Hide away that soldering iron, Nintendo is on to you crazy kids. The company has issued a press release "in support of" recent raids by US Immigrations and Customs Enforcement agents, which executed 32 search warrants in 16 states to weed out those responsible for the distribution of "illegal modification chips." Apparently this is the largest enforcement action taken against video game piracy, and Nintendo has been working hand in hand with the Department of Homeland Security to pull it off. Since April, Nintendo claims to have seized more than 91,000 counterfeit (er, "backup") Wii discs globally. Of course, the whole issue of whether mod chips, when used harmlessly to enable homebrew and backups, should be illegal in the first place is still a sticky issue (the DMCA seems to frown on the idea), but it looks like if you are indeed trading in the illicit stuff, Nintendo and the fuzz are hoping to track you down for a little chat.

Update: Looks like Wii modders aren't the only ones on the run. No console is safe!

Here's a new one on us. Instead of suing companies for infringing on its patents, like all the cool kids are doing, Media Rights Technologies has sent cease and desist letters to Apple, Microsoft, RealNetworks and Adobe for "actively avoiding" the use of its technology. According to MRT, the DMCA's language on copyright protection circumvention -- defined as "to descramble a scrambled work, to decrypt an encrypted work, or otherwise to avoid, bypass, remove, deactivate or impair a technological measure, without the authority of the copyright owner." -- requires those companies to use its product, since its X1 SeCure Recording Control technology has been proven to plug the "digital hole," and therefore allows them to uphold the DMCA. "We've given these four companies 10 days to talk to us and work out a solution, or we will go into federal court and file action and seek an injunction to remove the infringing products from the marketplace," says CEO Hank Risan. RealNetworks spokesman Matt Graves calls the letters "a rather novel approach to business development," and lawyers are calling the effort "out there" and "a play for publicity." We call it a riot, and while it's not likely to go far -- not even the far-reaching and vaguely worded DMCA is likely to hold this one up for long -- we're at least grateful to MRT for mixing things up a bit in the boring old tech lawsuit game.

It's roamed relatively unscathed for a few months now, but it appears that BackupHDDVD -- the app that helps bypass the AACS copy protection on HD DVDs -- has been hit with its first major setback, drawing a DMCA takedown notice and vanishing from its perch at SourceForge as a result. Speaking to Wired blog 27B Stroke 6, SourceForge parent company VA Software's General Counsel Jay Seirmarco revealed that the AACS's complaint centered on copyrighted cryptographic keys allegedly contained within BackupHDDVD, which he says was verified to be true, giving SourceForge reason to remove the software. He added, however, that SourceForge would be willing to host a version of BackupHDDVD that did not contain the keys in question. This course of events will no doubt be familiar to anyone's who's followed the FairUse4WM saga, in which Microsoft issued a similar notice demanding that the software be taken down from its host site. Of course, BackupHDDVD isn't the only bit of software that messes with the copy protection on HD DVDs, although, as of yet, it's main rival AnyDVD HD remains untouched and readily available, albeit for a price.

[Via Slashdot]

Ah, the day we've all been waiting for has finally arrived -- well, sort of. Yeah, it is still a bill, but it's a refreshing start on a long overdue amendment. While content guardians (we're looking your way, MPAA / RIAA) have done their fair share of beating around the issue and insisting that DRM-laced content was the only way to go, consumers haven't exactly been thrilled about such limitations since day one. In yet another glorious case of red and blue coming together for the good of mankind, Rich Boucher (D-Va.) and John Dolittle (R-Calif.) introduced a breath of fresh air they call FAIR USE, or Freedom and Innovation Revitalizing U.S. Entrepreneurship. The idea, of course, is to simply "make it easier for digital media consumers to use the content they buy" by amending the Digital Millennium Copyright Act; according to the duo, the DMCA simply "goes too far by dramatically tilting the copyright balance toward complete copyright protection at the expense of the public's right to fair use." Boucher further substantiates his case for the most down-to-earth politician of all time by suggesting that if the DMCA remains unadulterated, "individuals will be less willing to purchase digital media" due to the unacceptable restrictions that come along with it. We'd ask for an amen, but we don't want to set off any minor earthquakes.

[Thanks, Kevin M.]

We don't seeing anything with helping a man out, or cutting him a sweet deal if he picks up a bundle of goods, but apparently the MPAA isn't down with companies loading the DVDs that consumers purchase onto their iPods as a friendly convenience. In another round of studios forcing consumers to purchase content multiple times for no good reason at all, Paramount Pictures has filed a lawsuit against the all but helpless Load 'N Go Video, which provided customers picking up an iPod and a few DVDs with a converting service to get flicks onto their handheld as a thank you for their business. According to the suit, the actual ripping of the DVD is illegal under the almighty DMCA, making the entire process illegal, fair use or not. Evidently selling millions of copies of Mission: Impossible III isn't good enough, as it appears that customers will be asked to shell out multiple times for the same (admittedly subpar) content. While pirating copies for personal gain is certainly aggravating the law, transcoding content for personal use sure seems harmless to us, but you'll have an exceedingly difficult time convincing Hollywood of that.

Legal analysis courtesy of Scott McMillan, Zachary Sharpe, and Trevor Adler of The Columbia Science and Technology Law Review.


The press and blogosphere have recently been abuzz over programs that remove copyright protections technologies known as Digital Rights Management (DRM) from purchased or rented media files. These DRMs restrict a consumer's use of the media – morality notwithstanding, they are the only thing preventing you from copying your music or video files onto all of your friends' computers. DRM-stripping programs remove such restrictions from the file (and typically violate your terms of service agreement, to say the least). In September, Microsoft filed suit against the hacker(s) responsible for one such DRM-stripping program, FairUse4WM, purportedly created by the now notorious Viodentia. Other such programs reportedly target the DRM protections of the iTunes Music Store and AllOfMP3, among others. What will become of Microsoft's lawsuit? What does this have to do with "fair use" and the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA)? What follows is a brief overview in two parts. In the first, we'll discuss current issues surrounding fair use with regard to the DMCA, and in the second we'll approach Microsoft's legal actions against Viodentia for FairUse4WM.

What fair use is, and how it works alongside the DMCA

"Fair use" is a doctrine under US copyright law that permits certain acts that might otherwise be considered copyright infringement. Copyright law gives authors the right to exclude others from their work, and can sometimes get in the way of the ultimate goal of copyright, which is to promote progress in art and science. The theory here is that without copyright protections, many artists and authors would be discouraged from distributing their work. The fair use exception allows copyright protections to remain in place while enabling consumers some degree of freedom in their use of purchased media. For example, it was generally understood that ripping CDs for personal use was legal because it fell under the fair use exception. However, fair use was dealt a serious blow with the enactment of the DMCA in 1998 and the widespread use of DRM protections. Indeed, fair use is not a defense to a DMCA claim.

Everybody's favorite far-reaching, possibly free speech-infringing law, the DMCA, is being put to use again for busting down on Divineo, a seller of mod-chips. Sony has slapped them with a $9 million lawsuit for selling the chips, along with HDLoader, which allows a PS2 to rip games and store them to a HDD for "jukebox" access. Until recently, Divineo was selling a whole bevy of Xbox, Xbox 360, PSOne, PS2, GameCube and other system mod-chips. They've also got other slightly more innocuous devices like that snazzy 4GB DS-Xtreme which gives you homebrew action on the DS without any hacking. Though, we're not sure such attempts of theirs at semi-legibility will do much to appease Sony. There's no official response from Divineo yet, but since they're a France-based company, it seems like the best Sony can do with the DMCA is get them out of the states. The last time we saw the DMCA in action like this, a trio of Xbox modders were facing up to 5 years of prison time, but they ended up with just a few years of probation, and one of 'em got slapped with 6 months of home detention, Martha Stewart-style. They also had to pay $2,600 to the ESA, so it really seems like Sony has decided to up the stakes for Divineo's offenses. Interestingly, while those Xbox modders were loading cracked games galore onto the boxes of customers, Divineo only sells tools that make piracy possible -- interesting indeed.