Man Fined $1.5 Million For Leaked Mario Game

An anonymous reader writes "A Queensland man will have to pay Nintendo $1.5 million in damages after illegally copying and uploading one of its recent games to the internet ahead of its release, the gaming giant says. Nintendo said the loss was caused when James Burt made New Super Mario Bros Wii available for illegal download a week ahead of its official Australian release in November of last year. Nintendo applied for and was granted a search order by the Federal Court, forcing Burt to disclose the whereabouts of all his computers, disks and electronic storage devices in November. He was also ordered to allow access, including passwords, to his social networking sites, email accounts and websites."

Comments

Re:Proportionality.

[Anonymous Coward]

In most countries bankruptcy does not delete money owed in judgements. I don't know how that works in Australia though.

Re:Pro-piracy

[RockinRobStar]

He was a manager at a computer games store. I would imagine they sent copies early to his store so they had stock to sell on release day. (From what I understand it was a world first release date).

Re:Proportionality.

[jimicus]

I read TFA (I know, I know).

He hasn't actually been fined a single cent. The $1.5 million is an out of court settlement.

From what I understand (I don't know how true this is, IANAL), when settlements of this nature are made it's not uncommon for the company getting the settlement to make no real effort to actually get the money. They just wanted a big news headline saying "Man has been stung for $1.5 million for pirating our product".

Though if it's an out of court settlement, I daresay bankruptcy would probably make it go away altogether.

Re:Instead of homebrew, get an Aspire Revo

[marcansoft]

It's mostly IRC logs, but I can put up a more detailed report if you're interested.

The gist is that libogc can be mostly broken down like this:

• "Imported" libraries like lwip, lwbt, wiiuse, etc. that were developed separately and then merged into the tree. These should be OK
• LWP threading system. I think a bit of this might have some remnants of the Nintendo stuff (maybe in exception handlers or the like), but most of it is shagkur's original work. As a threading system it totally sucks, but that's better than being illegal.
• New Wii stuff to interface with IOS. This can be broken down into basically stuff shagkur (the "author" of libogc) "wrote" by decompiling the Wii SDK, and stuff that everyone else wrote. Thankfully the former isn't too much and could be replaced given some effort.
• The old Gamecube drivers. This is where the huge problem lies. Stuff like handling of pads, memory cards, EXI/SPI devices (RTC, ROM, etc.), audio, DSP, video, graphics, and even the matrix math library. These are all inherited in Wii mode and required. The problems range from identical APIs but different code (not too common), through mostly manually decompiled code with the same APIs (most of it), to straight ripped assembly code (matrix math library and a few system tidbits) and at least one binary blob ripped verbatim from Nintendo (the DSP program to perform memory card unlocking).

The big fat problem is the GX driver (graphics). Everything else could be replaced with little to average effort, and the hardware is documented enough to get it to work.

Personally, though, once the large obstacle that is legal GX is overcome, I'd advocate developing an entirely new system from scratch, based on Linux or eCos or some other embedded OS, working on top of mini and ditching Nintendo's IOS. I've tried to get people interested in such a project for quite a while but haven't really found any significant support, and by now I've mostly move away from the Wii and on to other systems.