I remember hearing about the ACME Game Store a while back, and wanted to go check it out (these were the pre-automobile, Halcyon days of my youth), and then I heard that someone set the owner up a bomb. Apparently being accused of making modded Xboxes is good enough to send the good folks at the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Service? Bureau? Task-Force Alpha-Rangers? The lack of collective noun at the end of their name is immensely disturbing-- the War on Terror has become the War on Grammar) a knockin' at your door with shotguns.
Thanks, DMCA.
After wondering what would happen to the store, etc, I promptly forgot about it until this morning when I read an excellent interview with Jason Jones, one of the former proprietors of ACME. Highlights include the fact that every inmate in his halfway house is given a television and a Playstation (2, I'm assuming), and why because games are considered part of his "crime" he isn't allowed to have any contact with them. Kind of like hackers being kept away from telecoms systems by their parole, except completely baseless.
Ordinarily, I tend not to really care about copyright law, as it lacks relevancy to the way I consume media. But I do care a great deal about the unchecked expansion of governmental powers, and the abuses of said powers. Shotgun-waving raids are not an appropriate response to the private manipulation of a private piece of technology, and any situation employing the word of undercover agents against that of the accused smacks of a frame-up to me.
Forgive the hyperbole, but I wonder what will happen when someone explains what a MAME cabinet is to some beady-eyed bureaucrat and the millstone of American Justice begins to grind in that direction.