Modding

In the United States, the DMCA has set up stiff penalties for mods that violate the rights of intellectual property owners.A 22-year-old man was convicted by Caerphilly Magistrates' Court in the United Kingdom in July 2005 for selling a modded Xbox with built in software and games.On August 5, 2009, Matthew Crippen, a 27-year-old student at California State University, Fullerton, was arrested for modifying game consoles including the Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, and Nintendo Wii for profit.In December 2010 the prosecutors dropped all charges[6] against Crippen because of inadmissible evidence obtained through an audio-less video recording deemed illegal by California law.Various other types of copyright circumvention systems also existed for the Nintendo 64 and the older Game Boy consoles (though neither include actual modding, but instead backup devices).One is through soft modding (modifying software, normally using a softmod) to allow the user to change data contained on its hard drive in the case of the Xbox.In the case of Half-Life and Warcraft III, mods called Counter-Strike and Defense of the Ancients (DotA) respectively, drove sales of the original software for years.The terms modding and modder have expanded to encompass a broad range of customization by personal-computer enthusiasts, especially in gaming PCs, including: custom and homemade hard- and soft-line liquid cooling loops; installation of LED strips and other lighting effects; replacement of stock cooling fans with high-performance ones (on CPU coolers, power supplies, cases, drive bays, and other components); "delidding" of CPUs and GPUs to replace their stock thermal paste and pads with high-thermal-conductivity ones; addition of individually sleeved (and often color-coordinated) cabling; replacement of various heat sinks with custom liquid-cooling water blocks on components normally air-cooled (e.g. RAM, GPUs, and SSDs); addition of new components not usually found in PCs, such as electronic timers or temperature and humidity alarms; custom soldering to replace or change the behavior of components; expansion of the motherboard's capabilities with PCIe add-in cards and risers (the latter also used to mount graphics cards sideways to show them off better); addition of server hardware into a consumer-grade system; and extensive overclocking through detailed benchmarking that seeks to squeeze out every last percentage of performance improvement without the system becoming unstable.