Modchips and patents
First conviction under UK’s anti-modchip law. I personally found it to be very odd. The guy was selling XBoxes with a bigger hard driver full of pirated games — yet instead of nabbing him for massive copyright infringement, he is found guilty of installing modchips. Insane! There are a few cases where laws limit what citizens can do with their private property — e.g. in the US, one can’t modify one’s firearms to be full-automatic. Such a regulation makes sense because there are no legitimate uses for an automatic weapon (deer don’t wear flak jackets), and posession of such a weapon is a significant threat to other peoples’ lives. By contrast, a modded game console has many legitimate uses (playing imported and backed-up games, setting up a cheap Linux cluster, etc) and poses no threat to anyone or anything except for the bottom line of a couple of big corporations.
I am hoping that one day, Microsoft or Sony will bring suit against a purely legitimate user of mod chips — because then, I trust that they will lose, and modchips will finally cope out of the underground.
But while losing a modchip skirmish, the forces of Good scored a major victory on the patent front: the European Parliament rejected software and business-method patents 648-14. This is not a total victory; national patent offices in Europe can still grant software patents. However, at least there is no pan-European directive; and European MP’s are now aware that patent law is an issue of major public interest.
Interestingly, both Redhat and Sun came out against software patents (while many other traditional corporate supporters of open source, like IBM, HP, and Nokia, generally favor software patents — a position for which they aren’t criticized nearly as much as they should be).