Federal Agents Raid Homes for Modchips

Lunatrik writes "Invoking the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998, Federal Custom's Agents have raided over 30 homes and businesses looking to confiscate so-called 'mod chips', or other devices that allow the playback of pirated video games. This raises an important question: Are legitimate backup copies of a piece of software you own illegal under the DMCA?"

$3 billion a year?

[mtmra70]

It is interesting that they say pirated games cost the industry $3 billion a year. Since most systems, I mean Microsoft, is pretty good about blocking online play (or online connection) of modded systems and copied games, they can not claim that as a loss. *If* I download a game today, I am fairly confident that A) my system will be banned B) the game will not work online.

So really, Microsoft is doing pretty good about creating a system that is always online. If a few years from now your console HAS to be online, the copied games industry will shrink even more. Sure, people will be able to change the packets, blah blah blah, but where we stand today compared to 4 years ago the software companies are far better off.

Of course Not

[Kranfer]

I am going to have to say no... The reason is.... Media degrades over time, and get scratched to hell and such. I own over 500 DVDs, however some of them are "unwatchable" either from storing them in those cheesey folder cases or just letting them sit around on my desk... Some of them are backed up some I bought anew... But I think making personal backups of software SHOULD be legal.... the companies that make this stuff could make money off this by selling an option to make backups for say... a dollar per backup and has to be registered to yourself with a separate backup serial key... DMCA goes too far sometimes....

Re:Bogus question.

[mrjb]

The (somewhat rhetorical) question is, did they raid those homes to find *one* mod chip or whole bunches of them? You don't need to have hundreds of mod chips to play back your own backups, after all. Unless, of course, said mod chip owners want to claim those mod chips were all backups of their *original* mod chip...

Re:Bogus question.

[dattaway]

I have a modchip on my Nintendo DS. I don't use it to play games. I have NEVER played a game on it. So why do I have it? So I can run Linux on it. I have no interest playing games, but I do have an interest in a unique hardware device. Should the FBI raid my house?

If they did raid my and drag me into court, I would ask my legal counsel why small portable computers with good battery life is non-existant, while gaming consoles with much more features are. Something is wrong with the market in my opinion. Should it be illegal for me to have the technical possibility of running a rogue game? Should they give me 20 years in FPMITA Prison for it?

Re:Games Producers Want The Best Of Both Worlds

[Renraku]

When you buy blank media they charge you for the media.

When you buy any kind of software they charge you mainly for the licence to use the software and to get support/etc. However when you lose the media or it breaks, they want to charge you to replace the media.

So which is it? Charging us for the media or charging us for the licence? One or the other.

Re:Bogus question.

[beatmania]

The "motivation" for mod chips kind of depends on the person, wouldn't you say?

I bought a Nintendo Wii on launch day when I was living in Japan, and bought 4 or 5 games for it while I was living there. I just returned to the USA about a week ago, and now I want to buy more games, but I can't, thanks to region locking. The only options I have are 1.) Buy another Wii (not really an option, as I've sunk money into the Virtual Console games), or 2.) Install a modchip. The games I want to play on my Wii are indeed published by an official publisher, just from a different region.

Does this mean I should be raided / arrested / tried in court?

I realize that a lot of people who use modchips are only out to copy everything in sight, but hasn't this kind of thing been covered in the past (Sony Corp. of America v. Universal City Studios, Inc.)?

Bogus question indeed, sirs.

False Positives?

[Sasquatch6]

OK, so the FBI has just gone and raided a whole bunch of places looking for mod-chips. Presumably they would be looking for installed chips in consoles they raid at homes. How are they detecting these mod chips? Are they running a program to detect modified hardware (I would have thought MS, Sony, et al. would be doing that already). If not that, then they must be physically opening the cases to find the chips... Which brings me to my ultimate point: what happens if their information proves to be faulty, and the console is found chipless. Is the owner compensated for bother? Wear and tear? Damage? Loss of warranty after the console has just been opened? One would hope that the apology would extend to some sort of written proof that the console was opened for legal purposes, so that if that 360 red-rings, they can send it back without MS complaining.

Re:Bogus question.

[another_fanboy]

complain that its a police state because you cannot play pirated xbox games

There are reasons to use a modchip beyond playing pirated games. There is always the possibility of playing third party games (where do you think new companies come from?), using the hardware for something other than a gaming console (myth tv/cheap handheld/etc), or just tinkering with it. The label on the back of the system says the warranty will be voided by playing with the insides, as it should be, but that is not the same thing as saying "opening this box is reason for your arrest".
Apparently our government (this is sadly not limited to the US) has not yet realized that a majority of the tech companies in existence today got their start tinkering with previous products.

Re:Bogus question.

[dattaway]

no. get some perspective. hammers and screwdrivers do not have an end use licence agreement. yes of course it is up to the seller to determine the terms of the sale. its called a contract.

Perspective? Why should a blank device with NO COPYRIGHTED MATERIAL have a license agreement? Should a movie projector have one? A pair of glasses? Why should my Nintendo that I want to put MY OWN DAMNED SOFTWARE on it have a license agreement? I don't want it for the games, I want it for the ARM microprocessors and displays, not for the any included software. The first thing I did was wipe off all that crap software off it, because I didn't agree with it. Is that good? Or did the manufacturer squeeze in some FEDERAL LAW that says my door is going to come down one day because I didn't subscribe to their business model?

Re:Bogus question.

[muridae]

hammers and screwdrivers do not have an end use licence agreement.

Neither does the Wii, the DS, nor any other console that I've bought. When I turned on my DS, I never had to click through a questionable document that pretended to be a contract between me and Nintendo.

Slashdot is not the place to argue if a sticker on a box counts as a contract, though. If a company wants to license a product so that it is only used in certain ways, then the contract should be negotiated, up front, before the purchase. After I have purchased the device, I may decide to cut through the cardboard box, rip through the paper that was going to be a license, and then compost the paper without even looking at it.

Who is Dell to say I can not install Linux on a computer I buy from them, they sold it to me right?
Who is Ford to say I can't put after market air filter on my car, I bought the car.
And, to make a direct parallel to your argument, why can't an auto maker force me to only use their car for street driving instead of racing? They would have changed twice the price if they knew I wanted to drive on a track/off road/anywhere else. It's their product, who am I to simply use it as I see fit after I've already paid them for it.

Re:WTF?

[Slithe]

They also get the "jobs" nobody else would want, because it's risky or so crappy paid that even the burger flipping crowd sneers at them.

The funny thing is that these jobs are low-paid because of the wage lowering effects of mass immigration. (supply and demand, anyone?) This article [vdare.com] has a very interesting paragraph about the meatpacking industry that sums up the situation nicely:

Thirty years ago, meatpacking was one of the highest-paid industrial jobs in the United States, with one of the lowest turnover rates. In the decades that followed the 1906 publication of The Jungle, labor unions had slowly gained power in the industry, winning their members good benefits, decent working conditions, and a voice in the workplace. Meatpacking jobs were dangerous and unpleasant, but provided enough income for a solid, middle-class life. There were sometimes waiting lists for these jobs. And then, starting in the early 1960s, a company called Iowa Beef Packers (IBP) began to revolutionize the industry, opening plants in rural areas far from union strongholds, recruiting immigrant workers from Mexico, introducing a new division of labor that eliminated the need for skilled butchers, and ruthlessly battling unions. By the late 1970s, meatpacking companies that wanted to compete with IBP had to adopt its business methods--or go out of business. Wages in the meatpacking industry soon fell by as much as 50 percent. Today meatpacking is one of the nation's lowest-paid industrial jobs, with one of the highest turnover rates. The typical plant now hires an entirely new workforce every year or so. There are no waiting lists at these slaughterhouses today. Staff shortages have become an industry-wide problem, making the work even more dangerous.

Re:Not really a legitimate question...

[Shade of Pyrrhus]

The next time you buy a CD or DVD, and you want to back it up, try calling the company that produced it and asking for a backup copy for the reasons above: you have the rights to one, but it's illegal for you to make one. Sure, they're laugh in your face, but if you bug the crap out of them you might just get some attention or even make them buckle to make you stop calling. I'm sure you could ask up the chain and eventually someone will get tired of it. Just sounds like something amusing to try if you have free time and speakerphone while you play your game or watch the movie.

Re:Bogus question.

[mhall119]

They designed, financed and made the product, it's up to them to determine the terms under which they offer it for sale.

That's the thing though, they can dictate the terms of the sale, but should the be able to dictate the terms of use? No non-media product I can think of dictates how you can use what you buy. Toyota doesn't care if I mod my car, or who's gasoline I put in it, why should Nintento care what you put in your DS?

Re:Not really a legitimate question...

[CelticWhisper]

What kind of blank media did you use? Normally recordable DVDs have inaccessible CSS key sectors so that the CSS key cannot be duplicated along with the rest of the content. Also, what DVD was it that you copied? Maybe it was released unencrypted (though I can't really see that happening.)

Re:Bogus question.

[cliffski]

No I am not a troll. I have a different view to you, and to the guy who called me a 'moron' and accused me of having brain damage. It's what intelligent, reasonable people in the real world call a 'difference of opinion'. Such things can be discussed and debated rationally and sensibly, except on slashdot, where anyone who disagrees with the /. groupthink is hurled with abuse.

Your post is dripping with contempt for the people who actually make stuff. 'so-called inventors' is a great example. Who did invent the mentioned nintendo games console then? you? your mates? How much of the R&D budget for the device did you contribute?

Said 1000 times before:

[Devir]

I bought my Xbox in 2001 I believe. To be honest it was an amazing console. I loved that I could insert a CD and rip it to the xbox into a media library that could then be played in my games. What i didnt like was the CD's didnt at the time connect to the CD Database and named them for me. Therefor I learned to hate that feature very quickly. Using the dashboard to type in the CD names and song titles was wretched. Also the miniscule 8 gig drive filled up. With no way of adding a bigger drive...

Later that year I discovered a mod chip that would simply plug onto the motherboard and one screw to secure it to the board. All of the sudden I could drop in a 60 gig drive, later a 120 gig drive. Amazingly now I could store my entire CD collection on my Xbox, 60 CD's in all. I believe about 12 gigs worth of MP3. Add in Xbox Media Center (player back then) and I could pretty much play all my MP3's to my home theater system complete with playlists and visualizations.

Now because of the much bigger drive I copied some of my (Legally purchased) games directly to the hard drive. AMAZING load times were much faster. No more waiting forever to play Mercenaries. My Xbox became the center of my living room with it's feature rich entertainment possabilities. So far the uses mentioned are legal, well aside from this DMCA making it illegal to circumvent copyright.

My POV is simple. MS designed and gave us a game console with quite a bit of power and expandability. The mod community made this better and locked me into using the Xbox. I BUY games for it still to this day (The exception being if there is a PC port). I use my Xbox to play tunes when I dont feel like waiting 15 minutes for my winXP system to boot up and load all that garbage and do checks and stuff before the OS becomes usable.

Microsoft didnt fully "realize" the Xbox potential and underground groups brought that to light making something good better. Is there really anything wrong with that? I love mod chips and really believe they should stay. Modding Cars, Game consoles, houses pretty much everything is what people want, make it so.

(for comparison, look into the Car modding scene, it's HUGE. Now look at the Console mod... small due to litigation.)

Re:Not really a legitimate question...

[norminator]

Actually, no you can't burn a copy of a commercial, CSS-encrypted disc to a new disc. The section that would hold the CSS key on DVD-R's is not writeable, so you can copy the entire encrypted DVD image, but not the encryption key. That leaves you with a coaster. But you can mount the image on your hard drive and watch it.

I didn't think the DVD Jon stuff was so retarded just because it was a chance to show the MPAA/DVDCCA and the judicial officials of the world that CSS is not an effective encryption system.

The one that's retarded is the Kaleidescape debacle. [cepro.com] To sum it up, a company called Kaleidescape puts together a fantastic DVD ripper/server system. It is easy and simple to use, it's locked down so movies that are ripped can't be accessed by any non-Kaleidescape device, it stores bit-for-bit CSS-encrypted copies of the DVDs on the server, and only decrypts them in the player (a separate box connected by a network connection), just like any other DVD player does. And best of all, Kaleidescape was granted a license by the DVDCCA to use CSS in the player. Oh yeah, and Kaleidescape also gives you the option to bundle large movie collections preloaded on a system, thereby providing revenue for the MPAA. Pretty soon the DVDCCA realizes what the product is, and since the DVDCCA is partially made up of consumer electronics manufacturers who never thought to create such a great device, they tried to lay the smackdown on Kaleidescape, saying they violated the terms of the license... Even though the Kaleidescape system offers less for would-be "pirates" than any PC with a $30 DVD drive... Oh, and the whole system, in the beginning, had a base price of $27,000. These days a basic system can go for about $10,000, but that's still out of reach of the kid in his mom's basement copying his friends movies. All the while, the only "legitimate" competitors to Kaleidescape make DVD servers which are not locked down, and which require the end-user to install DVD Decryptor or libdvdcss themselves (but the software is already set up to automatically integrate with DVD Decryptor). So the DVDCCA goes after the legally-licensed company and legitimizes the ones using the actual "pirate" software. And now that Kaleidescape won the lawsuit, the DVDCCA is amending their license agreement to require DVD players to actually be physically holding the original DVD.

Now that is retarded. Take an innovative, easy-to-use product, which if it won mass acceptance and became a common everyday system, would revolutionize the home movie experience, and try to cripple it, thereby keeping home movie viewing in the stone age.

Re:Bogus question.

[dattaway]

but your Nintendo DOES have copyrighted software on it, even without a disk in the drive.

No sir! I now have an open source custom bootloader flashed on it. The first instructions the ARM processors run the uploaded program I installed. Lots of good people in the DSLinux community understood the basic hardware and enjoyed making a complete system from scratch. The ARM7 and ARM9 processors are well documented and so is the hardware on the DS. I don't see why it would be a FEDERAL offense for someone to write their own software. Maybe a judge somewhere will listen one day without taking money.

You are defending outright fraud

[spun]

How do you rebut the point that the terms of the contract are not disclosed when buying a console? Should one party have the right to enforce a contract that the other party has not agreed to, and doesn't even know about? That seems very authoritarian of you. It's almost as if you believe that anyone with money and power should be able to dictate terms unilaterally to those of us without. That's not really what you believe, is it?

If game console manufacturers business model depends on limiting your freedom to use the device you purchase, shouldn't this be stated more clearly? Especially when it goes against all expectations about what the sale of an electronic device means? But that would hurt their profits.

So really, this 'business model' that you are defending is based on misleading the consumer. You are defending outright fraud.