Playstation mods legal, says High Court By Sam Varghese
Melbourne Age October 6, 2005 - 12:35PM
Sydney small business owner Eddy Stevens has won a four-year legal battle against Sony, with the High Court ruling that modding of PlayStation consoles is legal.
The decision has far-reaching implications for consumers and the manufacturers of computer games.
Mod chips allow gamers to ignore manufacturers' regional coding systems and run cheaper games - made for markets outside Australia - on their consoles.
All six judges of the High Court held that widely used mod-chips are legal and that playing a game on a consumer's machine does not constitute an illegal copy.
In 2001, Sony filed a suit against Stevens who was running one of many businesses in Australia that supplied and installed mod-chips, which rendered Sony's regional coding ineffective.
Nathan Mattock, a senior associate of Gadens Lawyers who acted for Stevens, said the decision would be good for consumers.
"It will increase competition in the games market and also among games retailers in Australia, which should result in lower prices," he said.
Mattock said the team acting for Stevens had been confident of winning as they had handled similar cases in the past.
The firm successfully represented the Australian Video Retailers Association against Warner Home Video in a Federal Court case. Also a test case, it dealt with the issue of copying and explored the nature of the technology used for playing DVDs.
"Fortunately for the consumer, the court has prevented a multinational corporation from further eroding consumer rights," Mattock said.
In July 2002, the Federal Court, after analysing the way in which the PlayStation console operated, concluded that playing a copied game did not involve breach of copyright.
Sony appealed against the ruling in September 2002. The full bench upheld the appeal on July 30, 2003.
Following this decision, other modders shut down operations.
Stevens' lawyers then went to the High Court.
The High Court appeal was based on two issues. The first was whether the "mod-chip" bypasses the digital rights management on the console and breaches Section 116A of the Australian Copyright Act.
The court accepted Stevens' argument that while making a pirated copy of a game is illegal, playing a game by using a mod-chip is not.
The second issue was whether playing a game - which requires copying data to a console's Random Access Memory or RAM - breaches copyright when the manufacturer does not specifically grant a licence to copy this data to RAM.
The court held that by merely playing a Playstation game, the consumer was not making an illegal copy of the game.
Asked for his reaction, Stevens said; "Geez, news travels fast, doesn't it? Well, you can say I'm pretty happy with the verdict."
"We always figured we would win because we were in the right," he said. "The whole point is, what we are doing helps consumers."
Stevens said he would now restart the modding business which is a small part of his operations.
A spokesman for the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission, which stepped in at the Federal Court level as a friend of the court and argued that regional coding was detrimental to consumer choice, said it would comment after going through the judgement.
A spokesman for Sony Computer Entertainment said any statement would have to come from the UK operation.
Full judgement: http://www.austlii.edu.au/au/cases/cth/high_ct/2005/58.html