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

Disgusting

[metalslinger]

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.

Re:Disgusting

[Anonymous Coward]

Eh, I've talked to maybe 20-30 people who have this unit, so this isn't statistically significant, but everyone used it to download copyrighted roms, not for homebrew games. So why don't you blame them for downloading them instead of nintendo for trying to stop them.

Re:Disgusting

[Dreetje]

The GC isn't doing as well as Nintento had hoped, but they can't blame piracy yet, as much as they'd LOVE to

I guess you are right, that's why they invest some much time and money to make their products piracy free ;).
It does show a point though. We all have seen the sales of Nintendo's GC fall further behind compared to the PS2 and XBOX.
This proves to the point that piracy aren't a deciding factor, in stead it might prove that piracy helps (to a degree) to sell products. I for one, have been copying games since I got my first commodore 64, and still do (oh I better post as an AC!). However I am in the position to buy games now, and perhaps to much of your suprise, I buy the games that are good! Of course, not everyone is like me, but I rather buy a real good game, then those mediocre games that only keep my busy for a week. I think piracy keeps developers and console makers on their toes to get real good games out so that people will buy them no matter what.

Actually protecting your software too good, isn't really healthy. People who are already accustomed to your software will easier buy another of your products. Make it hard...but don't scare away your potential customers...

How does this affect the US?

[mcSey921]

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.

Re:How does this affect the US?

[lightspawn]

Thanks to the DMCA production of this device would be patently illegal in the US

Not really; you're not cracking encryption or otherwise circumventing tech measures limiting access to copyrighted material; you're just copying it. There's no access-limiting technology there to begin with.

lost $650 million in sales last year due to piracy

[gumbysworld]

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.

US$650 million

[paradesign]

= $40 billion in the eyes of the *IAA.

thats not THAT much, is it? /sic

Re:lost $650 million in sales last year due to pir

[paradesign]

...even a downloader must buy GB to play it on... you know the GB and GBA emulaters are quite mature now, right?

Re:"capable of"

[hawkbug]

Ha ha, that's a great analogy, I like it. Better be careful, the government might decided you need to have an amputation performed in the near future!

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

Re:I'm glad I got mine....

[DrWho520]

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.

But make more money how? How many developers want to develop for a company that has no concern about copyright infingement? This was not about only first party titles. This is just one more venue that Nintendo has to stick with Sony and Microsoft...not for the consumer, but for the developer.

what other uses

[Zed2K]

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.

Re:what other uses

[octover]

Well I intend for one to make a game one day. I don't have the time right now, working full-time and going to school full-time sort of make it hard to do fun stuff. Which brings in one really useful feature, I can put all of my games on to one cart. So all I am toting around is my GBA, but I still have 3-4 games. Cause you never know if you are going to have enough time to jump in to Golden Sun some more, or if you only have enough time for some mini-games on Wario Ware. Then when I am done, I can take my SRAM and put the info on to the original cart. All very useful and nice. While I have had games that I didn't own on it, they are very few in number, and I wouldn't have bought them anyways (back in the color days). Now I am more selective about my games and only have time for the games I would buy anyway, so of course I am buying them, and sometimes I get Japanese ROMs to check games out months before they come to the states.

Re:what other uses

[jjhlk]

How about carrying around 5 games on one cart, which never has to leave the GB now? Illegal but useful.

Re:what other uses

[bobroberts]

There are plenty of free public domain roms out there which are not illegal to play.
Plus the flash carts also make a good development system if you want to try your own game on something other than an emulator.

Re:what other uses

[MyDixieWrecked]

For starters, there's an entire underground GBA programming initiative. I've muddled around with it a bit. Wrote a little etch-a-sketch app. Ported my "Life simulator" code. Made partical fire based on the routines at LongbowDigitalArts. It's great.

In fact, being able to do that is great, if you get a large enough cartrage (about 300$ for 1GB), you can fit 32 of your GBA games into one cart so you don't have to constantly switch them and fumble around with games and worry about losing them.

And, for the record, I've had gamegear games go bad on me. But that's because I had a magnet in the drawer with them. ;)

Re:lost $650 million in sales last year due to pir

[jjhlk]

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.

Re:"capable of"

[jjhlk]

Actually you can't make legal copies of gamebody games (any game not on certain types of media), but there are other legit uses: you could make an mp3 player and put it onto the flash device, or you could experiment with your own games, or you could put netbsd on it ;)

Re:Won Some Got Some

[jjhlk]

Unlike computer games, GBA games have no demos... sucks eh?

Re:lost $650 million in sales last year due to pir

[Yorrike]

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.

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?

This is annoying.

[Inoshiro]

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.

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.

Re:lost $650 million in sales last year due to pir

[lightspawn]

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.

The custom cart is an access control

[Hecatonchires]

The cart design is probably copyrighted. Its a physical access control.

What are you talking about?

[AltaMannen]

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.

I'm talking about ...

[Inoshiro]

Pocket NES, or the other emulators covered on this site.

It is also very possible that SNES on GBA stuff will exist soon.

Officiall comments by Alex Kampl / Lik Sang Intl.

[liksang]

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.