Australia's High Court has over-turned a previous ruling against mod-chipping in Sony's favour, effectively legalising the chipping of Playstation consoles. Mod-chipping was banned under a previous ruling, successfully arguing that such meddling with the Playstation's aids those breaking copyrights by illegally duplicating games. Un-modded consoles cannot play copied games, nor indeed can they play games imported from other countries, because of region-encoding.

The high court ruled, it seems, on a technicality, concluding that the hardware mod-chips negate are not primarily copy protection devices, and are therefore not supported by existing copyright protection laws. The court decided that no copying can take place within the console, and therefore the hardware that blocks copied games cannot be considered a deterrent to copiers. Copying is still illegal, but the act of playing a copied disc is not, seemingly.

Sony's oft-derided region encoding is felt by many observers to have spelt the end of Sony's case, not only providing mod chips with a legitimate function but also getting the court's support by enabling free-trade which is otherwise restricted by the default nature of Sony's consoles. The court may have ruled against Sony because region-encoding is believed to inhibit and artificially keep prices high.

"It's a victory for consumers, but also for business people," a lawyer for mod-chipper Eddy Stevens (whom this case surrounds) commented after the verdict. "It will likely increase competition in the market and possibly reduce the prices in the market for gaming."

Australia's conclusion will draw much attention from around the world, and will hopefully encourage platform holders to drop region-encoding, if this system really was at the heart of the High Court's ruling. Regardless, we haven't heard the last of this argument, that's for sure.

By Luke Guttridge