Microsoft carries out mass XBOX Live bannings

By Holly Green, posted in Xbox 360 - Oct 30th, '09 7:32pm CDT

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Been playing on a modded XBOX? You might not be much longer. It appears there’s been a wave of XBOX Live bannings carried out recently, enough that its caused a bit of a ripple over on the XBOX forums.

In response to enquiries from IGN, a Microsoft spokesperson said:

“We have taken action against a small percentage of consoles that have been modified to play pirated game discs. In line with our commitment to combat piracy and support safer and more secure gameplay for the more than 20 million members of our Xbox LIVE community, we are suspending these modded consoles from Xbox LIVE.”

I’m not sure how I feel about how “bad” modded consoles really are. On one hand, I can understand Microsoft’s concern with loss of profits. On the other, it could be argued that the money “lost” wouldn’t have been spent on those games in the first place, and that the makers have earned themselves a fan that might not have had (one that could arguably go on to spend money on the franchise). Altering your XBOX doesn’t always have sinister motivations, either–I use my (gifted, modded) original XBOX to watch stored anime sometimes, stuff I ripped and purchased myself. Is that so wrong? I don’t like to steal games, ’cause I have a lot of friends in the industry and the guilt would kill me. But I do borrow games occasionally. That’s just another way of playing a game without having purchased it. Should they go after that, too?

You don’t own your console so much as lease it, really. Makes me glad I still play PC. At least I can modify my junk without getting banned for it.

Have you been a victim of the mass bannings?

XBOX Forums
via IGN

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  • There's a lot under the surface… Since there are a lot of people playing games, a whole culture of gamers is being influenced by what's out there. Likewise, as with any media, the content creators have to figure out what to do next, who to target, how to target them. It's the same as any other media, only it's interactive. But the key principal of creator feeding audience feeding creator stands. It's very manipulative - a word that comes off as ominous, but it's the sort of thing we deal with in all aspects of media.

    Is there a lot of hard news? No. But there is still plenty of serious being thrown around every time we make the transaction, every time we opt to consume.
  • I think that's a great point. This business is pretty straight forward, there's really not a lot of real "journalism" to be done.
  • People need to stop acting like video games are srs bznss enough to warrant the effort one would give a political scandal or something. The Xbox 360 failure rate is pretty much the only thing that´s important enough to care that much about.
  • Ah, I see TOBEFAIR. I should dig up an article that you might enjoy very much, about the state of video game journalism and how it barely exists anymore. There just aren't many people out there pursuing stories instead of regurgitating pres releases. Example: the story on the RROD scandal and the research done to unearth it--journalism. The stuff you see on IGN daily...sooooo not.
  • Brian is correct. Legally, backups are OK... if you can find platforms that allow it. Unfortunately, Nintendo's, Sony's, and Microsoft's EULAs prohibit the creation and use of user-created backups of games for their platforms. Thus, they can't sue you for backing up games (unless of course you're distributing these backups), but they retain the right to prohibit your further use of their services because you insist on breaking the EULA.
  • TOBEFAIR
    Holly, I thought your article was completely fair.

    I was refering to the IGNs, Gamespots, and PC World folks. It is amazing there lack of knowledge despite having high-end tech journalism gigs.
  • With all due respect, maybe the word in quotations should be "journalist". I don't think a single person here has delusions that they're some sort of journalist. Writers, yes, journalism, no. If you feel I've merely copied some press release word for word with a cheap anti modding comment then I'm forced to wonder if you actually read what was written.
  • "Fair use" is exceptionally vague from a legal standpoint. I agree with you that playing your own legit backups should be ok. But I'm sure the software license terms on the 'box still prohibit it. I don't specifically know how Xbox games are designed, but I'm sure there's a level of encryption there that means they can go all DMCA on you, regardless of whether you're doing anything truly nefarious or not. Granted, it's hard to enforce a license that you "must" accept without ever reading (by simply buying the product w/o access to the license). With all the vagueness surrounding it, I think it's definitely 'fair' in the sense of consumer advocacy, &c., but if you're speaking from a legal sense, 'completely within the sphere of fair use' might be a stretch. There's a lot of nasty in the current state of copyright, and not always a lot of common sense.
  • TOBEFAIR
    To Be Fair,

    It should be noted that this “ban wave” effects less than 1-2 percent of all modded drives. In fact Microsoft cannot even detect the existence of the modded firmware or the abgx sheathed games.

    The folks being banned here on noob modders that play bad rips (non-sheathed games) or pre-release/review copies before the official release. At that point, the console records a log of the unusual behavior and sends the information back to Microsoft.

    Additionally, the complete copy-cat nature of the gaming journalism is starting to bug me. The vast majority of proclaimed "gaming" journalists simply copy the Microsoft press release word-for-word and provide a cheap anti-modder comment. The truth is that many folks mod their xboxs to play back-ups, in which is complete within the sphere of fair use. After all, the xbox hardware has been known to scratch discs badly.
  • You own your console. Hardware, all that junk - it's yours. But the software that powers it is merely licensed to you. Tricky game they play. Really, really tricky.

    This attitude concerns me greatly, though. I don't know all the details, but it's going to be hard for them to specifically target pirates. What if you hacked your Xbox, tried a few things, and figured out that it wasn't for you? I'm sure many in that situation would leave it all on, out of sheer laziness. I have my Wii hacked, but I've never used it to play pirated software, never even touched the WAD managers, etc. that would enable me to do so. But my unit is still hacked, the software has still been ripped apart… It's all very dicy, just constant games of back-and-forth…

    Edit - just realized my first ¶ sounds rather argumentative - not my intent, just needed a starting point…
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