Mod Chips Legal In the UK 169
An anonymous reader writes "Good news out of the UK! Techdirt reports that an appeals court has overturned a lower court ruling and has now said that mod chips do not violate copyright laws. The case involved a mod chip seller, who imported mod chips for the XBox from Hong Kong and would sell the chips or mod the Xbox's himself. He was charged with copyright infringement and found guilty by a lower court. The appeals court has dismissed all charges, however."
Expect anti-modchip legislation in 3, 2, 1... (Score:4, Interesting)
Of course they don't violate ... copyright ... (Score:5, Interesting)
(I believe in Australia both are perfectly legal.)
Of course, what the law says, and what a sensible person would expect the law to say are often two completely different things. Where the law is too complex for the average person to understand, then there is something wrong with it. (Resists temptation to explain why all laws are wrong, complex or not.)
Re:Of course they don't violate ... copyright ... (Score:5, Interesting)
I understand why copyright infringement is illegal. What I don't understand is why facilitating copyright infringement is illegal. It's conceivable that somebody is coming to harm when copyright infringement occurs, but nobody necessarily comes to harm when facilitation occurs. If I'm not mistaken, mod chips potentially fall under the
I say potentially because mod chips can be used to play import games, which is a legal activity (the fact that Sony somehow managed to shut down Lik-Sang notwithstanding). I've long held the (totally unsubstantiated) belief that games console manufacturers deliberately tie together their region encoding and copy protection functions, where disabling one disables both, so that they can cry copyright infringement whenever somebody mods their console for the purpose of playing imports.
Re:This is ridiculous... (Score:4, Interesting)
The vendors and especially the software ones cannot have it both ways. It is either a sale or a rent.
It it is a sale it is subject to appropriate financial regime for sales (VAT, can be registered as a capital asset, depreciation, etc). Income from sales can be taxed in a different jurisdiction. Even if the sale has taken place in a "nasty taxation" place like UK, Scandinavia, New York, etc, all taxation can be done in a place with lax taxation like Ireland in the EU or Texas in the USA.
If it is a rent it cannot be depreciated and cannot count for capex. It is opex, period. Similarly, income from rent in nearly all countries in the world must be taxed locally. The usual tax evasion practices of big software and hardware vendors are outright illegal and forbidden by law.
So frankly, if it is licensed and the licensing contract is valid - come on, try to prove it. All the defendant needs to bring are the taxation statements of company X. If X wins it will lose its taxation regime.
Lose-lose.
Of course, laws might change. (Score:2, Interesting)
The EU is just preparing more and more ridiculous legislation. Prepare for impact
GNU/Linux on hardware *you* *bought*! (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Of course they don't violate ... copyright ... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:This is ridiculous... (Score:5, Interesting)
It's a bit more complex than that (Score:3, Interesting)
Copyright is different. A photocopier, a camera, a computer and in fact a brain,hand and piece of paper are all that are needed to violate copyright. These are all long established to be legal pieces of equipment. The same applies to contract law. If it was illegal to possess a piece of equipment that facilitated allowing you to break a contract, we would have to get rid of our brains as well as our computers.
You can get through your entire life without ever needing access to a rocket launcher or a gun, (My grandfather, a Methodist, was in a reserved occupation during WW1 and lived to 90 without ever so much as holding a shotgun), but it is now extremely difficult to get through life in a modern society without ever using a photocopier, camera, or a computer. Since a computer can be used to violate copyright or break a contract out of the box, it is hard to see how modifying it to change slightly the ways in which you could potentially do so would be illegal.