It Might Soon be Cool to Jailbreak Your Consoles! It's totally cool to "jailbreak" an iPhone to get around its DRM. Apple may not like that, but the courts say otherwise, so it has to abide. Video game consoles? Less cool. But that could soon change. The reason the iPhone is exempt is because a few years back the Electronic Frontier Foundation successfully lobbied for its exemption from the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. It is now asking for the same courtesy to be extended towards other "smartphones, electronic tablets, and video game consoles", which would mean owners of such devices would be free to "run operating systems and applications from any source, not just those approved by the manufacturer". Jailbreaking of course already happens across all video game consoles, but if the EFF can win an exemption for them from the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, then this act won't be undertaken under the threat of lawsuits from the various platform holders, such as those that erupted in the wake of this year's PS3 Jailbreak affair. Indeed, the fallout from that mess is mentioned repeatedly by the EFF in its case, along with various claims that Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo's hardware protection measures are anti-competitive and are not in themselves a means to pirate games. It also gives big shot-outs to awesome sites like WiiBrew. Could the EFF succeed? Who knows. After its success with the iPhone you can't say it doesn't stand a chance! Source: kotaku
Well as it is now we are allowed to do so but they are allowed to remove us from their servers for doing so...
I hope this is passed. Microsoft and sony stop any 3rd parties from creating wireless game pads and many other stuff. I think once you buy your hardware you should be allowed to put whatever software you want on it legal wise and that you should be able to buy any device that is 3rd party that is cheaper. These companies want all the money and at times is a monopoly which is not fair for the public and small buisnesses that are trying to make a living.
This is great news i also really hope this gets passed if you buy something then its yours , It will make all the devs come crawling back out from under the woodwork and the console world will be so much better
A Bit of the submitted document make for very interesting reading although it it hell of a long document but heres a few samples https://www.eff.org/sites/default/files/filenode/2012_dmca_exemption_requests_no_appendix.pdf
If they can win this then as you guys stated, Devs, Coders, Modders, will all come back and probably blow the scene up with tons of emulators, browsers, Indie games and all kinds of goodies.
