GamesIndustry: This is a great day for consumers...at least, for Australian consumers. Basically, Sony sued Eddy Stevens for selling "mod chips" which get around the Playstation copy protection mechanism. The Australian High Court found that since the measures implemented by Sony didn't prevent copies being made of Playstation games, they only prevented them being played on the console, the mod chips weren't a device designed to circumvent copyright protection, which is illegal under Australian law.
Eddy Stevens had the backing of the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission, which is the only reason the legal battle made it to the high court. The ACCC argued that the mod chip should be legal because it allowed games imported from other regions to be played on the Playstation. A few years ago Australia introduced a "parallel importation" law which prevents IP owners from objecting to licensed goods imported from another country, where they may be cheaper. The ACCC argued that region encoding violated the parallel importation law, if not the letter then the spirit of the law.
I wrote about this back in 2003 for ZDNet Australia.
I'm with the ACCC on this one. Companies are always touting the benefits of globalisation and taking advantage of it whenever they can, yet they do things like region encoding which clearly works against globalisation.
Comments