As you are aware, solicitor's acting on behalf of instruction's from Sony Computer Entertainment Europe served a letter of cease and desist to Channel Technology today. This letter was sent by normal postal service, unrecorded (unprofessional) and arrived at the Channel Technology premises at 10am, and when opened and read, we were given less than 4 hours to respond to this letter to stop imminent legal proceedings.
The letter actually is a complete load of rubbish. It claims that Sony have seen the release of the NEO 2 etc. version of modchip as low risk, but direct booting modchip designs are deemed to be 'of serious consequence'.
(what they REALLY mean, is that the NEO 2 did not circumvent the PS2 copy protection without a disk swap with a DATEL disk, therefore it cannot be seen to actually circumvent the copy protection system so they did not have a leg to stand-on, obviosuly they were happy to ignore the direct boot of PSX games.)
The letter also claims that Sony have taken possession of the NEO 4 design of modchip, and are analyzing it's functionality and design content for breach of Sony's intellectual material, and also breach of the same copyright (section 296 of the Designs, Copyrights and Patents act), that the Messiah has been quoted as breaking, and based upon the result they obtain from the investigations of this modchip, they will take legal proceedings, and deem the Messiah to be of the SAME breaches.
Firstly, let me explain why this is an absolute CROCK !, and give some insights into our thoughts on these matters:
1) If someone does not have the right to reverse engineer their design, then also this applies to the other party, Sony have no right to tamper with this design and reverse engineer it if they also claim the same, and as big a 'mighty giant' as they are, they live by the same rules as everyone else on this planet.
They do, however, have the right if this right is given to them by a court of law.
2) An independant analysis would have to be made, so that all claims are viable.
3) NEO 4 works on the design of 'overwriting' the complete bios of the Sony PS2 system. although claims are made that this bios has been completely re-written, we are sceptical at Channeltech as to whether this is the case. We believe the actual case is that a modified Sony bios is being overwritten to the machine, and because the whole bios contains a whopping 4mb of memory, we beleive that possibly 90 % + of the bios is still intact as Sony has written it.
This is not an 'anti-neo' statement, this is simply a technical assessment of what we know already about how the NEO 4 works.
We believe that NEO may face some problem if this is found to be true.
4) Messiah uses NO duplicated bios information at all. It does the following technically, and without ANY information duplicated from Sony:
A) Messiah 'patches' addresses of information as they communicate with the PS2 console from the bios. The patched information is the property of the Messiah source code author, and has nothing to so with Sony, and does not contain any copyright information.
The original bios within the PS2 remains intact and unaltered at all times.
B) Messiah makes 'logic' connections to other circuits within the PS2 console, these connections carry data information that are the property of the author of the Messiah source code, and do not contain any information or duplicated material that can be deemed the intellectual property of Sony.
C) Messiah in it's entirity, does not contain ANY duplicated information that is the property of any organization, the source code for the Messiah is 100 % the property of it's author/s.
5) As can be seen, the solicitor's 'argument' that the analysis of the NEO 4 design will also be relevant to Messiah is absolute rubbish, and Channel Technology are seeking legal advice regarding this matter.
Further.....
We seek to investigate the relevance of the laws pertaining to section 296 of the Design, Copyrights and Patents act with the help of the Channel Technology solicitor to ascertain the validity of the claim made by Sony's solicitor.
If we find that this law is NOT relevant to the Messiah design, and the Messiah design has a legal right to be attached to the PS2 console, then we will seek to promote the design based upon what reasons within the law we are allowed to do so.
Messiah DOES NOT play pirate software, PEOPLE DO !
Messiah DOES allow software to be played, and makes no recognition as to whether the software is legally licensed, a legal backup (the law in the UK allows for ONE backup of software under conditions, and these conditions are NOT a defined criteria), or as to whether the software is a pirated copy of software, therefore the USER of this software is responsible for this infringement if it takes place, NOT the Messiah.
Messiah DOES allow legally purchased and imported licensed software to be played on the console, and although the Sony solicitor's bring forward that this 'region' control is a part of their copyrighted protection system, there is NO legal standing as to any laws broken by the ability to play this. Be assured, Sony cannot make import / export laws, it is governments that are in charge of this !
Lastly...
Sony's argument in basis is that they have a protection system in the PS2 console which has a copyright / patent and is their intellectual property.
We fully understand that to duplicate this protection system would be an infringement of this copyright / patent as it's idea's and functionality are the property of Sony..
HOWEVER, we disagree at this time that circumvention of this protection system by a design that is the property of persons outside of Sony does not account to a breach of the design / copyright's patents laws, as the circumvention design in whole is the property of another party.
Therefore, if Sony 'circumvent' the design of the Messiah with a change of their copyright design, we are not in a position to argue a case that they have illegally done so, as they are not in a position to argue that our circumvention of their design has any bearing on the copyrights / patents of their design as-is.
This is our arguments, from here we prepare to do battle based upon advice from our legal representatives.
This site is NOT owned by Channel Technology, and apart from moderatorship, we have no control of its content other than pastes made here by myself.
The messiah, as-is has a legal 100 % right to exist, it contains NO copyright material, and it can be discussed openly on any website in the world.
Anyone restricting the existence of Messiah is breaking the law, it is the intellectual property of it's designers, and until a court of law states that it must cease to exist, it remains a legal entity.
Promotion of the Messiah for the moment has been suspended until its relevance within the laws of section 296 of the Copyrights, Designs and Patents act (UK) are analyzed and confirmed.
Therefore Messiah at this time is now deemed 'underground', and should you wish to obtain this design, you should seek your own avenues of supply, it is simply a case that Channel Technology can no longer promote the design until it has a firm standing on its position within the law.
seek, and ye shall find !
