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FBI Cracks Down on Piracy of Obsolete Game
Alien54 wrote to mention a story detailing an FBI crackdown on pirated...NES games. From the article: "More than 60,000 pirated copies of Nintendo game consoles were seized Wednesday during raids in New York and New Jersey, prosecutors announced. Four people were arrested in the crackdown on the theft of popular games such as "Donkey Kong," "Mario Brothers," "Duck Hunt," "Baseball" and others, according to a release by federal authorities and papers filed in U.S. District Court in Manhattan. Nintendo told the FBI that individuals and companies copy the video games and sell the pirated versions throughout the world, costing the company millions of dollars in lost revenue annually, according to the complaint."
Do nentendo still sell the old games?
How do they figure out how much selling games that aren't sold any more is costing companies? If Nintendo was still selling say "Solar Jetman" or "Duckhunt" for the NES then I would understand it could cut into their bottom line. But seeing as they don't how is this calculated?
Next we'll be arresting people for making flash animations of copywrited material with really bad translations. Psh. So how much does a NES game go for these days? Buck and a quarter? Buck Fifty? Thank god the man put these criminals at bay. All your base.
Society never gets more or less violent, the definition of violent just keeps changing.
I think the biggest impact these consoles are having is not in revenue, but in brand damage, as is the case with most counterfeit products.
The games are all there, but often the titles or copyright notices are removed, or the graphics are askew, the little built-in light gun doesn't work, or the sound is off for some reason. The controllers are badly designed, such that you don't know which button is Start, which is Jump, and what the deal is with the turbo buttons.
I do think Nintendo is missing the opportunity to sell consoles like this themselves. But it seems they'd rather sell us old NES games for $20 each on the Game Boy Advance.
If you had to pay a yearly fee to maintain your copyright this kind of crap wouldn't happen. As soon as a game/book/movie/whatever is no longer being sold it should pass into the public domain. Not that the public domain will exist in 5 years.
How we know is more important than what we know.
They obviously aren't obsolete if they are still selling.
And also, these are the crappy 1000-in-1 games-in-a-controller things for sale at malls. The problem isn't so much that they cause Nintendo to lose money, but instead diminish Nintendo's brand.
See, many of the games in these systems are literally hacked ROMs with various sprites replaced, and often the ROMs don't work and simply crash. Since the consumer thinks "this Nintendo sucks", they are less likely to buy a Nintendo product down the line, thinking it'll be similarly crappy.
Not to mention that the consumer got ripped off in the first place, as these systems tend to be sold for US$60 or so in mall kiosks and are of absolutely piss poor quality which would likely break under moderate use.
all the mi-i-i-llions of taxpayer dollars, thousands of person-hours of deep investigative efforts using the latest in 1990s technological know-how and tools, our beloved Homeland Security leaders bring us ... NES pirates.
Nice try, people, but there're things you're *not* telling us and cases you're *not* showing us that keep some of us fearful - not respectful, given the above, but fearful.
Controlling the media to portray you, our beloved federales, as incompetent clowns is only halfway effective - which half varies depending, and I'm afraid of clowns.
Take the 90-Day Challenge! http://rwmurker.bodybyvi.com/
Arrrr! They be only 9 pixels wide, and be made of 3 colors, but arrr, these NES buccaneers have me shaking in me sea-boots!
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
1) Nintendo has on occasion re-released old NES games for new platforms, so they are still able to make money off of those titles.
2) Many 8-bit games have new incarnations, and as far as I know, its a good idea to control the IP in all its incarnations if you dont wish to lose that control.
3) This is about as blatant a case of piracy as one can name. It was both wholesale and flagrant. And Nintendo went after the source, not the customer.
This is not anything like the RIAA / MPAA suing individual users.
END COMMUNICATION
"Why would I buy newzeldatitle when I still haven't beat ZeldaII?"
f te nyou'dbeabletomastertheAandBbuttonswellenoughtobea tthegame.
Maybeifyoupracticedusingthespacebaralittlemoreo
"Derp de derp."
NES/FC and SNES/SFC clones have been a hot commodity for many years, especially in Asia and Brazil. For a selection of pirated systems, check out this page.
Don't these guys have anything better to do? Like tracking down murderers and rapists, for instance?
Four people were arrested in the crackdown on the theft of popular games
How many times does it have to be explained that copyright infringement is a different offence to theft?
If somebody put a game up on the Internet where it was downloaded thousands of times, that can cause far more harm than if somebody went into a shop and stole something.
If somebody copied games that you can no longer buy, it can cause less harm than if somebody went into a shop and stole something.
Copyright infringement and theft are fundamentally different actions, with different consequences, governed by different laws. Even the Supreme Court has ruled that copyright infringement is not theft (Dowling vs US, 1985).
There is a perfectly good term to use when somebody copies something illegally. It's "copyright infringement". People who insist upon misusing the term "theft" are only seeking to cause yet more pointless arguments. There is a word for these people too. It's "troll".
Back in november, when Nintendo asked for your help in tracking down these "N64 controllers" full of hacked roms, everyone thought it was great, lined up at their e-door to help
Now when they've finally raided the warehouse and put a stop to it, there's nothing but "bitch bitch bitch copyright is teh suck".
Fuck you guys, I'm going home.
The way I view it it's similar to records -> tapes -> cd's -> ???? -> profit!!!
Seriously though, Thriller first came out on vinyl. Everything was good. The tape offered portability. Everything was still good. The CD offered portability and sound quality. Still grand. You can buy these games for a song for the original NES, or you can pay 20$ for the portable version that has all the graphics of the original (sometimes improved) and maybe a few extras thrown in here and there. Sounds like a good deal to me.
The issue is this: some, if not most, of these games are not available for sale any more. I can't go to a store and pick up Double Dragon, for any system. I need to hunt hunt hunt for it. Now Nintendo may want to rerelease these games, they may not, but they can't say that they're currently losing millions of dollars in revenue. These guys have been stopped, I guess sales of old NES carts should start bringing in the big bucks for them again.
HOWEVER, that being said... these guys were profiting from counterfeit goods, and I'm sure no one can condone that.
-Dizzle
"I most likely AM so interested in myself."
Despite the lack of paragraphs, this guy has an extremely good point. Theft and violating copyright law are two different things. In many cases, if not all of them, here in the US, copyright litigation seems to be based on the principles of theft, where the plaintiff pleads that the copyright violation has 'stolen' their profits... or will steal their profits.
This is nearly the same as say:
If a drunk kills someone with a car, the family of that person sues the drunk driver not only for the wrongful death of one person, but the expected wages, family (sons and daughters) and other things that the family is now deprived of because of the death of one person in their family, even though there is no way to quantify or verify that these things were lost to the family, or that the family has been deprived of them.
I think we can all agree that this is not quite the right way to think of things, but this is how copyright litigation works. Sharing out copyrighted information does not involve creating wealth for the violator in the case of sharing movies and music files. There is also no precedent that the people who download those copyrighted works would actually have paid money for them if they were not available for download. Nor is there any solid evidence that the sharing of music and video files has reduced the copyright owners profits in any significant way.
(If anyone knows of such proof of loss, please tell me where it is)
Additionally, because the value of the perceived theft is intangible, and can not be quantified, there is no basis for assigning punitive damages based on the number of files shared or any other such measure.
Copyright litigation coming out of LA la land is monstrous, and a blight on both the legal profession and those instigating the litigation.
People with morals would find a better way to ensure their profits than try to effect law to prevent anyone from sharing what they have paid for, or trying to prevent anyone from using technology that 'MIGHT' let them share those files with others.
Sure, copyright violators are wrong, but the current fight against them is bogus, and dangerous in respect of how it bends the intent of both copyright and the law in general. Preventing people from profiting from your work is a good thing, a positive for all of us. Allowing anyone to run rampant and twist the law to punish people just because they might violate copyright law at some time in the future is insane.
If you violate copyright law, and reap financial reward from the violation, then clearly, this is theft as well as copyright violation.
The parent is right, its time that we start looking at this issue for what it is.
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An anticircumvention ruling was issued by the Librarian of Congress on 10/28/2003. It protects - for the time being - sites such as ours at videogamemaps.net (my url). The pertinent clause:
(3) Computer programs and video games distributed in formats that have become obsolete and which require the original media or hardware as a condition of access. A format shall be considered obsolete if the machine or system necessary to render perceptible a work stored in that format is no longer manufactured or is no longer reasonably available in the commercial marketplace.
Sounds like the FBI straight out fucked up to me.
http://www.copyright.gov/1201/
ACs are modded -6. I don't read you, I don't mod you, I don't see you. Don't like it? Don't be a coward.
Sorry for being a correction nazi, but the NES tiles are 8*8px and 4 colors. Below is a blurb if you're interested to know more. Else skip.
I wrote a program that extracts the tile tables from NES roms and thus had to do a bit of reverse engeneering. It seems the tiles are 8*8px and 2 bitplans, which means 4 colors. One of the colors is transparent though, so 3 is sort of correct. A tile only requires 16 bytes of memory (8*8 bits * 2 bitplans).
The tiles are arranged in 16*16 blocks or banks, and two of those can be kept in memory at the same time, which means that 256x2 tiles can be kept in memory at the same time.
When you get to a new area, the game will swich banks, and you get new enemies or whatever. The game can also switch palettes so the enemies come in different colors. To further save memory, the tiles can be flipped and stuff, so less angles will have to be drawn. The octorocs on Zelda 1 are just two tiles that are mirrored to make a fully symetrical creature, then there's two different palettes (red & blue).
This guy knows more than me: NES Architecture - by Marat Fayzullin
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