Mod Chips Legal in Australia (again)
Unbelievably, the High Court of Australia has today ruled that mod chips are legal… again.
For those who don’t know the history of this case, here’s a very brief summary of the mod chip battle between small business owner, Eddy Stevens and the electronics giant, Sony.
The legal battle started in 2001, when Sony filed a suit against Stevens, and has been ongoing for four years. In 2002, the Federal Court ruled that mod chips were not in breach of copyright and therefore were legal. Sony appealed this decision and won their appeal, therefore making mod chips illegal. Stevens then appealed to the High Court, which unanimously ruled on Steven’s side and mod chips are now deemed legal again in Australia.
I can remember the first ruling in September 2002 where mod chips were deemed legal, there was almost a mad rush to get your console “chipped”. Then soon after the courts ruled on Sony’s side and all of a sudden everyone was worried that they now have a chipped console.
I found it amazing that back in 2002, Australia (possibly the only country in the world) could find that mod chips are legal. I still find today’s news amazing, but I can see the reasoning behind the latest ruling and Stevens’ lawyers did successfully argue the two issues in this case.
The first issue is whether mod chips circumvent a technological protection measure and therefore breach the Copyright Act. The second issue is whether the act of playing a pirated video game breaches the Copyright Act (playing a game requires data to be copied from the disk to the RAM of the console) where game makers didn’t granted a licence to copy the pirated data on to the RAM.
Steven’s argument for the first issue was that making a pirated copy of a video game was illegal, but using a mod chip to play a pirated video game wasn’t. His argument for the second issue was that people simply playing a video game didn’t mean they were making an illegal copy of the game on the console. The High Court ruled on Steven’s side on both issues and so mod chips are legal to use again.
Read the Full High Court Judgement in the case of Stevens v Kabushiki Kaisha Sony Computer Entertainment.
