Playstation mod chips ruled legal in Australia...

[Godder]

http://xtramsn.co.nz/technology/0,,7006-4863630,00.html

The mod chips are to allow Playstations sold in Australia to play games made in the USA and Japan, rather than the chips that allow one to play copied games, but still, it's a victory for the consumer.

[crazedpenguinman]

It's about time. Now to find a dodgey guy to do it.

[jpmeyer]

It's actually probably going to be a moot point.  I know that the PSP can play games from any country and I'm pretty sure that PS3 will be the same.

[ctthespian]

Not to mention that products like HD Advance allow you to copy 85-95% of the games to a HD and play them.  So there's no real need for a mod chip.

[Revvik]

A hollow victory at best.

[Godder]

Yes and no - the whole concept of zones is highly annoying to Australians and New Zealanders, not least because we got shifted from DVD's Zone 2 (Europe) to Zone 4 (South America - wtf? Apparently we don't have internet...) very late in the process. Also, games aren't released in NZ or Oz until they've done well overseas, so we get mainly old games (and worldwide releases), and a rather small selection at that. Basically, cases like these seek to allow consumers to rectify that by making it possible to import and play games/DVDs from other countries.

I don't know about Australia, but here in New Zealand, almost all DVD players sold are multi-zone, even the cheapest ones (and the newer ones get round RCE) precisely because of the problem that zoning presents to us (the Zone 4 selection is very small compared to Zones 1 & 2).

[Bram]

A friend of mine modifed Xboxes a while back. I think that was ruled legal over here, too.

Pirated software, obviously, is not, though. Pretty weird legislation, yo.

[Apollyon]

In the case of Australia legalizing mod chips, the court said that mod chips that circumvent zone limitations are legal (as the zone limitations are illegal in Australia). In this case, Sony uses the chip as both anti-copyright and anti-zone control, so Australia said that if it circumvents anti-zone, they are legal to sell and install. However, if Sony puts them on separate chips, it will be illegal to modchip the copyright protection chip.

I'm not sure about the relevant case law in the States or anywhere else, or if it's even been tested. That's the big problem with the rapid advance in technology, we try to apply legislation made before the advent of the modern computer to current issues, so it becomes an even larger mishmash of somewhat arbitrary rulings. I suspect that we'll start to see some relevant rulings as to their legality soon here.

The legality of the modchips that will allow you to play games off a HD so you don't need to worry about discs getting scratched and general other problems involving optical media is going to be an interesting case. PS2 and XBox both use 4.5 GB DVDs for their games. The original Playstation used 700 MB cds for their games (hence why the RPGs tended to have multiple discs). A 250 GB hard drive costs under 100 dollars and gets a higher continuous rate of data transfer, generally.

ctthespian:
The intent of the modchips in question for that ruling wasn't to allow you to play games off a HD, but rather the legality of chips that make the PS2 region-free. It happens that Sony uses the same chip to do two different things, so a modchip would eliminate the copyright control features of the PS2.

[knickers]

A friend of mine modifed Xboxes a while back. I think that was ruled legal over here, too.

Pirated software, obviously, is not, though. Pretty weird legislation, yo.

Yah, it does appear weird ...
I don't agree with the Region Codes at all ... I think its very stupid, and that there should be laws against it ... I am a consumer, and I don't see why I can't purchase whatever I want wherever ... I know they are in place to protect our economy, but it just makes me mad!

Also, here's something a little off topic ...
So Gasoline Companies made a record amount of money? 10 Billion?
And the government wants them to give something back to the Consumer? I don't get it ...
The Banks make BILLIONS a year, and the government doesn't do anything to them!

/me cries ...
So ends my pointless rant, I'm off before I make more stupid posts ...

[jpmeyer]

The happy ending in all of this is that I believe that Sony and Toshiba (those are the two companies with the two new DVD standards, right?) are not going to include region encoding in Blu-ray/DVD HD