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Nintendo Asks For Government Help To Fight Piracy
Nintendo, in its annual report to the USPTO, has requested help in dealing with piracy overseas, both from the US government and from several other countries in particular. China, Korea, Brazil, Mexico, Spain, and Paraguay are listed as the greatest contributing nations to piracy of the company's products. Nintendo suggests, for example, that "Chinese customs officials must stop shipments of game copiers and other infringing products out of China, and China should work in the coming year to eliminate barriers to its enforcement laws," and that "the Spanish government implement laws protecting the creative copyright industry and enact laws against Internet piracy."
Most of the people who copy games for their consoles get the console and the necessary devices for copying games just because they know they can copy the games if they get it all.
There is no guarantee those people would get the console and any games if they couldn't copy them.
I've got a chipped gamecube and a DS with flashcart and could kinda get all of the games for both systems but then all I do is play WC3 on my computer anyway ...
I'm just not that into console gaming, I don't even play the games when they are free ffs, why would I play them if I had to pay for them?
Atleast Nintendo makes money on the consoles to so they have got my support anyway.
Parents getting said devices for their kids which would indeed get a couple of probably crappy games may be another story though.
My heart goes out to Nintendo in these difficult times of record profits.
...I bet China will get right on it!
"I may be full of crap about this game, and I may be wrong, and that's fine." -Jack Thompson
.....if we piss off the Chinese by demanding they stop copying games or exporting copying hardware, they won't loan us 2000 billion in dollars. And then what will this poor, debtor nation do? No, no, we can't afford to make demands of the people giving us money to survive.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
At least in brazil its the truth. Super Mario Galaxy, for example costs 46 dolars on amazon.com. If you try to buy it in brazil, it will cost 260 reais, which is about 120 dolars. Its costs 2.6 times more than if you were buying it on the US. Whats the reason for this? Taxes and filthy lucre. I dont know why it doesnt happen with computer games. Left 4 Dead for PC, for instance, costs 45 dolars on Amazon.com. If you buy it in brazil, it costs 99 reais, which is about 45 dolars. Thats why computer games piracy has decreased in brazil and console games piracy is still the same. Charge a fear price and everyone will buy the game. Charge a pornographic price and we will pirate it.
I suspect most people would be surprised by the sheer amount of piracy there is for games on Nintendo's platforms. So here's some background reading on the issue:
"In South Korea, many video game consumers exploit illegal copies of video games, including for the Nintendo DS. In 2007, 500,000 copies of DS games were sold, while the sales of the DS hardware units was 800,000." Yes, you're reading that right; the attach rate for DS software in Korea was at one point less than 1.0, fewer pieces of software were sold than hardware devices, which is a tell-tale sign of use of piracy devices.
As for why that is, Gamesutra has a short but insightful article on the matter. DS flash carts (what Nintendo is calling "game copiers") are cheap, and the South Korean people are turning to them in part as a solution to not being able to afford every game they want.
Nintendo's biggest fear here is that other countries end up like Korea, with rampant piracy and few legit customers. Nintendo does make a profit on hardware, but much of their profit is still on software. Furthermore their 3rd party game developers who don't make a profit on hardware would love to make a profit at all, and bad/no 3rd party support just makes Nintendo's hardware and software sales that much worse. I can't see why Korean piracy levels world-wide wouldn't kill the DS, or any other console for that matter. I understand Wii piracy through mod-chips is also pretty rampant in South Korea, although I do not know to what degree.
With that said I don't know why Nintendo is going to the US government about this. Certainly it's reasonable to ask the government to clamp down on this in the United States, and perhaps even apply some pressure on China where flash carts are made with relative impunity, but I don't see the point in listing the other countries. I don't see what stake the US government has on piracy in Spain, for example.
And I'll close this out by admitting I'm a pirate. I have an R4 flash cart with many games and exactly 2 legit games (1 of which came with the DS) when I could easily afford to be completely legit. I'm exactly the kind of person Nintendo is worried about. There are many more like me, I'm afraid.
Oh come on! What's he complaining about? Software is illegal to share in Spain as in any other civilized country. Media is something else, as the right of personal distribution without it being a lucrative activity is legal.
Also, Mod-Chips and the sort are illegal too, not that security agencies give a f*** about some teenagers buying them.
So what is it that you want Nintendo? A France like model of 3 strikes you're out enforcement? I think the government has (or at least should) more important worries, like almost a 4MM unemployeds.
So Nintendo, when you build a factory in Spain and some developers shops to help mitigate this problem, start whinnying about piracy.
....see mine. I have two kids (2 & 4), sometimes I play Wii Music / Wii Fit / Wii Play (Fishing!) with the older. It's too troublesome to lock all stuff away all the time (and sometimes I just forget to remove the disk from the console), so I've already thought a few times about modding the console to be able to backup the games before the kids manage to destroy the disks accidently.
As it is, they won't replace my scratched disks, so I don't have so much simpathy for them.
good to see government is being asked to tackle the big issues, like teenage girls pirating "Animal crossing".
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
Simple: Stop putting games on a media which can be copied in any home PC.
Make game CDs a bit bigger or something so they don't fit in a standard drive for recording.
PS: "Spain"? Oh, sure, Spain is a major international cause of lost profit. Not. Spain has a sensible law regarding copyright, that's all.
No sig today...
No, you are not right. In Spain, where we both live it's illegal to copy software, even if it's non-for-profit.
But Spanish judges dismiss charges against people modifying their consoles or copying music or movies for personal use.
What Nintendo wants is to make illegal devices like R4/M3/WiiKey and blocking webpages that give access to pirated games (software).
Good luck with that, but I don't think it would be possible here.
I doubt Wii games are what the O.P. was talking about. I think he/she/it was talking about older systems.
For instance, how many people signed the online petition to have Nintendo translate Mother 3 and release it in the US? I believe well over 100,000 people signed it. Yet Nintendo refused to translate and release the game over here. So, fans of the series took matters into their own hands and translated the game themselves. If Nintendo would have released the game, they could have made a ton of money off of it, but instead, it is now being "pirated," instead.
I have a bad feeling about this...
"Chinese customs officials must stop shipments of game copiers and other infringing products out of China"
Why doesn't Nintendo go after customs of the importing countries? It's because on both sides of the import/export equation are a very small number of people who actually inspect what is going on. Why don't they get the piracy sniffing dogs out? That's right, they can barely handle the drug trade.
Straying from the topic, but actually the solution is LEGALIZE LIGHT DRUGS (such as cannabis), so they can be produced and traded by honest, non-violent entrepreneurs, and certified for quality.
Circumcision is child abuse.
Then the answer would seem to be to make new games that are actually more fun to play than the old ones. People wouldn't be playing the old ones if the new ones were that much more fun. I think the biggest problem with profit in the game industry right now is that nobody focuses on playability aka controls and game mechanics. The few companies that do for example blizzard make record profits whenever they release a game.
"We want [country A] to change their laws, so that if a person in [country A] breaks our [country B] laws , we can prosecute them."
If [country A] != America and [country B] = American then GOOD
If [country A] = America and [country B] = !American then BAD
I can absolutely dig Nintendo's position on large-scale bootlegging, but isn't Nintendo a Japanese company? Let them ask their own country for help leaning on China. We already have enough people bitching about America acting like the world's policeman.
Never approach a vast undertaking with a half-vast plan.
It seems to me that China is such a shithole, that it would be completely unethical to waste time dealing with piracy at this point. Let's stop slavery, let's stop human rights abuses, let's enforce workplace health and safety standards.
Moaning and whining about how a few people are getting games for free in a country like China is like complaining that Hitler stole your parking spot.
It's been a long time.
if you don't want to buy the games (for whatever your reasons may be) then don't play the games.
I want to buy the games, but Nintendo doesn't want to sell the games for any of several reasons. One is the No Export For You mentality even if there's a fully translated prototype (Earthbound for NES) or even if it's been released in another anglophone market (Kuru Kuru Kururin for GBA; Pinocchio for Wii). Another is that games from a smaller developer can't get published unless the developer has already released another commercial title on Windows, and some developers aren't fans of the genres that Windows gamers have historically preferred. What is the alternative to piracy in this case?
Yeah, that's right. Here in Spain, it's simply legal to download, upload and/or share music and films, if it's non-profit. Also, it's been ruled that pages that encourage sharing films and music and have revenues from ads are also legal, in part because otherwise google would be illegal, as google also has links to torrent files (try searching for "filetype:torrent" in google).
Unfortunately, Spanish Law makes an exception with copyrighted software. So it's legal to share music and films but not software. Anyway, I'm PROUD to say that software piracy is also widespread here in Spain (the exception is that businesses don't use pirated software).
Right on. I've had an R4 since day one, and freely admit to downloading NDS ROMS. The only one I've bought is Zelda.
1) Convenience. I have at least a dozen games on a 1 GB MicroSD. That's the ONLY way I'm going to be able to carry around a variety of games without losing half of them.
2) Quality. A lot of DS games really suck. I don't even keep most of the games I try. If I had paid for them, I'd regret it.
Mother 3 is awesome. I ordered a Slot-2 flashcart just so I could play it. I can see why Nintendo didn't bring it over to the US... if you're expecting Earthbound, the style is just as cute and bright, but the story so far is dark and tragic.
Piracy is morally neutral, neither good nor bad. The intellectual monopoly faction has utterly failed to produce a single solid argument for the alleged immorality of piracy. Their appeals to property rights consistently ignore the factors that justify rights to actual property in the first place.
Lay off the moral posturing. Consequentialist arguments are all you've got, and even those are pretty weak.
AEIOU: open-source anonymous internet currency
I'm kind of suprised that none of the console makers haven't taken to copying the disk to a hard drive. I know that they are not going to do anying without copy protection, so they could just just use a usb dongle as a key. You could technically have up to 256 keys plugged in at a time, so you could load up you console giving you the convenience of installation to a hard drive as well as protection from disk scratches.
I would be willing to pay $5-$10 (includes shipping) for a replacement disk. I send them the original scratched disk and they send me a replacement. They can even send it back in a generic box.