EFF is trying to make console modding legal

The Copyright Office is holding hearings about exemptions to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is taking advantage of this by petitioning the office to make jailbreaking game consoles, tablets, and other devices legal.

Just last year the EFF successfully made a case to have smartphone jailbreaking included as an exemption to the DMCA, so there is precedent in place for this kind of thing. It’s worth noting that while installation of software not approved by the distributer was allowed, it was not made legal to produce or distribute tools for the purpose of jailbreaking.

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The statement from the EFF states,

“In the exemption requests filed today, EFF asked the Copyright Office to protect the "jailbreaking" of smartphones, electronic tablets, and video game consoles – liberating them to run operating systems and applications from any source, not just those approved by the manufacturer. EFF also asked for legal protections for artists and critics who use excerpts from DVDs or downloading services to create new, remixed works. These exemptions build on and expand exemptions that EFF won last year for jailbreakers and remix artists.

The DMCA is supposed to block copyright infringement. But instead it can be misused to threaten creators, innovators, and consumers, discouraging them from making full and fair use of their own property," said EFF Intellectual Property Director Corynne McSherry. "Hobbyists and tinkerers who want to modify their phones or video game consoles to run software programs of their choice deserve protection under the law. So do artists and critics who use short excerpts of video content to create new works of commentary and criticism. Copyright law shouldn't be stifling such uses – it should be encouraging them."

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If the EFF is effective in making this case, it would mean that modding a console would no longer be illegal, although using it to play a copy of a game that you do not own would still remain illegal. The Copyright Office holds these hearings in the spring. so we’ll have to wait awhile to find out if the EFF's proposed exemptions go through.

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