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Selling Modded Wiis Is A Crime

Selling Modded Wiis Is A Crime

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The Wii homebrew community is one of the biggest console-hacking communities out there. There is just so much you can make the Wii do when homebrewed. Do you want to play DVDs? Sure. How about playing popular fan-made mods of games like Smash Bros.? You can do that, too. Do you want to play pirated games? Screw you!

The “Golden Rule” of legal homebrewing is that you should never mess with profitability: never do it for profit or do anything that cuts into the profit of the original company. Apparently, this is a rule that two men In Fukuoka have never heard of. Tomonori Sato and his brother were running a rather lucrative business, selling modded Wiis for a marked up price. It’s estimated that they sold nearly five hundred modded Wiis for nearly 200,000 dollars. That means they were selling each Wii for about 400 dollars, just for the homebrew functionality.



In Japan, altering the internal programming of a console violates Japanese copyright law, and once word got out, both men were arrested. Here in America, copyright law is a little more lax, but the two men would still have gotten in trouble for running the business for profit. Perhaps they didn’t pay attention to the very first splash screen the homebrew installer throws at you which says “If you paid for this software or received it as part of a bundle following payment, you have been scammed and should demand your money back immediately.”

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