According to a report on Ars Technica, France-based company Divineo, along with two other defendants, will have to cough up more than $9 million in damages for selling mod chips for Sony PlayStation consoles as well as HDLoader, an app that lets you rip and store games to a hard drive connected to a system. Selling the chips is in violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act because they break the console’s copy protection measures.
“Mod chips and HDLoaders are key elements in facilitating video game piracy because they allow people to play illegally copied games on illegally modified video game consoles,” said Ric Hirsch, Senior Vice President of Intellectual Property Enforcement for the ESA.
HDLoader is still plenty easy to come by, as are console mod chips, so I don’t know how much of a victory this is for the ESA. What I do know is that just reading this story makes me want to do dirty, illegal things to my consoles.
Mod chip seller hit with million-dollar damages [Ars Technica]