Messiah allows owners of PlayStation 2 consoles to play NTSC-standard games on PAL consoles and DVDs from any region. Sony is now expected to step up its fight against modding in other EU countries on the back of the British ruling.īack in 2002, Sony was awarded damages against Newport-based Channel Technology, which had been manufacturing the Messiah mod chip-the same chip that Bell was accused of selling. An Italian court ruled that console owners have the right to modify their hardware once they have bought it. Sony recently won a similar case in Belgium, but the company has also lost cases in Spain and Italy. "We are sending a clear message to manufacturers and distributors of mod chips throughout the PAL territories that we will continue to pursue legal action against them," said David Reeves, president of Sony Computer Entertainment Europe. This is the first time that Britain's copyright laws have been used to prevent the circumvention of copy protection. The court further found that the sale, advertising, use and possession of mod chips for commercial purposes is illegal. The court ruled that Bell had violated the European Union Copyright Directive, which became part of British law in 2003. Like many makers of consoles and DVD drives, Sony uses regional encoding that prevents its European hardware, based on the PAL television standard, from playing software from the United States or the Far East. Users could install these chips in their PlayStation 2, or PS2, console to play games imported from other parts of the world as well as pirated copies of games. Sony's case targeted David Bell, a British citizen who had been accused of selling some 1,500 mod chips.
The United Kingdom's high court ruled Wednesday that Sony's intellectual property rights were being violated by the production of modified chips, also known as "modding" and "chipping." Sony has won a landmark judgment against a man who sold modified PlayStation 2 chips that circumvented copy protection.
0 kommentar(er)
