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."

Comments

Whine whine whine

[aliquis]

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.

Re:Whine whine whine

[Xest]

Yep, I know people who bought DS' only because they could buy a cart with a micro SD card in and copy games to it.

These are people who I know definitely wouldn't have got one if they had to pay an additional £20 for each game on top of £100 for the device itself. Piracy has been one of the reasons the DS has been so succesful.

As you say providing Nintendo makes money on the device itself then they've really got nothing to complain about and aren't really acting any better than the RIAA/MPAA trying to force their ideal laws on foreign nations. Even if they didn't make money on the device I'm inclined to say more fool them for pursuing such a silly business model.

The other point is it's not like they even seemed to try hard to prevent piracy. Their systems are some of the most easily hackable out there so if they don't even invest in anti-piracy measures like Sony and Microsoft do then why should they expect anyone to help them if they wont help themselves? At least pirating XBox 360 games means goodbye to your warranty, can't be done on live arcade games means saying goodbye to XBox live with your system forever too so Microsoft at least tried to solve the problem through technology than just whining to foreign governments to enforce stricter laws on their citizens.

Poor Nintendo

[lbft]

My heart goes out to Nintendo in these difficult times of record profits.

Re:Piracy? What Piracy?

[Logical Zebra]

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.