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Nintendo Blocking Counterfeit Game Machines
An anonymous reader writes "Nintendo won a court case Monday which "prohibits retailers from selling products that look like Nintendo's game controllers from its older Nintendo 64 game console, which can be plugged directly into televisions to play games."" These were apparently being sold nation-wide in mall kiosks. Shady.
They didn't pull them just because they looked alike, they pulled them because they were running pirated copies of their games.
A friend of mine saw one last year saw no copyright acknoledgements on the box.
The article states that Nintendo is slapping down a company that is pirating its older inventory. You know those controllers that you plug into the A/V that let you play a few simple games? Some company decided to put Mario and Donkey Kong in theirs without paying Nintendo any money. Of course, Nintendo is going to be upset.
There was one of these kiosks in my local mall as of Saturday night, everytime I walked past it I wondered how long it was going to take them to be sued into submission.
If Nintendo would make something like this, only with higher quality parts (the controllers on these things felt horrible and were obviously poorly made) I'm hard pressed to believe they wouldn't sell extremely well given the right price point. Then again, they're able to sell single games for twenty bucks apiece for the GBA...
How's my typing? Call 1-800-eta-shut
"Theft is theft, at least admit it"
I thought it was copyright infringement... Oh wait, that's just music.
Hey dumbass -
Maybe if I stole your car, made an exact copy of it, and then returned it without you noticing.
This attempt to make these devices not exist won't work. At best, it might remove this one product from the market, and another two will spring up to replace it.
The allure of easy money and the fact there's a starved market mean these things are here to stay. It's no different than the illegal TV market. How many illegal cable descramblers have been discovered in the past few years?
And, just a while ago, thousands of people got letters in the mail saying DirecTV is going to sue them for pirating satellite TV. And there's still thousands of others doing it.
These markets don't collapse under the court of law. In fact, as the law makes the products increasingly illegal, the market for them increases. Yeah, that's odd, but look at the situation:
- Legal pirate device -- Easy to come by, near infinite supply, commodity pricing.
- Semi-legal pirate device (shady, not yet busted) -- Harder to come by, smaller supply, prices are driven up
- Illegal pirate device -- Really tough to come by, very tight supply, prices go very high
- VERY Illegal pirate device (active prosecution) -- Extremely tough to come by, rare supply, prices have to compensate dealer for risk of jail time
So, we go from a $40 pirate device, to a $1000 pirate device in no time. The funny thing is, in the end the people doing the illegal activities *benefit* from increased prosecution. It means they can raise prices. So long as they don't get caught, they make a killing scalping consumers.
If you could be told what you can see or read, then it follows that you could be told what to say or think - BoC
Dear assmonkey,
I did not throw a fit to my wife first of all. You see, my wife and I have this thing where we talk about stuff, without being angry at each other. I told her I appreciated it, and explained to her that it was a bootleg product. She was surprised and a little upset that she had been taken. I know it's hard to understand how a successful normal relationship works, since you've probably never even talked to a woman. That's alright though. You'll get there someday.
X
I feel no obligation in complying with laws that arn't in sync with my own moral code.
As far as I'm concerned trademark law & copyright law should be treated & enforced no differently than Patent law. Meaning Nintendo's only recourse should be to use the civil court system to sue the makers, sellers & end-users of products that break their copyrights or use their trademarks. Copyright law should not be the business of the criminal court & if copyright holders want to prevent end-users from buying & using products that break their copyrights, it's only recourse should be to sue each end-user individually.
So while the corporate world's lobbyists & the US govt have been using their influence to get govts arround the world put copyright provisions in their criminal law codes (a process that's been going on in one form or another since WWII), I'll make my protest by feeling no obligation to comply with copyright laws. As such if you have some hangup over your woman's game controller, I'm quite happy to take it (or maybe her) off your hands.
Sould have picked up a few when I saw them at my mall. They were nifty little things. Most of what was sold was old games that you can't really get here anymore (some being the key word here). I'm kind of sad that they got closed down so fast. But then again these people really didn't have the snap that a classic Korean game counterfiters has. When they pirate something they make it look like art.