US authorities raid mod-chip shops

[eppur_se_muova]

Source: Australian IT

Correspondents in Washington | August 02, 2007

US FEDERAL customs agents have raided more than 30 businesses and homes in 16 states, looking for devices that allow pirated video games to play on Wiis, PlayStation 2s and Xboxes.

The alleged sale and distribution of illegal modification chips and copyright circumvention devices for the popular consoles and others included 32 search warrants in 16 states, said the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
***
Redmond, Wash.-based Microsoft Corp. issued a statement applauding ICE's efforts to reduce piracy and protect the gaming industry's intellectual property. A company spokeswoman would not divulge Microsoft's individual piracy losses.

The raids were conducted in: California, Florida, Hawaii, Idaho, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Texas and Wisconsin.

Read more: http://www.australianit.news.com.au/story/0,24897,22175627-15306,00.html

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Glad to see DOJ has enough resources to protect the profitability of its corporate masters. It would be too bad if something more urgent were to distract them from this crucial mission. Let's just hope that nothing bigger than VIDEO GAMES shows up on their radar screens.

[Buzz Clik]

1. I can't decide whether or not this is more important than check points for seatbelts.

[Akoto]

2. As someone in the games industry ...

I have to admit that I'm a bit biased on this subject. It pleases me to hear that these businesses were shut down.

Fact is, if I choose to market my skills through a certain company, that's the company I'd like to see selling (and, yes, profiting) from the product. Not some pirate bootleggers.

[merwin]

3. Many people legally use these devices to run homebrew and backups.

As someone with a child, I know how destructive they can be with discs.

Would you be pleased if all of the DVD backup software distributors were also raided and shut down?

[Akoto]

4. To answer that, I point you to the original article ...

"The alleged sale and distribution of illegal modification chips and copyright circumvention devices ..."

Illegal is illegal. Clearly, if these locations were distributing approved devices for legal use, they would not have been raided by customs agents across sixteen states. That is a very large dragnet.

[merwin]

5. The DMCA is a crock of shit that makes playing DVD's on Linux illegal as well.

Both are a violation of the same DMCA provision. These so called illegal modification chips and copyright circumvention devices have a number of uses, one of which happens to be illegal.

Just because it's a law doesn't mean that it's not there to screw people who are doing nothing wrong.

I personally put on in my XBOX so I could run XBMC (XBOX Media Center), a homebrew project. Microsoft didn't provide a way to "legally" run 3rd party applications, so people came up with modchips to do so.

I suppose you think bittorrent should be illegal as well, since it allows for people to illegally download movies and music.

[Akoto]

6. My problem there would be with the illegal downloads.

In many cases, things being illegally shared are taking money directly from the pockets of contributing professionals. One aspect of the gaming industry I've previously participated in, pen and paper, suffers fairly rampant sharing. The writers often earn the bulk of their profits not from the original contribution, but from future royalties based upon sales. If things are being shared for free, sales aren't happening, and the artist isn't getting the payments he's rightfully owed. It's tough to make a decent penny in that venue, particularly considering the level of creative investment and work involved.

[merwin]

7. I'm not saying people should be allowed to pirate things.

I'm just saying that they're going after the wrong things. Why go after things with legal uses, when you can go after the real problem... the distributors of the illegal games & software and/or the people uploading illegal content to bittorrent sites.

[Solon]

10. You have no clue what happened, do you?

The MODIFICATION is what was made illegal, not whether it was used for illegal purposes. To give an example, I run Linux, and wanted to play encrypted(Commercial) DVDs. So I broke the law(DMCA) to use my device of preference the way I want to, as a DVD player, by downloading DeCSS. Now, the fact that just simply playing DVDs, on any device capable of it, is perfectly legal, is frankly irrelevant. I had to circumvent the DVD copy protection and doing so is not legal. So the law in question is a bad law, simply because it prevents people from engaging in legal activities that hurt no one.

[Henny Penny]

16. I'd have a bit more sympathy if the price of these games wasn't

so astronomical. They seem to be a total ripoff.

[Ian David]

8. We can safeguard The Wii but not the voting machines? WTF?? n/t

[Spiffarino]

9. Grow up, dammit!

You know profit is far more important than democracy!

:sarcasm:

[Indenturedebtor]

11. Well the voting machines aren't broken

They're being routinely hacked exactly as intended :roll:

[LIVESIPOG]

12. Im not surprised. These are big companies wanted dollars

Im not surprised.  The game makers have a lot of money , and a
lot of clout.  A great example is I have a neighbor who's
relative use to work as a Loan Officer for a Mortgage
Brokerage here in the states, and quit when it was discovered
a lot of fraud was being done by the owners of the company.
This relative reported what was witnessed to the FBI and the
State Mortgage Fraud Task Force.  These agencies were given
file names, locations and what exactly the frauds were.
Changing bank statement amounts before faxing them to the
Underwriters at the banks for approval so they would look much
better, forging signatures, adding fraudulent content to the
application and having an appraiser who would write appraisals
for anything they wanted so they could get the loan, and sell
it right away to a bank or Mortgage lender. 
Was anything done?? You bet your life it WASNT!  Apparently,
since the Mortgage Broker was a small fish,  he wouldnt bring
the media attention agencies crave these days, and nothing is
going to be done.  In other words, its fine to break all the
laws and screw families and even lenders over, as long as your
a small fry. 
Last I heard, he is still unemployed, and they are still
ripping off people everyday.  Gotta love American justice.    

[comtec]

13. Ironically, the only reason I want a mod chip is so I can play PAL and NTSC games

without having to buy a second fucking unit!
I haven't gotten around to getting my old PS2 modded yet mainly because the mod failure rate is a little too high, like 20%+.
My thoughts are simply I don't care for the PAL/NTSC difference in units. It is easy enough to make one Disc, and have a scaler on board. In fact the TVs here all handle NTSC signal fine.

The reason the raids happened is because, as earlier stated rather poorly, the units were being used to play illegal downloads. The reality is whatever the amount of perceived loss in revenue it's still rather minimal compared to the actual income generated by fresh game sales. Some times people do this because they literally can't get a certain game because it's to old, or it was rare at the time (few productions, and fewer buyers).

Until the Wii came along I used to use the various NES/SNES/Genesis emulators to play the old Megaman games and the MANY Final Fantasy games that were fan subs because they simply were NOT AVAILABLE!

Oh well. Se la vie

[TheWatcher]

14. And yet Criminals still run the country, Impeachment is a fantasy, and our soldiers are still

dying.

But THANK GOD we are being protected from modded PS2's.

:eyes:

[Snazzy]

15. My brain nearly leaked out my ear tonight

Dateline did an "investigative" report on ipod theft. They had a hugely expensive rv heavily wired for HD that they drove around to many states to "sting" the ipod perps. Further expenditures included a custom ipod installation CD (which they noted they paid $40K for); it phoned-home NBC to let them know where the ipod went. Something like 30 ipods they planted to be stolen. And of course, should hardly mention, the 100's of hours of setting up all of this, and filming the nearly exclusively 17 year-old ipod thieves. Let's leave an ipod in the middle of a mall and see if anyone returns it--basically their paradigm. Oh, and please do throw it in prime time for most of an hour I guess.

Granted I mostly avoid TV, but WTF? :wtf: :wtf: :wtf:

Pretty sure I read here today that there are 190,000 missing weapons that we distributed in Iraq. A place where we are spending $200K a minute and people are killing our guys with... yeah, wait for it... the missing weapons. No one really knows where the money goes.... Oh a bridge collapsed today and people died, well clearly the answer is "fuck government", drown it in that bathtub while expanding our empire!

Got an attorney general who lies to us and likes to (he giggles while lying to Congress), whom with the combined superpower-like forces of Cheney (he looks away while lying to THE MOST IMPORTANT PERSON EVER, Larry King (er, 'cept Oprah)) and our fabulous Supremes, it's become the new cool (I'd say "chic" but we don't want to offend our buddies, you know who) to endorse shit like torture, removing both Habeas Corpus and Posse Comitatus, and to enjoy spying on each and every american without a warrant. Bill of Rights? Screw it, they are the Right. The constitution has never been so bent between claims of executive privilege and turning the justice department into a one stop shop for minority voter purges. No one in the White House has ever met a crony the American people can't spiff up to the tune of millions or billions each, especially if they happen to be Saudis or represent anyone in the oil business. Hell we even got a diaper wearing compassionate conservatives that you can tune into on cspan, when they are not busy with their madams....

Well anyway, whoever here who has been saying investigative journalism is dead is soooooo clearly wrong. Wrong! Wrong I tell you. It's just resting, kinda warming up. Baby steps, aim for the moon and all of that. Wait till ya see what Murdoc has in store for WSJ, finally we will go deep! Meantime I hear NBC will have a special next week on hair tonics---lotta pissed bald guys out there, especially at NBC. They've got you covered.

Oh and mod chips? Evil! Expect blanket coverage.

[keroro gunsou]

17. bah!

i've got a modded PS1, and the only reason i had it modded was to play some japanese games.

region encoding is a joke and really needs to be done away with.