was scrapped.
Because Apple is the new blac^W Microsoft.
"linux is just DOS with a UNIX like syntax" -- Galactic Dominator (944134)
Actually, it would allow homebrew software. His mod was an extension of the soldering mod that allowed users to install linux on the original xbox, instead modified for the 360 hardware. All the mod does is stop the xbox from checking if it is a factory made, xbox manufactured game when you load a disc (somewhat like how a jailbroken iphone can use non app-store apps) and instead it will run whatever you stick in there, from game backups to a bios bootloader.
Also, the article states that he would only mod for backups, and if piracy were brought up it would be a "no-deal".
Back in July, the Librarian of Congress officially made it legal to jailbreak your iPhone (or any phone). So why is it that the government is trying to prosecute Matthew Crippen for jailbreaking Xbox 360s?
I got dinner from Arby's tonight. So why is it raining outside?
The prime interest of a politician is, and must be, to get reelected. After all, fail at that, and you aren't a politician anymore. So it takes precedence. Ultimately that means keeping the voters happy. Now if the voters ignore the shit you pull, well then you can do as you please. However if voters hold them to account, then they'll do as they are told (or be replaced by ones who do).
So, if you keep that defeatist attitude, and espouse it to others, then yes, you'll have say at all. However if you wake up and realize that indeed the voters DO choose who is in office, then you'll realize that isn't the case. No, you as a single person cannot change things all on your own. However you shouldn't be able to, this isn't a dictatorship. Doesn't mean you can't make a difference. Let them know how you feel, and let your friends know to do the same. If enough people care, change will happen.
This crap of "Oh lobbyists control everything and there's nothing we can do!" is only true if people let it be true. Your vote, your voice, is just as important as anyone elses. However if you just bitch about it and act powerless, well then you are.
Remember that having only a small amount of power (which is all a single voter has) is not the same as having no power. It only becomes no power if your attitude demands it be such.
Now how do you get the ignorant masses from running out and purchasing/licensing DRM infected gear? There is no warning label on such goods that state "WARNING: If you modify this device you may go to prison" Maybe there should be a campaign to educate consumers in such a fashion. Who is going to sponsor it? Maybe EFF? How many people on Slashdot donate to the EFF? I do. Every time the make news I donate again. People can thank the EFF for it now being legal to jailbreak their Iphones. Just a quick google search shows some of the valuable work they have done and you can go here to see a list of that valuable work. I urge every Slashdotter to Join the EFF and help them fight the RIAA/MPAA/BSA juggernauts. Any little bit helps.
Except that exactly this isn't possible on 360. By modding the DVD-ROM (which he apparently did), he cannot run his own software - he can only run copied games that are already signed by Microsoft. This is totally different from what bunnie did on the original xbox.
Is anyone else concerned that homeland security arrested him? Weren't they created to fight terrorism in response to 9/11?!? And, what on earth does it have to do with "Immigration and Customs"? It sounds like the ESA went to an organization that they knew (1) had nothing important to do today, (2) would have the least capability to understand the issue involved and (3), would have a tendency to overblow the importance, and (4) be desperate to throw someone in jail.
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