Guest post by “Federal authorities in the first-of-its-kind game-console-modding criminal trial abruptly dropped their prosecution Thursday, “based on fairness and justice.” Following procedural rulings made by the presiding judge in the aftermath of his 30-minute tirade yesterday, it emerged that a key witness, an employee of the Entertainment Software Alliance, had provided a pirated game to the defendant during the course of his investigation. As this detail had been known to the government for almost a week but had been withheld from the defense, prosecutors had no choice but to move for a dismissal.”
Wonder how they knew the game was pirated and not a backup? If he made it known that it was pirated, he should’ve went to jail for no other reason than being an idiot.
Backups don’t exist for console games. Regardless of why you cracked the console and DRM on the games you’ve still broken the relevant laws
Just because they’re written laws, doesn’t make them right.
http://www.dumblaws.com/
Well, we’re talking about two different laws here. One is violating the DMCA by modding a console. The other is piracy. If you take a game that you legally own and burn a copy of it, it is technically a copy and not a pirated game. Obviously, the prosecution considered the difference between a backup and pirated copy important enough for their case to make the distinction.
All I’m saying is that if I were using pirated games (and not backups) to test mods, I would certainly not advertise the fact that it was pirated. Sure, I might get in trouble for modding, but why make it worse for myself by introducing piracy into the mix?
If you bypass a copy protection mechanism to copy a video game disc *for any reason* then you violate the DMCA because “video game backups” is not on the very narrow list of exemptions.
And that is one of the biggests problems with the DMCA in general.
Gotta love how the Americans come up with ways to make perfectly legal activities (under Fair Use) illegal by adding another layer (breaking DRM) in front of / above the legal activity.
Here’s hoping the attempts to bring DMCA-like laws into Canada continue to fail.
The ESA investigator deliberately took a pirated game to the defendant’s house, so that he could test whether the modding worked. In doing so, he broke the same law that the defendant was charged under (the DMCA).
Actually this is one of the reasons why the judge went all Rambo on the government the day before the dismissal. Both the ESA witness and another witness from Microsoft openly admitted to wilfully breaking the DMCA, yet here they were testifying against someone else for doing the same thing. (The Microsoft employee admitted to having modded Xboxes himself when he was at college.)
So… federal undercover agents, prosecutors, three public defensors, all around a guy tampering some stupid game consoles… while on the other hand Prime ministers and Presidents wage wars based on blatant lies and their friends get fat bonus checks for building world wide economic crisis… world is really fck·up, man.
Where in the original article does it mention the ESA Employee providing the pirated disc to Crippen? It looked to me like a witness had recalled something else and the prosecution had failed to notify the defense of this new revelation.
Edited 2010-12-05 00:25 UTC
It doesn’t. It says that the ESA agent failed to mention that he saw Crippen insert a pirated game before the ESA agent was called as a witness. I guess Crippen’s lawyers were unaware of this, but isn’t this something Crippen should have told his lawyers anyway? I mean Crippen probably knew that was illegal at least, even if he didn’t know it was illegal to circumvent the drm in the xbox.