Petteri Pyyny
21 Jul 2004 13:28
British High Court has ruled that selling, advertising, possession for commercial use and even use of PS2 mod chips is illegal in the UK. The ruling was based on UK's implementation of the notorious EUCD legislation that UK implemented to its national legislation, virtually without consumer friendly amendments, back in October 2003. The European Union Copyright Directive legislation makes it illegal to sell or distribute tools that allow circumventing technical copy protection mechanisms.
The ruling was made against a Briton, David Ball, who sold 1,500 Messiah 2 PS2 mod chips in the UK. Mod chips are basically hardware modifications to games consoles that allow playing imported games, game backups, self-made software and, obviously, pirated games. Many Linux distributions and media player tools require mod chips to be installed in order to run the software.
Source: The Register