Nintendo's Lawsuits Aided by Fans

Guppy06 writes "Last week there was a posting about Nintendo's efforts to crack down on people selling counterfeit Nintendo hardware and software, and there was at least one reply from a guy who reported someone to Nintendo. It turns out he's not alone; according to a posting at Nintendorks, NOA's Jodi Daugherty, their director of anti-piracy efforts, says it was helped by over 400 people reporting such kiosks to them."

Comments

You guys don't really get this

[stratjakt]

This isn't about gamecube piracy, this is about these cheesy import deals that look like N64 controllers, and plug directly into your AV jacks (like all those Atari deals), and have a bunch of old nintendo games built in.

They sell 'em everywhere, go to any flea market and you can find them. They're as flimsily built as you can imagine. There's a light gun too, for Duck Hunt.

I believe they just have an image of the old 100-in-one NES bootleg from the olden days.

Anyways, they're no doubt illegal. But we're talking about Kid Icarus and Duck Hunt, not Metroid Prime and Resident Evil Zero.

More and more common?

[Tethys_was_taken]

I remember that when the HL2 source code was leaked, Gabe Newell (VALVe founder) sent out a request to the HL community. It worked. Pretty soon, they managed to get a few leads and tracked down the guy who initially distributed it. Best part was, all this happened over IRC rooms when some guy started boasting about his exploits.

This is setting a very positive trend, IMO. (Besides showing that IRC is not *just* the home of the pirates and the script kiddies :) It shows that the community will back a game publisher/developer who gives them quality stuff, and is willing to pull down shitty publishers like EA.

Anyway... long story short, this is Very Good(TM). I hope this continues

Re:Piracy in China

[taxevader]

Umm.. I call bullshit. I have been living (and gaming) in China for 3 years, and have yet to see the product you mention above. A knock-off GC??? The hardware is so proprietary it would cost them more to make a pirated version than to sell the official one, which sells here for just a bit more than the RRP overseas (1200 RMB). If they modded an original and put it in a pretty clear case I could understand. But as far as hardware goes, the only pirated consoles available are the 8-bit NES preloaded with hundreds of games. Maybe you could post some pics of the machine you claimed to have seen? It would send shockwaves through the hacking scene, because it seems not even the hardcore hackers have ever seen one of your fabled consoles.

Why I reported them

[Anonymous Coward]

I was one of the "400 loyal fans"... ... except I'm not really a loyal fan. They lost me to the dark side (Sega) after their stubborness over CDs. Sure, I like their games, but I haven't really been a Nintendo fan since the SNES.

There are a few reasons I reported them. First, some of those games aren't abandonware. Nintendo is actively re-releasing them for the Gameboy Advance. Second, they're competing unfairly with Nintendo. The kiosk I reported was just outside an Electionics Boutique, and I suspect a fair number of parents that were asked for a Nintendo system for Christmas saw this as a deal, and got that instead of a real system. Third, they're unfairly profiting from Nintendo's IP. They were selling these devices for nearly $70! And finally, they were extremely pushy, and used high-pressure sales tactics on anyone who passed by their kiosk.

I think emulators are perfectly legal, and trading old ROMs doesn't really hurt their bottom line, but this was wholesale abuse of their IP.

They're not _all_ just pirated ROMs...

[tuxedobob]

I called today (with my own report), and the guy I talked to said they'd also been getting calls from people who had bought them and wanted some support.

It seems not all the ROMs are complete. Some give up after a certain level, so you can't finish the game. As a result, Nintendo is getting calls.

Considering it costs money to keep people on the phones, and they're getting calls for something that isn't actually theirs, yeah, I can see how they'd be losing money on these things even if they weren't rereleasing some of the games.

Re: Wrong mistake...

[Luigi30]

The PS1 *WAS* going to be a Nintendo console. It was a Sony-developed add-on for the SNES. When SEGA's CD system failed, Nintendo rethought it and told Sony they didn't want it anymore. Sony had to do something with this CD-based system, so they turned it into a standalone console and released it.