Federal modchip raid spans 16 US states

by Ludwig Kietzmann { Aug 2nd 2007 at 7:55PM }

The video game industry's war against enemy solders continues unabated, with 16 U.S. states recently becoming legal battlegrounds for federal customs agents working under the Immigration and Customs Enforcement group. According to the New York Times, more than 30 businesses and homes were raided in search of illegal modification chips and far more sinister sounding copyright circumvention devices. The groups and individuals targeted are suspected of importing, installing, distributing and smuggling devices which allow pirated games to be played on PlayStation 2, Wii and Xbox consoles.

The pirates asking where all the ROM has gone should cast their functional eyes toward Nintendo -- the company notes in a separate press release that it fully supports the sinking of illegal chips. "Nintendo and its developers and publishers lost an estimated $762 million in sales in 2006 due to piracy of its products," said Jodi Daugherty, senior director of anti-piracy at Nintendo of America. "Nintendo's anti-piracy team works closely with law enforcement officials worldwide to seize mod chips and counterfeit software. Since April, Nintendo has seized more than 91,000 counterfeit Wii discs globally."

Friendlier seas won't be found with Nintendo's competitors either. Last month, Sony promised to "aggressively pursue" PS3 pirates and in May, Microsoft gave modified systems the boot from its Xbox Live service.

[Thanks to everyone who sent this in. Commence "eye patches are for night vision" commentary.]

Tags: BloodyPirates, ICE, Modchips, Mods

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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

Hard Gay @ Aug 2nd 2007 8:03PM

And mod chips became illegal when?
Boo hoo Nintendo, like you were the only publisher to lose money to pirates.

Do not region lock your hardware and there would be no real reason to mod.

Captain Jody Anthony XVIII @ Aug 2nd 2007 8:07PM

i was wondering how long it would take for people that comment to focus only on nintendo and not on sony or microsoft (even though they also agressively go after pirating), but I seriously wasn't expecting it to be the very first comment.

Hard Gay @ Aug 2nd 2007 8:16PM

Saysaysay....Hard Gay focused on the Plumber because they were specifically mentioned in the article complaining about money.

Complaining....wwwwwhhhhhhhooooooooo

josh @ Aug 2nd 2007 8:36PM

ahaha, hard gay! bravo.

josh @ Aug 2nd 2007 8:37PM

oh and by the way, i was bravoing the fact that there is someone on here who is posting as Hard Gay, not at the content of his post. if you don't know what hard gay is, look on youtube, it's amazing

Patrick @ Aug 3rd 2007 12:07AM

ehhhhhh.... not that funny imo but on topic, i dont think they
'lost" any money because they neverr intended to buy it

dark54555 @ Aug 3rd 2007 9:04AM

I think Law of the Game answers the "illegal" question:

http://lawofthegame.blogspot.com/2007/08/customs-raids-mod-chip-makers.html

razer @ Aug 2nd 2007 8:08PM

Only in America.. If they tried to pull this sh*t in other places they would get the middle finger.

Good to see ICE being used as it was intended. Screw the terrorists, illegal's, etc and go after the greatest threat to america MODDERS!! LMAO. It's all about the money, it's more important than you or I or freedom or religion.

Special thanks to the DMCA and Patriot Act!! Without you we wouldn't be able to stick more American's in jail because the billionaires only get to have marble floors instead of gold.

FM @ Aug 2nd 2007 8:18PM

Thanks America. You fucked up.

nevets @ Aug 2nd 2007 8:25PM

How would you like it if you spent months on a piece of software which in the end was only purchased by one person and spread to thousands of others?

Wii60 @ Aug 2nd 2007 8:37PM

I'd feel cheated. It'd almost be as bad as losing my legal and moral right to backup from an inferior distribution medium and play imported games.

sheppy @ Aug 2nd 2007 8:49PM

Okay, seriously? I created a VST vocoder for many programs (about four years ago). Charged a whopping $10 for it. Sold ten, over 13,000 downloaded a patch for it....

I have a modchip in my Wii because I was one of those "worthless people" in Nintendo's eyes who likes to import games. Apparently I'm to be held on trial instead of Perrin Kaplan when she started bragging about Riigion Frii.

Meanwhile, when my HP does it's typical "oh no, it's poop again" routine every 6-8 months, I have to be on a phone with Microsoft for 4-5 hours just so they can verify my XP copy is legit. Several software packages need verification dongles so as I'm switch between programs, I'm switching and installing licensing dongles. And my copy of Photoshop? Hell, Adobe is such bastards about their whole process it's much easier just to crack my software rather than install it.

And the benefit? All anti-piracy methods have EVER achieved is making the product more inaccessable to the consumer. Pirates won't be slowed down. This phantasy world doesn't exist. So what do they do? Companies make up an astronomical number to make things seem worse than they are. Example? Nintendo's numbers. There is NO conceivable way they know how much they lost. So they take number of sales versus number of expected sales. When things don't sell as well as expected, they take the difference and call it loss due to piracy, not disappointing sales. This number only goes up, so when something like Mario Party 8 exceeds expectations, this is not reflected in Nintendo's bottom line. Also, they still consider ROM DLs as loss to piracy, as if I can walk into Walmart and buy Uniracers.

So keep in mind, these numbers always have been and will continue to be skewed to make things seem worse. I mean, hell, remember all that money lost to Napster with the decreasing sales? Those figures came from the sales of cassette tapes. CDs were actually on an upswing at the time.

Hard Gay @ Aug 2nd 2007 9:22PM

Wow!!!

Sheppy, you are the man. Hard Gay loves you...
Sheppy....fffffffoooooooooooo

You are exactly right, no matter what they do, the pirates (I know some) are allready a step ahead.

And the losses are just shots in the dark.

DWells55 @ Aug 2nd 2007 9:26PM

Cracking down on the illegal sale and redistribuition of pirated games is 100% fine by me. But cracking down on mod chips themselves is something I disapprove of. I've been considering modding my Wii and 360 for the sake of legitimate backups of my own games. Why? I have a younger brother in my house I share my consoles with. However, he absolutely can't be trusted to handle a game properly. As it stands right now, every time he wants to play a game, I have to be the one to remove the current game from the console and replace it with a new one so nothing gets damaged.

Consumers deserve the right to have backups of their property, especially when that property is data on a reasonably fragile medium. Unless manufacturers want to allow us to run backups, it shouldn't be illegal for me to modify hardware I purchased with a chip I purchased to play copies of games I purchased.

Mr Khan @ Aug 2nd 2007 9:42PM

I agree with DWells and sheppy, the mod chips can actually increase sales by eliminating region boundaries, and its probably used for that as much as it is pirating

Of course Nintendo's always been death on pirates, it was the #2 reason against using optical media at all in the N64 days, and against using a common optical format in the GC days (#1 being EAD's aversion to load times of any kind)

The DRM Demon abounds, sadly.

Mr Khan @ Aug 2nd 2007 9:49PM

Given that their fear of piracy helped prompt them to take the limited, arcane storage mediums through 2 generations, DRM has probably hurt Nintendo a lot more than it helped

N64 CD, the 5th generation champion in a paradise of a DRM-free alternate world...

Evan @ Aug 2nd 2007 8:26PM

I wonder if the reason casual games get so much love from Nintendo, and do so well against hardcore games on the sales charts, is because casual gamers tend to buy their games, while hardcore gamers are more likely to pirate their games.

Especially on the PC... consider how "The Sims" out-sells the big FPS franchises on the PC. Over half the FPS gamers I've met pirate their games. Therefore, the game sales don't reflect the number of people playing the games. But everyone I know who plays The Sims (besides being girls) own a legitimate copy of the game!

CJC @ Aug 2nd 2007 8:27PM

Please tell me that the people posting these first few comments aren't so ignorant as to think the government only deals with one thing at a time.

Sweet zombie Jesus, people. Just be happy that for every pirate busted, a little more money is saved, and it can be put toward the games you love.

AoE @ Aug 2nd 2007 8:44PM

"Just be happy that for every pirate busted, a little more money is saved, and it can be put toward the games you love."

If you believe that, then you're even more loopy than the folks who think the government is capable of only one action at a time.

minus_273 @ Aug 2nd 2007 8:30PM

insert generic insult about america here
insert generic comment about bush and patriot act here
insert generic gripe about immigrations and CUSTOMS having other things to do here
insert generic 13yr olds anger about not being able to steal games here

you dont need to read any more comments.

DESU @ Aug 2nd 2007 10:37PM

its not that simple.

SirRoxen @ Aug 2nd 2007 8:33PM

Can't stop us, gl feds.

hvnlysoldr @ Aug 2nd 2007 8:41PM

I shall commence with the pirates wore eye patches for night vision commentary thank you very much Ludwig. Finally posting it in every topic about pirates, bugs, patches, and mods or comments veering towards them pays off. I would like to thank Mythbusters for proving it.

Massmass @ Aug 2nd 2007 8:43PM

I don't think many developers/publishers would actually lose as much money as they say they do if pirates didn't exist. Certainly, from a technical aspect they are losing money by having people pirate games. However, that's assuming that if each pirate didn't steal the game that they'd go and actually buy it new. I'd say only 20% of all games pirated would actually be purchased if they weren't available illegally, and only half of that would be games bought new. Used games only help the local economy, not the developers/publishers. I'd be willing to bet they lose more money from USED game stores/sales than pirates. That's for consoles. For PC software, the developers/publishers are losing a lot more money to prolific piracy, but no one cares nearly as much about that...

FrankTheCrank @ Aug 2nd 2007 8:43PM

Thanks Nintendo, you just confirmed that modding the Wii actually works.

I'll be on the lookout for a modchip for my Wii. And backup procedures.

And this whole thing with Government and Big Business, it's all getting a little too Matrix like for me. As our brothers die on the battlefield for a barrel of oil.

Neebs @ Aug 2nd 2007 8:45PM

Mod chips are not illegal, fools.

hvnlysoldr @ Aug 2nd 2007 8:54PM

Ahh but selling copyright circumvention devices are illegal.

sheppy @ Aug 2nd 2007 8:58PM

hvnlysoldr, does your PC have a disc burner of any kind?

HOLY SHIT! COPYRIGHT PROTECTION CIRCUMVENTION DEVICES DETECTED! GET'EM!

sheppy @ Aug 2nd 2007 8:56PM

Every PC game I own I pirated first. Why? Never know which games work and which ones don't. I mean, hell, I've had a game refuse to play for me once just because my D: drive was not my DVD-ROM drive but instead hard drive 2 of 3. How retarded is that? And can I take that copy back into Best Buy and say "Yeah, this game won't play on my computer due to draconian anti-piracy measures" and get my money back? Nope, I'm just stuck staring at a $50 that won't work because my computer doesn't have the drive lettering their programmers thought it should.

hvnlysoldr @ Aug 2nd 2007 9:06PM

Yes. They should stop the anti-piracy and focus on the real threat. Ninjas. They're the cause of the world's problems and scapegoat pirates from behind the scenes.

sheppy @ Aug 2nd 2007 9:16PM

But Ninjas simply don't exist...

*hides Wakazashi*

Nox @ Aug 3rd 2007 9:11AM

You know you can change your drive lettering right?

Abscissa @ Aug 3rd 2007 3:21PM

"You know you can change your drive lettering right?"

Why should he have to?

rokubungi @ Aug 2nd 2007 9:18PM

since cd's have a !COPYRIGHT BIT! wouldn't bypassing that also count as circumventing copy protection..

why not? early cd ripping programs would NOT let you rip music from a cd unless you checked a box saying that you held the RIGHTS (everyone knows that the studios own all the rights to the recordings) to the information on the cd you were ripping. but now it's common practice unless you like buying the music a second time on itunes.

movie industry: pirates WILL RIP movies from dvd/bluray/hddvd regardless of the copy protection method. but very few will buy your next gen hd hdd portable movie players if they can't move or convert content to them from media that they already 'own'.
and very few will set up a 30 hour batch to convert movies with industry standardized tools unless they already do so with more 'unsavory' tools.

Hard Gay @ Aug 2nd 2007 9:26PM

Saysaysay....stop global warming...become a Pirate.

Pastafarians have a beer volcano in their heaven.
Pastafarians have a stripper factory in their heaven.

Come, be touched by his noodly appendage.

Pirates...dirty men in fancy, smelly clothes...
oohhhkkkaaayyyyy

blackbird @ Aug 2nd 2007 9:32PM

You know, if they didn't region lock it, we wouldn't bother to mod it. Most people just want to get games from another region before it's released here, or if it's ever released here.Not to break copyrights. Now, it would be nice to get a Uk copy of strikers and play it on my American wii, but I can't do that because of the lock.

It's the same story with DRM on music. DRM doesn't work. They think by adding DRM, people won't file share because they can't, but that just makes them want to file share even more. If they'd just let people have music free of DRM, im sure more people will adopt it rather than file sharing.

Alex McKee @ Aug 2nd 2007 10:10PM

Everybody loves the modchip. It's a terrific athlete.

mike @ Aug 2nd 2007 11:29PM

test

BananaBoat @ Aug 2nd 2007 11:38PM

Nintendo is going hard gay after the modchip because they know each NES rom you play on your modified Wii, is a rom you might otherwise have purchased to play on their virtual console. It was a joke from the beginning to think that we would pay AGAIN for the same games we already payed for years ago. Atleast on Xbox Live Arcade, the games are given the HD treatment. On Virtual Console, the games are just the original forms, no changes.

This pisses me off to no end. Almost as much as Sony suing Lik-Sang into oblivion pissed me off. Now my only legal means of importing games is Play-Asia, which prices their games so much higher than Lik-Sang did that it's no longer economically feasable for me to purchase many imported games.

Nintendo, Microsoft, take a hint; Put out a region free (game only) patch for your consoles, and in one swoop kill off the appeal of a modchip (the appeal that is legal. Obviously the "Backup"

aristokrat @ Aug 3rd 2007 3:55AM

I have Gamefly, and I won't even rent most Wii games because of their terrible controls. I don't want to have to keep my arm locked in position so that I'm not constantly turning in COD3 and I'm getting tired of constantly timed (yet arbitrary) slashes in Zelda and POP (I look like I'm having a seizure fighting enemies, not some refined warrior). I seriously thought my chip was a waste until my 360 died (for the third time), and only then did I start wasting DVD-R's on my Wii.

Curmeo @ Aug 3rd 2007 6:01AM

one of the reasons people mod their systems is to play import games. there where i love Blu-ray. region free gaming and a much better movie region code system than DVD: one of the many benefits of owning a format.

Ihar `Philips` Filipau @ Aug 3rd 2007 7:31AM

If they are against mods - they they should release their games with open cheat codes.

So that I will not be ruining my experience of games because of senseless and pointless stuff like boss fights. Or lack of load/save functionality.

I use R4 for DS - solely because it gives me more control over how and when I play.

And honestly I was already looking into Wii mods - MP3:C comes inevitably with its boss fights and lack of load/save. Without cheats this is not going to be palatable. DS' MP:H with infinite health and missiles is really really good exploration action game.

KirbyMeister @ Aug 3rd 2007 10:57AM

Sick and tired of this "OMFG PIRAETZ R EVIL LULZ" BS. You're telling me, you've never scratched a disc? Ever? You must be handling your discs telepathically. Heck, just leaving a disc out in the open can scratch it from all the dust in the air. Now try having a kid or two trying to handle this fragile disc, shoving it into their Wii every time they wanna play. It's almost guaranteed, you're going to scratch up that disc really fast. Hell, at least cartridges work as long as the contacts don't wear out.

I find the DMCA's "circumvention == banned" approach extremely heavy-handed. There are plenty of legal reasons to circumvent copyright protections, just like there are plenty of legal reasons to use sharp cutting implements. It seems, in our fear of killing the market, we have willingly signed away useful freedoms.

Not to mention, that anyone using Linux or other free (as in freedom) software is considered a second-class citizen unable to play anything DRMd at all without circumventing the DRM. As far as I know, no DRM scheme supports Linux.