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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."
And yet they still don't give a damn about piracy, technologically speaking, or at least they care about it a lot less than they care to annoy homebrewers and importers.
Proof: the last three iterations of Wii System Updates closed exploits used to run homebrew, but an ancient exploit that is still being used for piracy has remained untouched for that long (and counting). More proof: it would be trivial for them to detect and block modchips at the system update level, but so far they haven't even tried. Even more proof: NIntendo seems to be happy deliberately bricking your Wii if you have imported it, but it certainly hasn't even crossed their mind to do that for people who pirate. Yes, System Update 4.2 deliberately bricked all Korean Wiis that had been switched to the USA or EUR region. And by this I mean an explicit if(korean_detected()) { show_error_code_on_boot(003); }.