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Nintendo Wins Lik Sang Piracy Case
Thanks to an anonymous reader for pointing to an Adrenaline Vault article indicating Nintendo has won substantial damages against GameBoy 'backup' device vendor Lik Sang. According to the original Reuters story, "Nintendo Co Ltd said on Thursday it has won one of its 'most significant anti-piracy judgments ever' against a Hong Kong firm that sold devices capable of copying its games and putting them on the Internet for limitless downloading." Nintendo has been awarded an interim amount of HK$5 million (US$641,000) in damages, and they say Nintendo software publishers as a whole lost US$650 million in sales last year due to piracy.
Next comes the end to video recording and...gasp...computer data recording. The International "software piracy" issue has esculated and become too much of a scape goat of late to rip away any freedom and right of use that they want to. Watch out.
/. Heroics - 99.999%
In reality I have about 7 or 8 GBA games and I would LOVE to back them up on one cartridge. If they were not so prohibitively expensive, then I would have bought one long ago. The same ruling on MP3 players should have gone for this product. If it has a legal use then it should be legal. Even if it does have the possibility of being used in one form or another that is against the law.
How does this affect the US? Does it allow Nintendo to go after people who purchased products from Lik Sang? Does it prohibit another Chinese manufacturer from making similar products and selling them here (other than that they too would likely lose a suit in HK)?
BTW -- Thanks to the DMCA production of this device would be patently illegal in the US. It wouldn't take a court to decide that either... Nice to know the Chinese have more "freedom to innovate" (hey that's catchy;) than US citizens do. Makes me think we're gonna do real well in the next 100 or so years.
BS.
They assume just cause someone download it for free they lost a sale. Most people who download stuff would of never bought it anyways, even if they could not of gotten it free. They should just enjoy the popularity of the product and acept the sales they get. [even a downloader must buy GB to play it on] Anyone with brains does not spend $5-600 a year on GB crap. Well not anyone with a real life or a good drug dealer near by.
= $40 billion in the eyes of the *IAA.
/sic
thats not THAT much, is it?
I want 2D games back.
...even a downloader must buy GB to play it on... you know the GB and GBA emulaters are quite mature now, right?
I want 2D games back.
Why would anyone even want a GB let alone play GB games on a home computer??? Now that is lame.
The games are not even that great on the GB but its portable. That is the only fun in the GB is you can take it along.
Yep, I can see some one sick enough to spend $2000 on the best computer to play GB games on.
Right in my back yard.....video games are being blamed for a 12 year old attempting to "take over" his school, only to kill himself in the bathroom when the police were informed. Pretty soon the games themselves will be banned, to hell with the backup equiptment. Yeah i know its off topic...but appearantly it wasnt relevant enough to warrant my submission being accecpted Read about it at http://www.stargazette.com/headlines/Thlocal1.html
"Once upon a time men were lions and machines were mice, but since it was so long ago, now its twice upon a time."
sold devices capable of copying its games and putting them on the Internet for limitless downloading.
Christ, when will thus "piracy" bullshit stop??
I hope they don't put me in jail, since I'm "a human being capable of murdering countless innocent children." I mean really, look at me, I've got two strong arms. What good are two strong arms except to KILL BABIES?
Well, and strangle video game company executives.
I've downloaded some of the gba roms and tried them out. Some of the games I bought afterward. Other ones I doubt I will buy because I didn't care for it. Some of the games I thought I would not care for I actually ended up enjoying. Fortress being one of them.
before they got taken off of the website. I think the GBA backup device is awsome. I admit to trying games before I buy them, especially when my little brother wants a new game. I download the game onto the cart let him play with it, if he likes it tell my parents to buy it for him. This way, he doesn't waste my parents money by buying games he will never play. Almost half of his GB collection he didn't play more than 2-3 days because the games sucked.
Just like with all technology, there are good uses and illegal uses. Everything from pencils to guns can be used for good or "evil". Banning devices like this is retarded because the backup device really has good uses (I'm not saying mine is a legal use, I guess it should be but I understand it is not), but there is a rather large community of homebrew developers making games and other applications for the GBA that depend on the backup device to run their code (well they can run their code in emulators, but its just much cooler to do it on an actual GBA).
Anyway, this sucks... I don't think its Nintendo's fault, I think it's the judge's fault. Nintendo just wants to make more money, can't blame them for trying especially since there are many people using the backup devices for pirating.
--D3X
What other possible uses does this device have though besides copy carts and dumping roms onto blank carts? In which both are illegal. You don't need to backup your game carts. I don't know anyone since the days of atari that had a video game cart just spontaneously go bad on them.
Standard excuse, standard nonsense.
It is statistically proven that sales get lower and lower while more and more people play games or watch movies.
For Nintendo this isn't that much an harm. The big companies can normally handle such losses or even make profit with it (like Microsoft's foresight to make contracts with hardware publisher and letting the others suffer). Hard affected by this are allways the small to medium sized companies and the shops where you would've bought the games.
Companies must have a special ass that they always pull these so called "losses due to piracy" from. I mean, they sure as hell don't seem very plausable.
There are only 10 kinds of people in this world... those who understand binary and those who don't
It is statistically proven that sales get lower and lower while more and more people play games or watch movies.
Prove it. It's one thing to make a statement like that, it's another to link a study. And as you know, the interpretation of statistics is often subjective, and fraught with bias.
While it is probably true that if there was no way to pirate something today, more products would be sold, but in a world with a warez mentality, that's not true. If I can download The Hulk, I'm certainly not going to buy Mario World unless it's
a) So good I feel inclined to give them money
b) Not possible to have the "real" thing for free (like portability of a console game, or quality of a movie)
And even then, some people just never will buy something if they have the money or not.
Thanks for clearing that up. I assumed that all the money I was spending on those GB games was because the games were fun and interesting to play. Now, thanks to your marvalous insight, I have realised that I am, in fact, brainless or without a "real" life or drug dealer.
Just so you know, Nintendo, Sony and Microsoft don't make money on hardware sales, they make it on software sales and licensing. But hey, I'm brainless one, so what would I know?
Looks can be deceiving. Or CAN they?
Once again, bad people ruin fair use for good people.
I have lots of NES and SNES games that I'd love to be able to play on my GBA portably, but can't because the flash carts are impossible to find now. Why? Because people were just warezing like mad with these things. The only time I ran into a person with a flash cart (at a theatre), he bragged about how he had so man games, he couldn't even remember them. The flash cart he carried had 5 of them at the time on it.
As someone who owns over 250 games, I found it reprehensible. It's stealing, and we all end up paying for it. This time it was Lik-Sang that ended up paying for it, which is a shame because they sell a lot of cool stuff.
--
Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
You have an option if you want a handheld console system that can play homebrew/small studio content, the little handheld from Korea, the GP32. There has been some great homebrew development for that, like a Doom port. Unlike Nintendo, the GP32's manufacturer encourages homebrew content.
Unfortunately, the current console system works too well for most console manufacturers to abandon it, especially when the courts will back them up. I sincerely doubt that the unavailability of the backup cart will mean that Nintendo will lose sales. If Nintendo hadn't gone after the backup carts, what's to stop their licensees from thinking, "Why am I buying a license? Why don't I just produce the cartridges myself and keep all the profits rather than splitting them with Nintendo?"
I would love for things to be different, and for the console market to be more like the PC/PDA market. The only way that would happen is for something like the GP32 to become popular, but that doesn't seem likely at the moment. For console makers it's not just about protecting copyrighted content, it is also about protecting license revenue.
All the creatures will die, And all the things will be broken. That's the law of samurai. (Jubai, 1605)
Why would anyone even want a GB let alone play GB games on a home computer??? Now that is lame.
I don't know... because some people get some sense of enjoyment out of playing games?
Why would anyone ever want to play GB games on a console? Nintendo's releasing a gamecube peripheral to let you do just that in a few days.
A sizeable proportion of the sales of these devices went to the companies that develop GBA games.
Whilst Nintendo has it's own flashcart development kit, it's *far* more expensive than the ones Lik Sang sold, and it's not nearly as friendly to use. So whilst a dev team may have a few official Nintendo kits, they would also have a bunch of the "illegal" ones, used legitimately.
Methinks part of the reason Nintendo goes after the flashcarts so strongly is because they want to protect their income stream - not from pirates, but from the LICENSED DEVELOPERS who aren't buying many of the profitable, *expensive* official devkits.
at least the home developers over at gbadev.org and forum.gbadev.org can show that
not everyone uses these flash cards for copying commercial games.
And another thing; "Following the recent Hong Kong ruling, Nintendo believes the cheap copying devices,
which were manufactured in China, are no longer on the market, Daugherty said." Ok maybe the old flash linker
isnt available anymore but no one would buy that anyways now that EZ-Flash, XG-Flash, F2A and their USB versions are available.
Good job nintendo, 1 down & just 20 more to go! erm yeah...*cough*
The cart design is probably copyrighted. Its a physical access control.
Yay me!
I don't think you can justify an emulated copy of a GBA game on a PC as a lost sale. Here's why:
The whole appeal of the GBA is that it's portable. The games are nothing amazing and a hefty portion of them are ports from existing console/PC titles. There aren't any "killer apps/games" for the GBA that aren't already available in a superior form on a PC or home console, unless you consider the fact that it is now portable!
Now since you've removed that portability advantage by going to a chained-down PC, there's no way that person would have bought it in the first place. Unless they were scoping the game out to see if it was worthwhile to buy for the GBA.
Now, if the emulator runs on a portable system like a GP32, then it's a different story...
How would you be able to play SNES games on the GBA? The cpu is very different as is screen size and other issues, a flash card wouldn't help unless you had some amazing emulator that ran SNES games on the GBA which would be piracy in some regions anyway (by argument of copyright protection). Just because you can upload the 65c816 binary code to a cartridge doesn't mean it will run on a gameboy.
Unless you build your own portable SNES and NES I find it unlikely that you'd play SNES and NES games portably.
Pocket NES, or the other emulators covered on this site.
It is also very possible that SNES on GBA stuff will exist soon.
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Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
You people are so funny. Microsoft does this a few months ago and you complain about "M$" trying to be jerks and not allowing you to "do what you want with a product you buy" nonsense.
But if Nintendo does it, you have to stick up for them. Fucking classical.
I hope with the following Information I am able to give you a little insight into the recent
happenings and about the misleading press release of Nintendo.
Before the Nintendo Press release has been distributed, I have delivered a Notice of
Appeal to Nintendo, as well as to the High Court of Hong Kong. I am not exactly sure
why Nintendoâ(TM)s press department didnâ(TM)t mention a word about it.
The Judgment was not a real trial yet, it was a Summary Judgment with a single Judge.
Usually such Summary Judgments are in case of bounced bank checks where no trial is
needed and everything is straight forward.
With all due respect to the High Court of Hong Kong, but no Intellectual Property (IP)
specialist was assigned to this case. Already at the first hearing the Judge mentioned that
itâ(TM)s a pity Hong Kong has no IP specialist anymore and that he finds the Copyright Law
of Hong Kong very confusing. After some research, it looks like the Judge is a specialist
for maritime laws. He made several comments during the hearings which seemed to
observers like this was his first IP case ever.
The Summary Judgment itself was based on the Section 273 of the Hong Kong Copyright
Ordinance about âoecircumventing a copy-protectionâ. No copy-protection exists in the
Gameboy or Gameboy Advance game cartridges. The Judge didnâ(TM)t hear a specialist or at
least an independent 3rd party expert opinion - he took it for granted from the
explanations by Nintendo that there is a copy-protection.
Furthermore, the Judge found that âoeby analogy with drugs, it[the setcion 273] is not
aimed at the drug addict but at the drug traffickerâ. I fail to understand his logic, as this
would mean that the drug store selling the injection needles to drug addicts or maybe
even the manufacturer of the container where the drug addict keeps the drug could be
held liable?
After legal actions in the USA against Bung Enterprises in the late nineties (for selling
and manufacturing videogame development and backup equipment) this was the second
Court Judgment ever regarding products of this nature. Regarding information made
available to me in the Court Room, the case against Bung and its US distributor Carl
Industries Inc was brought to an end in their disfavor by Bung not complying with Court
Orders and not paying ordered penalties. The actual judgment was written by Nintendo
representatives, without the Judge properly going through the arguments. The legality or
illegality of the products in question has therefore never been argued in a real trial
anywhere in the world. A serious trial, with competent Judges, is now definitely needed
to settle the question once and for all. This is why I have decided to appeal.
I am not happy about the direction where this is heading, neither are supporters and
legitimate users of the tools. Again, I have to stress once more, that the very same
hardware under attack is used by thousands of hobbyist users and even professional
developers for legitimate purpose. Very embarrassing for Nintendo: even the large
publisher, who made the original game used in Court for demonstrating purpose, bought
hundreds and hundreds of Flash Cartridges from my company for beta testing. And so did
numerous other top 10 publishers listed in the stock market.
The products I have sold are not circumventing any copy protections, same as a Floppy
Disk Drive and a 3.5" Disk doesn't â" in fact there is no copy-protection existing, as
commonly known by the gaming industry.
I completely understand Nintendoâ(TM)s fight against piracy, but I believe they are aiming at
the wrong targets. With Digital Media and the Internet nowadays, publishers will have to
change their strategy. They just canâ(TM)t win the fight against the Progress without removing
our primary rights: presumption of innocence and the right for backup. Nintendo doesnâ(TM)t
need to prove you are a pirate anymore, it is assumed you all are if you have the technical
means to copy.
so basically you give us the finger and moon us? piracy is wrong. (except fpr music because they deserve it) i am offended by your statements Mr. and will no longer buy products from your website. did everyone here me? BOYCOTT LIK-SANG!
Liksang, you should try developing software for a living, instead of making a living selling products that do nothing but hurt it.
lol, you're offended that Lik Sang is fighting to correct laws which are VERY unclear?
I really don't understand how people can say what Lik Sang was doing is wrong, I mean the devices they sold did not commit piracy, the users did. It's the same thing with music, if you have a walkman you can record music onto it from a CD. This is commiting piracy in just the same way however you don't see people sueing the walkman makers because it would simply be stupid.
My 2c
I am one of the few thousand developers earning my living by coding GBA games all day long. I have bought a few of the devices they were selling, I simply need them since at one point I have to send my games to a publisher to let him have a look. Same accounts for hundreds of other coders I know. Without those cartridges, there will only be Nintendo's own games, maybe a few titles from Disney and mega hit's like Matrix. All the small labels/coders like me (who also successfully sell games on the market) wouldn't be there. Welcome in the real world. Lik Sang did a good job!
Lik Sang did nothing wrong! The flash linkers that they sold have been used by many a company, in place of buying Nintendo's expensive and inferior flash tool. Lik Sang helped the development community for the GBA and many other systems immensly. It's the person who buys the linkers and uses them to pirate games, who should be held responsible for what they are doing. Alex I hope your appeal goes through and you win, good luck!
sweet lord jesus!!! RTFA and fsck yourself!!!
Ninty have shot themselves in the foot here, this reduces peoples want to develop their own software for Nintendo hardware, the use of cart suppliers like liksang was great for amateur developers to start up into the games industry, now this will greatly reduce the amount of new devlopers for the Nintendo range of machines unless the new machines use freely available cartidges for storage then amateurs will be happy.
But the reason nintendo stuck for cartridges for so long is that they stopped normal users from copying games, but not expert pirates who used things from liksang (probably) and other suppliers. these carts of the nintendo are not protected at all except for the fact that no other machines have the right to use the patented slots on these carts. And looking at a previous post is that these cart were heavily used be developers to beta test the games on real hardware.
So if you want to learn developing for consoles then opt for the more adult consoles like the ps2 or even gamepark (currently) for the portable version.
Hopefully sony wont sue aswell for the use of chipped development enabled console, as there are plenty of people the have a passion for games developing on the ps2, mostly these free projects by "amateurs" i a bridge from one job to another, so they can use their free work as proof of their coding skills.
The advantage of having amateur developers is that they can make software that has profesional quality for free, and these games can scare the official developers and make them hire these developers, then the industry gets stronger and has more experienced coder in the field, which is great for all of us.
Sorry Nintendo but i think less and less amateur developers will be on your system, which is good for you in the short term, but the lack of skilled coders will eventually kill you off, unless the next console you make includes a version of linux or a free sdk which i doubt very much.
J. Le Brech
Why Sony is not getting sued for manufacturing CD-R-Writers, as you can copy music CDs with these devices?? Well, the point is that they will never do that, as they make too much money with that, although Sony Music is even inside the same corporation...
It is commonly accepted today to make backup copies of your Audio CDs to prevent them getting damaged by scratches etc. So why not with games, especially when they are for a portable console, so that you can't put them into a protected class cabinet all the time and simply need a backup, if your purchased stuff may get damaged one time?
Unfortunately it's just about money, not justice.
S.M. Guga
I think Nintendo has missed a great opportunity here. Instead of suing Lik Sang, why not work with them?
Instead of selling many single game cartridges, why not sell protected flash cartridges that are able to store multiple games?
You walk into a store and pick a game and they flash it to your specified block. The games could be sold for a lower price. Nintendo would likely save on manufacturing and definitely shipping costs.
Just a thought.