European Court: Modding consoles not necessarily illegal

Installing mod chips in consoles is not necessarily illegal according to a recent ruling of the European Court of Justice. The national court of every European country has to determine whether it's legal to install a modchip in each particular case.  When it's installed to make it possible to use homebrew software, the European Court has no objections. The court decided this in a case between Nintendo and the Italian console modder PC Box.

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Whether a modchip violates copyright laws depends for what purpose the chip is installed and the European Court ruled that national courts will have to decide in each case whether the modchips are install for homebrew software or facilitating piracy.

The outcome of each of these modchip related lawsuits will be mainly influenced by the question whether the mod chip was designed to facilitate playback of pirated copies. Amod chips to the European Court, every national court should investigate how often the mod chips are used to playback copyright protected content on a console.

In practice, most modchips are installed by gamers who want to play pirated games on their consoles.  The ruling now paves the way for game developers to distribute their game without a license from Nintendo but they'll have an audience that's limited to gamers that have a modchip which allows playback of  homebrew games.

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