AfterDawn: News

Australian Competition and Consumer Commission announced this weekend that it will file a 'friend of the court' papers to Australian Federal Court opposing Sony's attempt to rule PS2 mod chips illegal in Australia.

ACCC's opposing doesn't relate to the fact that mod chips allow users to backup their games and play those as well as pirated copies, but it opposes the fact that Sony also wants to maintain regional coding of its games and wants to keep modifications that allow users to play i.e. American games in Australian consoles, illegal.



ACCC says that it filed its opposing opinion to court "because it feared if Sony was successful consumers stood to lose money on PS2 games purchased overseas at significantly cheaper prices by being denied the right to use them in Australia."

Sony is most definately going to argue against this vigorously, because it has maintained relatively high prices across the globe by using regional coding in its games -- it can't sell games with same price tag to Eastern Europe and to U.S., because the income levels in these countries are so different.

And obviously, if ACCC's opinion is going to be the winning opinion in this case, it would mean a major setback for movie studios as well -- DVDs use similiar regional encoding and often major releases are sold in the U.S. months earlier than in Europe or in Australia.

Written by: Petteri Pyyny @ 10 Feb 2002 9:01