When people first started talking about messing around with the insides of the Kinect, Microsoft played bad cop, making legal threats. Thankfully, things have calmed down since then.

A few weeks back, Microsoft said - in response to a "bounty" being offered to the first person to "hack" Kinect - that it would "work closely with law enforcement and product safety groups to keep Kinect tamper-resistant". Heavy-handed!

Now, though, cooler heads have prevailed, and in an interview with NPR, Microsoft's Shannon Liftis and Alex Kipman have stated emphatically that nobody doing what is presently being called "hacking" - as in, messing around with drivers on a PC to get the Kinect doing cool and interesting stuff - will be punished.

Indeed, the pair say Microsoft meant to make it this easy to hook a Kinect up to a PC, in order to encourage this kind of behaviour.

But what about the legal threats? Those are being reserved for people who "hack" Kinect using the definition Microsoft is using, which is "someone got to our algorithms that sit on the side of the Xbox and was able to actually use them", or had "put a device between the sensor and the Xbox for means of cheating".

http://kotaku.com/5696005/microsoft-will-not-be-taking-kinect-hackers-to-court

"Hack" can be a pretty broad term, but from the legal standpoint, I'm guessing it's primarily the malicious type hacking they're concerned with.

I would hope that they don't pursue any cases against individuals or groups for writing custom drivers for Kinect applications outside of strictly commercial game use.

Personally, just about all of the coolest things I've seen regarding Kinect have had nothing to do with the current games or the limited Xbox user interface additions, but what software engineers and tinkerers have managed to come up with in such a small period of time following the release.

^

well.., considering it as a usage of "free" creative developer for free.., and those hackers were buying the hardware.., why bother to suing something work for you for free..?

I recall reading how Microsoft was looking for Kinect to go beyond just the 360, and work to get integration in with PCs.  Allowing "hackers" to mess with Kinect to figure out how to get it to work with the PC, would be a plus.  Of course, there is likely concerns that it gets reverse engineered, and people come out with knock-offs, which would concern Microsoft, but not the making Kinect work with the PC.

I hate the fact that after we buy a product, the company that made that product says what we can and can't do with the things we bought.