Federal agents conducted simultaneous raids Dec. 1 of the region’s three Pandora’s Cube stores – including one in College Park – for modified Xbox and Playstation 2 consoles and pirated video games.
Authorities arrested two store employees for conspiracy to commit copyright infringement and conspiracy to traffic in a device that circumvents technological protections measures – violations of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, according to an Entertainment Software Association press release.
Pandora’s Cube, which specializes in video games and anime, carried several “modded” Xboxes priced upward of $460 on display with souped-up hard drives with dozens of illegally preinstalled games, a patron said. Pandora’s Cube employees declined to comment.
These raids follow cease and desist notices mailed to the stores in November, said Chunnie Wright, anti-piracy counsel for ESA. Wright said she hopes this is the beginning of a law enforcement trend.
“I can’t say if there are any other criminal investigations going on … but we see this as a sign that law enforcement is taking this seriously and we hope in the future there are more similar actions,” she said.
The ESA, a lobby organization similar in nature to the Motion Picture Association of America and the Recording Industry Association of America, assisted law enforcement in the case through its anti-piracy program.
While the MPAA and RIAA have filed hundreds of copyright infringement lawsuits since the advent of peer-to-peer file sharing, the video game industry’s copyright enforcement actions have received little attention.
“What was noteworthy of these raids was that they are the first of the kind that we are aware of,” Wright said.
Various modifications like chips soldered into the console exploit its computer-like structure, help users increase the console’s functions and get around hard-wired limitations. Just as DVDs are region-encoded so only DVD players from a corresponding region can play them, so are some games and consoles.
Anime and gaming enthusiast John Pickett, a freshman animal science major, said he bought a “mod” from an anime convention he attended a year ago for about $40 that helps him defeat this encoding.
“I only modded mine to play legal and/or foreign, never-coming-over-here games,” he said.
However, many mods greatly facilitate piracy. Some mods let consoles “rip” games from discs, dump the data onto the console’s hard drive, and then play the games without the disc. Other mods circumvent a console’s ability to recognize copied discs.
Though it is unusual to find “modded” gaming hardware or “mod chips” openly displayed in stores, both are readily available online. While buying such hardware is not illegal under the DMCA, it is illegal to manufacture or distribute it, Wright said.
When asked why the store owners would sell the modded Xboxes in the open or so overtly online, Wright said, “People might just feel like they’re under the radar right now, and that might not actually be the case.”
Pandora’s Cube’s other locations are in Springfield, Va., and at White Marsh Mall in Baltimore.
“I really hope they continue to sell the imports and the legit stuff they were selling,” Pickett said. “They were one of the few stores, especially in areas like this, that would sell that kind of stuff. But at the same time, the way they were selling [the modded systems], it was just a matter of time.”
This is the second federally orchestrated raid in the city dealing with piracy in recent months. FBI agents seized a computer and Playstation 2 from student Jeffrey Lerman’s room in April. He was a boarder in the Kappa Alpha fraternity house on Fraternity Row.
That incident coincided with Attorney General John Ashcroft’s announcement of Operation Fastlink, the “largest multi-national law enforcement effort ever directed at online piracy,” according to a Justice Department press release. More than 120 searches and 200 computers were seized through the operation in 27 states and 10 foreign countries in the day before the statement was released.
