February 19th, 2002 (12:00am) - Here is the exact story from Wired.com:
"U.S. Customs officials have blocked shipments from one of the largest online video game retailers, hoping to stop the import of products that may run afoul of federal copyright protections.
The agency was trying to stop the import of NEO4s (http://www.mm-vision.dk/distribution/neo4.htm), a chip that allows PlayStation consoles to run DVDs with geographic encryptions and games copied on to CD-ROMs, according to sources familiar with the video game company, Lik-Sang.
These chips, called "mods," have come under scrutiny by corporations claiming the technology violates the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which restricts anyone’s ability to circumvent copy protections.
The company claims it pulled the product when the controversy arose, but those claims have so far fallen on deaf ears.
Customs agents are using the UPS computer system to track packages from origination points, UPS spokesman Dan McMackin said.
"The shipper is having things stopped by the U.S. Customs Service," McMackin said. "I don’t know what is being held, but the probability is that multiple things come in a shipment and some are outlawed and some are not. The customs doesn’t know which is which."
Meanwhile, the upshot of this indiscriminate action is that Lik-Sang customers are being left in the lurch.
For example, Colin McMillen, a computer science major at the University of Minnesota, ordered a coder’s cable from Lik-Sang (http://www.lik-sang.com/) that would synch his now-defunct Sega Dreamcast (http://www.sega.com/games/dreamcast/home_dreamcast.jhtml;$sessionid$A2KF4RYAAABQACRSBUFCM4QKGIGRIMS0) with his PC. The wire, which is not manufactured by Sega, would allow him to write programs for the gaming console.
After two weeks, he hadn’t received his shipment so he e- mailed the United Parcel Service (http://www.ups.com/). A representative informed him the package had been stopped at the request of the U.S. Customs Service because its contents violated the 1998 DMCA.
It’s unclear if customs should be stopping shipments from Lik-Sang, said Electronic Frontier Foundation (http://www.eff.org/) attorney Fred von Lohmann. The DMCA isn’t clear on what protections companies have if the products don’t have encrypted security.
"The DMCA was intended to protect copyright owners who took technical steps to ’lock up’ their content," said von Lohmann. "But Sony PlayStation 1 games are not locked up. There is no encryption on these game CDs. That’s not stopping Sony from invoking the DMCA against PlayStation 1 mod chips. I guess when you’ve got the big hammer of the DMCA, everything starts looking like a nail."
In the interim, Lik-Sang is shipping its products through another overnight service until Customs lifts its ban, according to the company source. Once that happens, the retailer will return to UPS.
This is the latest twist for those who have run afoul (http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,48726,00.html) of the DMCA.
Russian programmer Dmitri Sklyarov faced 25 years in prison and over $2 million in fines for violating electronic book copyrights until he struck a deal with federal prosecutors. Professor Edward Felten, one of eight researchers who reverse engineered the recording industry’s digital copy protections, had his court challenge against the law tossed out of court.
2600 magazine had its appeal shot down, leaving the hacker publication unable to distribute copies of a DVD descrambling program.
This brouhaha is slightly less serious. While McMillen’s cable still sits in a warehouse in Louisville, Kentucky, nobody is staring down prison. In fact, he isn’t even going to be without his cable, after his plight made its way around the message boards.
"It’s possible to make them yourself because the pin-outs are available," McMillen said. "But I got an e-mail from another developer in the U.S. who is going to send me one."
