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Sony busts down mod-chip retailer with $9 mil. lawsuit
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.
