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we are all discussing this without mentioning the differences in local laws. neither we nor sony are making the laws. the distributed custom firmware is not braking any laws in spain nor in belgium. i do not know the situation in the rest of the world. we only know that europe is more free world than the usa who predicts to be the free world ;-)
over here i may also change/repair my car though the official dealer will state that my warranty is voided. this is the only disadvantage.
Personally, my major issue with custom firmware is the ISO ability. But (before I get flamed) this didn't stop DevHook because the illegal portion of the process HAD to be done by the user, ie the file downloading ,etc.
This same issue arises with OE. But again it is upto the downloader to do the illegal things, not upto the creator. It would be like blaming torrent client creators for the users downloading the material.
Sony didn't do anything wrong in my opinion, they were perfectly happy with homebrew and emu's before some idiot developed a UMD Ripper, seriously, any of you would have patched the ability for the console to do illeagal things. Custom Firmware is a grey region as you dont HAVE to use it for illeagal things, although you can, you dont have to. If sony didnt patch there firmware Game companies may have sued them for allowing their games to be stolen, no one likes to lose a million dollars.
This topic seems to come round every so often, and perhaps with the events of the last four weeks or so, its an even more valid question to be asking of the PSP community.
While its easy to argue that theres nothing inherently wrong in using a custom firmware (it is simply taking firmware releases Sony has made and combining them to provide the facility to do more than either firmware on its own is capable of doing), Sony would, I guess, view it as a reverse engineering process of its software and a violation of its EULA.
I personally see no problem in using a custom firmware, and I can understand why the ability to play PSP games from the Memory Stick is part of that custom firmware functionality.
However, there is a responsibility of the end user (ie the PSP owner) to decide what they wish to do with their PSP, and not up to the creator (Dark_AleX etc) to determine whether including a particular function is ethical or not. My car can do 160mph, doesn't mean I should drive it at that speed. Same thing with using my PSP to play illegal games, just because it can doesn't mean I will.
At the end of the day however, the number of people with custom firmware is such a small percentage of the 20+ million units sold, I'm sure Sony isn't overly worried (at least no more than any other company selling software).
I wrote a post [PSP-Questions] that is attempting to get a feel for how many people are running custom firmware (I guess most DCEmu readers are probably running some form of custom firmware or 1.5) as well as a general demographic of the PSP scene. Without knowing the numbers involved in homebrew, its difficult to guage if the long term impact on the PSP is going to be postive or negative.
Chances are, Sony will release PSP2 and it will require you connect to the internet and have its firmware checked before you can do anything ;)
The "scene" goes where the wind blows
Watch the tide and catch the wave
Enjoy it while it lasts...
Before you know it this time will be gone
And no will care what firmware you are on.