The Australian man who had the chip from a travel card implanted in his hand, and was fined for travelling without a valid train ticket, has had a court victory, winning his appeal against Sydney Trains.



Earlier this year Sydney man Meow-Ludo Disco Gamma Meow-Meow, 33, was convicted and fined $220 for travelling without a valid ticket.

But in a short and at times humorous appeal hearing in the New South Wales District Court on Monday morning, Judge Dina Yehia overturned the conviction, pointing out Meow-Meow had paid for his ticket.

Meow-Meow, a bio-hacker who experiments with modifying the human body to include technological advancements, had the chip from an unregistered Opal card implanted in his hand by an expert piercer in April 2017.



He could simply tap on and tap off to enter and exit a train station by placing his hand up to a card reader, as someone would with a regular Opal card. In August 2017, when he tapped on with $14.07 on the card, he was stopped by transit officers and handed a fine.

About five minutes into the hearing, Yehia asked how, exactly, a person goes from having an ordinary Opal card to having an Opal card chip implanted into their hand?

“How does that actually take place?" she asked. "What happens to the card?”

Meow-Meow's lawyer Nicholas Broadbent explained: "As I understand it, within the Opal card itself there is a chip device not dissimilar to when one has a credit card with a small chip. Effectively the means by which the Opal card chip is extracted is by melting down or destroying the plastic material which surrounds the chip, but leaving the chip intact, such that it can then be encased in some kind of plastic material."

Meanwhile, Sydney Trains prosecutor Andrew Wozniak quickly withdrew his submission that Meow-Meow's chip was an issue of public safety.

What Meow-Meow did "undermines the Opal system", he told Yehia.

"I understand that, but how does it undermine public safety?" she asked.



Wozniak then admitted the public safety argument was perhaps "a step too far" and withdrew it, saying "it’s a matter for him what he does with his hand".