Quote Originally Posted by Bojay1997 View Post
The issue has already been settled in the courts. License agreements like those that would apply to Xbox One and possibly PS4 games are perfectly legal. If you don't agree to the terms, you simply don't buy and install the software. As a consumer it sucks, but this idea that lawsuits are going to be filed is laughable.
There has been a lot of back and forth over issues such as jailbreaking, however. The courts are not in perfect agreement on whether or not you really can do anything you want to a piece of hardware you legally bought. The cases will continue to be brought as new and novel issues pop up for all kinds of hardware. One reason this is hasn't been settled is because the DMCA was essentially cobbled together in a panic and clashes hard with some basic libertarian principles espoused in the political and economic ideologies held by most Americans. You can freely smash your Xbox with a hammer yet you can't make it it do X, Y, or Z? Forget being good law, I'd go so far as to argue the thing barely makes sense.

Where this would get seriously dicey is if some exploit were discovered by which an Xbox One could be made to play a game without submitting to Microsoft's built-in "protections" (something that's probably inevitable). It would be awfully unconvincing, I think, for Microsoft to argue against a practice that does nothing except...make the One function like every previous console ever, including Microsoft's own. Nintendo lost to Galoob, remember. And this scenario would be essentially the exact same thing (the console manufacturer not liking some non-approved end user modification). And Sony v. Universal is still good law as far as I'm aware, and can probably be teased out enough to apply to this issue.