In a landmark ruling in the land down under, in the Sony/Hardware/System maker vs. Mod Chip war, the Mod Chippers have won! The case basically points out that region-encoding limits consumers unfairly (amen), but also comes dangerously close to opening up the pandora's box of legalized piracy. It's a tough nut to crack: personally, it's my damn hardware and I should be able to play it, broil it, turn it into a habitrail, and yes, mod it if I want to. Telling console owners, consumers, that they don't have the right to mod their hardware is like saying Honda Civic owners can't tweak their engines. All of the you-bought-this-unit-so-therefore-you-agree-to-this-license-agreement is rubbish IMHO; if someone sells you something, that's that. It's yours. Do with it as you wish. If Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo wanted to lease consoles from now on, that'd be a different story. But for now, as long as we're lining up for days and buying consoles by the tens of thousands, any country with a decent legal system should follow suit with the aussies and let us crack the case and solder away.

Nintendo has already led a strong charge in circumventing the need for chips by making the DS region-free (play imports! all you want! yippie!), and if Sony and Microsoft would get out of their proprietary mindsets, chances are they'd see modding drop a notch as well by letting US/EU Otaku play Japanese imports on their systems.