Really?
They own the hardware?
When you go to Wal-mart and buy an Xbox, what are you paying for?
If you were to buy a new Xbox and intentionally destroy it, would that be considered illegal?
They own the hardware to the extent of it's setup and configuration and the software and firmware it runs.
http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/649675/playing_backups_on_xbox_360_is_it_legal.htmlAbove link says that it's "legal" to make backups of games (they are probably, like most people, under the impression that you can "own" a game. Not really.
You own a <license> to the game software. This is hardly anything new, It's the same story with, say, Nintendo cartridges. It doesn't matter how many copies of Super Mario World you have, you don't "own" the software. You own the physical cartridge case, and the circuit board and battery inside; but you don't, for example, own the actual ROM. Therefore, the whole Emulation retort "but according to fair use I can copy my games" is redundant since you don't own the game ROMs to dump. It doesn't stop people, but wether it's legal and wether it's something that, as Chris noted, will have police busting down your door are two different matters. However this forum adheres to the former regardless of the state of the latter.
A common retort to the "copying of software/games etc is not illegal because the fair use act of 1992 says I can". These folks apparently neglect to actually read the act and see that it mostly pertains to the copying of Digital Audio Tapes, which I don't believe are used for, say, Xbox games. Additionally, that act has been amended several times since (and in fact was an amendment to a 1976 act itself) by, for example, the DMCA, which quite clearly prohibits this. Additionally, the replacement of hardware component of the console is viewable as something that not only breaks the Xbox live Terms of service, but also as a form of circumvention around the protection that the original chip provides.
A similar problem was when Tengen decided they didn't need Nintendo's special lockout chips- which were required in order for a game cartridge to properly communicate and be used by the console.- that is, Nintendo could dictate who was able to publish games because they needed to get that chip from nintendo for their carts. Tired of Nintendo's restrictive licensing rules, they instead reverse engineered the chips (the 10NES chip that was on the console) and put their own chip into their cartridges. The relevance here is that, while they were in fact a separate company acting on their own to create a product, they
still lost the case (ok, not really, they actually settled out of court, but up to that point it seemed to be working in Nintendo's favour). So with that in mind, and the obvious analogue to modding a purchased console, it stands to reason what the legality of said modding is and therefore of "backups"... even if it <was> legal to make backups, backups would be pretty useless if you can't use them, which you cannot with the xBox without changing the console.
yes I do like bringing up various Nintendo related stuff from early on in these types of threads. It's what I'm familar with
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