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.

Comments

I'm glad I got mine....

[DeionXxX]

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

Not New for Nintendo

[ronfar]

Nintendo has always agressively gone after people who provide unlicensed content for their systems. The managed to get Tengen, after all. I think they only left Color Dreams/Wisdom Tree alone because they didn't want to mess with the Christian Bookstore market. That was way back in the 8-bit days, when there was no question of copyright violations. (Tengen was publishing content with permission of the copyright holders. Even in the case of Tetris, it was just a case of license confusion.)

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.