CHANGE: Prosecutors Dismiss Xbox Modding Case Mid-Trial. “The announcement came a day after a whirlwind of legal jockeying in the case against defendant Matthew Crippen, a 28-year-old Southern California man. The government charged that Crippen, a hotel car-parking manager, ran a small business from his Anaheim home modifying the firmware on Xbox 360 optical drives to make them capable of running pirated or unauthorized games. It was the nation’s first jury trial to test the anti-circumvention provisions of the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act as applied to game consoles. The law makes it a crime to offer a product or service that circumvents a technological measure designed to protect copyright material. Each of the two charges carried a maximum five years.”

If Republicans were smart (note the conditional here) they’d be pushing a DMCA repeal in the next Congress, for a whole lot of reasons.