Need some help on legal things with 3ds hacking

[Guineo]

So i was wondering if I was to purchase Japan-made 3ds and then unlock them and change them to English and remove every hack application on them to only keep it unlocked and sell it would that be illegal?

 

[lone_wolf323]

So i was wondering if I was to purchase Japan-made 3ds and then unlock them and change them to English and remove every hack application on them to only keep it unlocked and sell it would that be illegal?

why even bother with doing that? Are you planning on making a business outta that?

 

[FAST6191]

As we are dealing with the US then better to the boilerplate if I am a lawyer then I am most certainly not yours. Hopefully you can find one that deals in import law and copyright law as it pertains to computer hacking in your state if you really care.

There is legal, unlawful (that is to say civil matter, which is to say Nintendo would have to find out, file the lawsuit, explain how you are costing them all the money, aka a very difficult task, and somehow collect it from you), allowed on online tat merchants if explicitly advertised, generally ignored by online tat merchants (even more so if you don't have nice images of the hacked modes available).

You will however notice all the big lawsuits are either for tax evasion (though not seen any of those in a while. Import for personal use and import for resale, never mind resale being a business by itself, are different matters in many places) or selling with ROMs (even if the PR puff piece put out by them downplays that massively). Outside chance safety goblins appear if somehow the chargers catch fire (don't know why they would) but given half the crap that gets sold on ebay every day it would be billions to one odds on that.
There might well be some law, probably an aspect of the DMCA, that we could point to as a "technically" but again number of lawsuits based upon that is non existent at this point.

If you wanted to buy in Japanese 3ds by the box (they are often amazing quality, even Japanese low grade, might have rare/non existent outside Japan colours, might have different shapes as XL and such appeared a bit later in the day and in different numbers), do a basic test (all buttons work, screens good, slots good, battery does not immediately die...) and region swap but shuffling them out the door with no other efforts towards cleaning them then you would probably be able to sell a million of them on ebay without concern from the law or Nintendo lawyers.
Whether it is worth the effort of doing that is a different matter entirely -- there are sure to be enough 3ds of quality already out there in the US right now (not like it is not released in the region yet, stopped early or otherwise under supplied), hacking is trivial if others did want to order from Japan themselves (not as easy as I might find ordering something in the US to Europe or vice versa but still doable without leaving the chair and minimal costs as these things go). Warranties are probably out in general at this point and to that end you are pretty much trading on rare colours and maybe getting a bunch of quality examples more readily than some drooling teenager having in the bag for years on end, and being bounced off younger siblings in other occasions). Maybe you buy some in with the hope that the 3ds, sit on them (keep them charged up on a regular basis) becomes retro in a few years (not so many years ago I was buying GBAs and DS/DS lites for £5 a pop at any car boot sale you care to visit, less so today and things tend to be rather more costly when they do appear). I am not seeing too much scope for that (3ds library is weak and homebrew and emulation power not much compared to earlier devices or likely future devices). That however is your business to contemplate.