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The chips are down for Sony
After a four-year legal battle an Australian small businessman has come up trumps against Sony after the High Court ruled that installing mod chips in PlayStation consoles was legal. The chips…
Lawyers Weekly
After a four-year legal battle an Australian small businessman has come up trumps against Sony after the High Court ruled that installing mod chips in PlayStation consoles was legal. The chips allow gamers to bypass manufacturers’ regional coding systems and play cheaper games that have been made outside Australia.
The case looked at two factors: the legality of mod chips and the issue of copying games into the random access memory (RAM) of PlayStations. The question was whether playing a game, which requires information to be copied into the RAM, was breaching copyright if the manufacturer had not granted a licence to copy that data. The court held that playing a PlayStation was not creating an illegal copy.
“It’s been a long journey but it’s great to have an outcome,” Mattock said. “To have the High Court confirm what we believe is correct, and to help someone like Eddy Stevens, is very satisfying.
“Sony [and other manufacturers] may have to change the way they produce their machines. It might mean their strategy on how they attempt to protect their works will need to be completely changed.”
