Badges? We don't need .....

[richlevy]

From here.

LOS ANGELES — Federal authorities in the first-of-its-kind game-console–modding criminal trial abruptly dropped their prosecution here Thursday, “based on fairness and justice.”

It was the nation’s first jury trial to test the anti-circumvention provisions of the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act as applied to game consoles. The law makes it a crime to offer a product or service that circumvents a technological measure designed to protect copyright material. Each of the two charges carried a maximum five years.

So if I buy a piece of hardware, I have to accept an governor which artificially restricts the devices use. A fact which is not explicitly explained in the product packaging.

Could Ford or Chevrolet legally place a device on their wheels without informing their customers which would disable the vehicle if certain branded tires were not used ?

Witness No. 1, Tony Rosario, was an undercover agent with the Entertainment Software Association. He told jurors Wednesday that he paid Crippen $60 in 2008 to modify an Xbox, and secretly videotaped the operation. Rosario had responded to Crippen’s advertisement on the internet and met Crippen at his Anaheim house.

during his testimony, Rosario also said Crippen inserted a pirated video game into the console to verify that the hack worked. That was a new detail that helped the government meet an obligation imposed by the judge that very morning, when Gutierrez ruled that the government had to prove Crippen knew he was breaking the law by modding Xboxes. But nowhere in Rosario’s reports or sworn declarations was it mentioned that Crippen put a pirated game into the console. During the opening statements shortly before Rosario’s testimony, defense attorney Koren Bell told jurors that there would be no evidence of that kind.

So the undercover agent at the last minute makes a claim that suddenly meets the judges requirement to continue the case, without any proof, even though he had videotaped the operation. Way to go, Tony!

BTW, it appears that the defendant's lawyers were all court appointed.