Englishman Convicted for Game Console Hacking

A 40-year-old Leicester man was sentenced for running a game console hacking business which, according to the prosecutors, facilitated copyright infringement.

Thomas Norwood ran a company called Modchip Fitters Ltd, which imported, sold and installed special electronic cards (chips) in Xbox and Nintendo Wii game consoles.

The practice is known in the gaming community as chip-modding, and involves soldering these modification chips onto the circuit boards with the purpose of thwarting restrictions which allow only software approved by the manufacturer to run.

Unlike jailbreaking iPhones, game console hacking requires considerably more technical skill and people able to do it generally charge money for it.

According to court records, Norwood had hundreds of customers around UK and abroad. In 2008, the Leicestershire Trading Standards Service seized £60,000-worth of electronic equipment that was linked to his business.

TMCnet reports that the modder pleaded guilty at Leicester Crown Court on November 9, 2010, and was sentenced late last week to a 12 month Community Order and a 2 month Curfew Order (7pm-7am). Monetary penalties will be decided during a later Proceeds of Crime hearing.

In UK it is illegal to chip-mod game consoles since 2003, when the EU Copyright Directive was enacted. The practice is considered a deliberate circumvention of copy protection systems.

In US, under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), it is also illegal to circumvent copyright protection mechanisms, although, no convictions have been recorded to date for hacking game consoles.

A recent case against a California chip-modder was dismissed last month over prosecution errors. The judge asked prosecutors to prove without a doubt the hacker knew the modified consoles were going to be used for copyright infringement.

Chip-modding advocates claim that people should be able to modify their own game consoles how they see fit, because they bought, not leased, the hardware device.

Under this theory, the purpose of chip-modding is to allow the running of custom games and applications, also known as "homebrew," which falls within the principles of fair use.

The same principle led the U.S. Copyright Office to add iPhone jailbreaking to the list of DMCA fair use exemptions last July.