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Comment by littlestymaar | Hacker News Reader

> I suspect the actual physical hardware modification line is the one that most users are going to be unwilling to cross unless they are in the "Download a Car" crowd.

Idk, hardware modification of the first Playstation that allowed to play ripped games became mainstream very quickly in my country (France) and you could even go to some shops that sold Playstations to get it done. It only stopped when it was made openly illegal.

“I paid for this shit, I do what I want with it” is a very powerful sentiment (and a legitimate one actually: corporation adding “Digital Right Management” system to deprive people from their property right is dystopian as hell).

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By the time I got around to booting "backup" discs in that system, it could be done just with a dongle (like a GameShark type thing, maybe? Can't remember) although unlike a soldered-in mod chip, it required booting with any genuine game and quickly swapping to any copy of another game, using a spring to defeat the lid sensor thus avoiding a subsequent check for a genuine disc.

Not quite as convenient, but lack of invasive mod was the tradeoff.

> hardware modification of the first Playstation that allowed to play ripped games became mainstream very quickly

I remember this. Chip on chip iirc. The period is stored in my memory because it was also when DVD media first broke the $1/disc barrier. It wasn't very good media at $1 per but exciting times nonetheless.

Okay, but in that PlayStation example you DIDN'T pay for the games, but still decided to 'do what you want'. How is that legitimate but attempting to prevent it not?

Because you also prevent legitimate uses of such "feature", such as playing games you purchased legitimately from other regions, as that "feature" also allows to defeat region-locking. As for why not just buy those same game versions released in your region, some games were just never released in some regions. Another common use is running legitimate homebrew software.

So logically, it isn't modding/unlocking the console itself that's illegitimate. But it can be used for certain illegitimate actions, yes (along with legitimate ones).

This, or you want to have a backup of your disk because your younger brother isn't especially gentle, or you want to have a second copy of your game so that you can have one at Dad's home and one at Mom's.

And these use-cases aren't only legitimate, in France they are even legal and in exchange we pay a tax whenever we buy a media storage device (Taxe sur la copie privée).

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