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Canadian DMCA In Action: Court Awards Massive Damages In Modchip Case (michaelgeist.ca)
New submitter google20000 shares a report from Michael Geist: The Federal Court of Canada has issued a massive damage award in the first major
Canadian digital lock copyright ruling involving circumvention
of technological protection measures. The ruling, which is the first to conduct an extensive examination of the anti-circumvention rules established in 2012, adopts expansive interpretations to the digital lock protections and narrow views of the exceptions. The case launched by Nintendo confirms that Canada has tough anti-piracy laws with one of the most aggressive digital lock laws in the world and will fuel calls to re-examine the effectiveness of the anti-circumvention exceptions in the 2017 copyright review. The case stems from a lawsuit launched by video game maker Nintendo against Go Cyber Shopping, a modchip seller that operated a retail store in Waterloo, Ontario and several online stores. Go Cyber Shopping offered a wide range of products that allow users to circumvent the digital lock controls on the Nintendo gaming console (such as the Wii) and play unauthorized games including "homebrew" games. Go Cyber Shopping argued that it provided other services but the court says that it did not tender any evidence in that regard. The court concluded that the modchip seller engaged in copyright infringement and circumvented technological protection measures. In fact, it went out of its way to emphasize the importance of TPM protection. It adopted a broad interpretation of a technological protection measure -- rejecting a UK case that used a narrower interpretation -- in favor of an approach that covers access controls that go beyond restrictions on copying.
Run for Parliment, get law overturned. [One of the reasons] I moved to Canada to escape the DMCA laws in the US. We need legislators who take a hard line "No DMCA" eveywhere we can fight them, the TPM measures here could be used to lock us out from booting Linux on our new PCs in the future. We need a Pirate Party that isn't actually called the Pirate Party to fight hard and declare war on the copyright cartels, and Trusted computing.
Now my country is going down the tubes too. Corporatocracy wins again. Bastards.
'The Economy' is a giant Ponzi scheme whose most pitiable suckers are the youngest among us and the yet-unborn.
From the featured article:
Nintendo's policy during the Wii's commercial lifetime was that only a company with "relevant video game industry experience" and a dedicated office detached from any residence had such "legitimate paths". This came to a head in 2009 when Nintendo's denial of a devkit to a home-based video game studio run by programmer Robert Pelloni made the news.
(Nintendo has since substantially loosened this policy, and Pelloni has since admitted that he should have released it on PC first.)
That PDF is a piece of work... From what I can tell the total award is $12,700,00? Anyone know what they mean by "work" here?
What we have here is where Nintendo (and the dumbasses who signed this idiocy into law) are claiming that Nintendo's temporary monopoly on its idea is somehow so important that it usurps the owner of the computer's right to modify his own property. I dunno about how Canadians feel about it, but for those of us south of the 49th parallel, our justification of government was based in part on John Locke's principle of "life, liberty and property" (which got changed to "pursuit of happiness" in the Declaration of Independence, but it still counts!). The right to own property is inalienable, but this copyright run amok turns that principle on its head in some kind of bizarro-world feudal dystopia. That tyranny must not stand!
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
Are games really worth all the legal bullshit? I think they're not. I'm also beginning to think no software is worth it if you have to agree to sign your rights away. If I buy a hammer at the store I don't have to sign any god damn EULA, so why should I have to if I buy a drawing program, or video editing software? Do I sign a EULA when I buy a pack of playing cards? What about Monopoly? Must I sign my rights away in order to play it? Only if it's digital!
All those tractor manufacturers are going to use this to stop farmers repairing their own machines and will jack up the prices for repair jobs. That will be the start, next: cars, mobile 'phones, washing machines, ... anything with a CPU in it that runs code that can be 'protected' by XORing bytes with 0xFF.
Well then, how about one called The Pirate-Ninja-Zombie Party? www.facebook.com/groups/545267922328106/ Though on a more serious note, I did put more thought into it thsn that, but couldn't determine if there might be someone who wouldn't mind creating a Democratic-Republican-Whig psrtu Facebook group with me. If someone is interested, they can contact me at https://www.facebook.com/hackw... or go it alone.
I found that Steam prevents me from losing games from things like physical media going bad or being stolen and makes it much easier to install games on new machines, and this is enough to tolerate their little DRM game.
Shameful ruling on a shameful law. :(
I, as a Canadian, will write my MP, and I encourage others to do the same.
A government is a body of people notably ungoverned - AC
I wonder why people even went through the hassle of running homebrew on a Wii console instead of just using a TV as a PC monitor. True, many during the Wii's commercial era (2006 to 2012) had an SDTV, but back then, I used a $40 scan converter like one of these to turn a PC's VGA out into composite or S-Video.
I for one did it because the Wii was small and quiet and had interesting input devices, and the PC was big and goofy and didn't. You could use the ones from the Wii, and a lot of people have, but that only rams home the point really.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Canada uses first past the post voting, which makes it very difficult to set a new party up. If you try, you end up splitting the vote with whichever of the two main parties most closely aligns with you, which leads to the other main party being more likely to win -- as a result most people won't vote for you, even when they support you more than either of the two leading parties.
"Set up a new party" would be rather a lot viable if that was fixed... but good lucking getting FPTP replaced by anything else.
Laptops are also relatively "small and quiet".
The problem isn't the mod chip per-se. If you read the ruling it shows that they were providing instructions for how to modify the headers of dumped ROMs so that they could play them. They basically were selling the chip as a way to clone games. What we have seen in the US courts is that, if you provide a service that permits copyright infringement, you have to show that you were actively policing the system to prevent that from happening. But if you basically sell something as "Hey look here, you can download free stuff off the internet here!" then you lose.
In bygone days, I had a modded Nintendo DS, and the homebrew community was very active. There was hardly another device like the DS at the time. Is the Wii homebrew community just as active? Or are the mod chips really just being used for piracy? It seems like there is really nothing special about a Wii that makes it a good target for homebrew development.
I've been thinking of setting up a Nazi party, because people sometimes call me a nazi due to my attention to detail and willingness to maintain order and sense. The party would have nothing to do with national socialists, right wing extremists etc. as it would be all about logic and reason. We would base our decisions on science rather than semi-religious feelgood arguments, which seem to be common in politics.
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
Laptops are also relatively "small and quiet".
At the time, small and quiet laptops had garbage graphics, often even being incapable of high-resolution output due to limited video memory. So if you're going to have all that, why not a Wii? It had interesting input devices. It had interesting games, actually, if you're a Zelda fan anyway. It was cheap. 480p was good enough for the kinds of games Nintendo wanted to make, and I had a good time playing some of them. If you are going to have the thing around, and it's feasible to make it run homebrew, why not? The original Xbox is arguably a better platform for that, but it's also bigger and noisier.
I ripped my Wii out of the entertainment system recently in preparation to be rid of it, because I haven't turned it on in ages. But it was cool in its time. Now you can do all that stuff on an Android stick.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"