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

Pro-piracy

[sopssa]

I often see many pro-piracy comments on slashdot on these things (probably also because pirates are more interested on the matter). But many times these are actual damages caused to companies. Putting out that game a week before surely counted a lot of illegal downloading and people not buying the game. Sure it's bad to for him, but those are the lost money for Nintendo. What's so wrong about them suing him?

Re:Pro-piracy

[anss123]

What's so wrong about them suing him?

There's nothing wrong with them suing him.

The Pro-piracy comments you've seen is (probably) more directed towards "freedom" as the technologies/laws that limits piracy also limits that much valued freedom.

Ergo pro freedom = there will be piracy

Re:Pro-piracy

[Feef Lovecraft]

Having RTFA I'd be more intrested in how he obtained this advanced copy of the game for distribution, was it as simple as importating it from another region where it had been released or was it a lapse in security that enabled him to get hold of this game?

Re:Pro-piracy

[marcansoft]

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); }.

Re:Pro-piracy

[Alphathon]

Exactly. I don't think I've seen that many people on here advocate piracy, it's usually anti-anti-piracy laws, such as the proposed UK law where suspected filesharers can be cut off without trial, disproportionate fines (especially from the RIAA) or the treating of bittorrent as illigal regardless of what's being shared (open source software etc). This can't really be treated as any of those. It would seem that the fine is roughly equivalent to 15000 copies of the game. That's assuming none is added for the crime, so it seems like a fairly reasonable fine. The only possible problem I can see is that he had to give over access to social networking sites etc. as that has little to do with the crime.

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:Pro-piracy

[jamesh]

Seriously. They aren't even trying. This isn't even remotely in the same league as Xbox 360 hacks and the like, which have evolved to be quite a bit stealthier due to Microsoft's detection efforts.

So the choices are...

1. don't try, and people will copy your stuff
2. try, and people will defeat it and copy your stuff.

I wonder which of the above two options is cheaper?

Re:Pro-piracy

[paeanblack]

There's nothing wrong with them suing him.

He should go to jail. He used the special access his job gave him to steal from Nintendo. Yes, I used the s-word. Redistributing unpublished content is theft...he stole something valuable and monetizable from Nintendo (the right of first publication), and they don't have it anymore.

What he did was deliberate and premeditated. He abused a position of trust. There is no "Haha, just kidding" defense or excuse for this crap. This kind of shit severely weakens the man-years of effort expended towards fixing broken copyright laws.

He's not cute. He's not funny. He's a criminal.

Re:Pro-piracy

[xtracto]

Hey marcan, first let me tip my hat for your work.

Second, I use some of those "oh noes piratz" enhancing mechanisms to copy my legally purchased games to a USB hard disk and play them. Note that I bought my Wii console while living in Britain, I have bought games in Mexico (where I am from) and USA (cheaper to ask a relative to get them from there) AND Germany (where I am currently living and playing games).

When I moved to Germany, I refused to take all my CDs/DVDs with me [Laugagge handlers at Lufthansa are a bunch of monkeys.. you should see the state of my bags when they arrived to Germany], therefore I put all the content (serveral music CDs, some DVD movies and several Wii games) into magnetic media and took them with me.

Having said that, I really applaud Nintendo for doing this specific move, and I completely believe that this is the *right* move to combat piracy.

It is not illegal to modify hardware you buy, it is not illegal to play a copy of your purchased media, however, IT IS illegal to distribute such media without copyright permit; and that is what Nintendo prosecuted with this guy.

Re:Pro-piracy

[steelfood]

No, that's still not stealing. It's still copyright infringement. If he say, stole the disc from his company and kept it in a vault, then that would constitute theft. Otherwise, it's still copyright infringement.

Re:Pro-piracy

[hairyfeet]

Not to mention most of us are for fair copyright terms but fair was about 20 miles back and we have gotten into so disgustingly greedy it is ridiculous. I can point out what is wrong with this picture in a single sentence....Steamboat Willie is STILL under copyright. The man has been dead for nearly a half a century, yet one of his FIRST works, made when planes were made of cloth and antibiotics were but a dream, is STILL under copyright.

There is a big fucking difference between fairly compensating the author so he/she can produce more art (which was the whole point of copyright, to enable those that create art incentive to create new works, which would then become ours through public domain) to allowing multinational corporations to pervert our system with treasonous bribery to create a license to steal. So while I am not a pirate, those that are? Really don't care. They robbed US FIRST, by stealing our public domain away from us, our kids, our grandkids, etc, and by locking our entire culture up behind a paywall. Copyrights were a contract, and the contract has been broken. "Forever minus a single day" is NOT limited copyrights, and until it changes and We, The People, get a spot at the negotiating table I can understand why folks wouldn't care about copyrights. After all, all they are doing is stealing from thieves.

Re:Pro-piracy

[qubezz]

More chilling - a corporation with suspicion of someone not 'busted' can get a court to confiscate every computer and device someone owns, and force them to turn over every password to every account they have so the company can root around for evidence for a civil matter (copyright infringement).

Maybe when the MafIAA alleges an IP address that might have been assigned to you at some point was infringing, and gets the thugs to toss your place and take anything they want and look at all your emails, texts, and friends online you might then want to complain, but you won't own anything electronic anymore to complain with.

There's a leak?

[Anonymous Coward]

Quick, we need a plumber.

Re:There's a leak?

[anss123]

Quick, we need a plumber.

It has always amused me that the most popular video game character by far is a "fat Italian plumber" instead of mister "awesome cool superdude".

Re:There's a leak?

[Ivan Stepaniuk]

Recentrly, Spain's Plumbers association honored Mario "For 28 Years Of Plumbing Accomplishments"

Re:There's a leak?

[Totenglocke]

One of the recent big ones was a cynical doctor with a lame leg and drug addiction.

I think you meant "One of the recent big ones was a completely honest doctor with a lame leg and takes prescription pain killers for the pain his lame leg causes him".

Sorry, but it really irks me when people call House a drug addict when it's been clearly shown that he's not (when his leg was temporarily better from the end of season 2 through early season 3, he didn't take any Vicodin - if he was addicted, he'd have continued to take Vicodin even after the pain was gone). Also, it bugs me that people call being honest about shitty things "cynical", but that's a lesser annoyance.

Proportionality.

[headkase]

There should be some kind of proportion to the damages, seriously that amount ruins an ordinary person for the rest of their life. Did the court deliberately set out to give him a life sentence of sorts? And if the amounts are to be set at company rates for individuals he should have his own choice just to do some time for it. Seriously, go on a walk for 3 years and move on in your life instead of being sentenced to financial death for the rest of your natural time.

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:Proportionality.

[twoshortplanks]

Break this down on a personal level - if someone takes a mallet to my car, I'm going to sue them for the value of the damage to the car, i.e. what it costs to compensate me for the damage they caused. If someone burns down my house, I should be able to sue them for the value of the house. The loss they have caused is not mitigated by the ability they have to pay for it.

Now, if you're going down these lines you need to separate out the punitive damages from the actual damages. The former should be taken in context of the ability for the person to pay (i.e. if you're suing a multinational, you expect punitive damages significant enough for them to sit up and take notice.) The later should probably not be.

Re:Proportionality.

[GF678]

You have a point. BUT... the guy didn't just trip over and somehow end up leaking the game by accident. He made a conscious decision to do what he did, knowing full well it could land him in hot water. It was an easily avoidable situation which he chose to place himself into, and paid the price. A very high price, and probably an immoral price, but he made his choice.

Re:Proportionality.

[Blue23]

here should be some kind of proportion to the damages, seriously that amount ruins an ordinary person for the rest of their life. Did the court deliberately set out to give him a life sentence of sorts? And if the amounts are to be set at company rates for individuals he should have his own choice just to do some time for it. Seriously, go on a walk for 3 years and move on in your life instead of being sentenced to financial death for the rest of your natural time.

Your suggestion seems to be setting the amount as punishment, not as restitution for lost sales. Now, I think the $1.5 million in lost sales is highly debatable, but I would think that whatever amount is awarded should be to recover the amount of lost sales, not a punitive amount as punishment that's scaled to what the person makes.

To flip this around, if someone committed a premeditated violent crime that they are sentenced to jail for 20 years, I wouldn't expect them to reduce the sentence for a 70 year old because "20 years might be all he's got left, it's a life sentence" vs. the 25 year old who committed the same crime.

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:Indecent Proposal

[hanako]

Ignoring your rude suggestions (Slashdotters don't like women? What a surprise!) the exact money figure is mostly a distraction from the issue. If he's done something *actually wrong*, then the fact that he can't pay the fine shouldn't mean that he gets off scot free. If he's done something that ISN'T wrong, then the fine being a thousand instead of a million makes little difference.

Re:Indecent Proposal

[Anonymous Coward]

What a heap of ill thought-out bullshit.

The defendant not having enough money isn't a valid reason for giving him a fine that, to him, is an economical death-sentence. "Scot free" doesn't even enter it. Why should a multimilionaire get a slap on the wrist if even that, and a poor guy get the economical death-sentence for the same crime? And is this a "crime" that really should carry the economical deathpenalty? Should any offence? Is it even consistent with human rights and the constitution of the United States?

(Yes, I know this wasn't a criminal case, but we're discussing principles here.)

Re:Curious...

[Farmer Tim]

Australian game releases typically lag behind other regions.

Australia: kicked from the world for unacceptable latency.

New Super Mario Bros Highest sold Wii game?

[adosch]

Nintendo is going to do what any other software mongrel in the free world is going to do when their production is illegally propagated to the masses. However, let's not overshadow the fact that the New Super Mario Bros Wii game did sell over 10 million copies as pointed out a little over 2 weeks ago.

Just for fun, I'd like to see what Nintendo's exterior argument was from 'loosing sales' because, clearly, they capitalized on the sales aspect and in any retail store I've been in recently in my area, even a month or better past the holiday season, has the game completely sold out.

Furthermore, pirating a game like New Super Mario Bros Wii, to me, seems quite contradictory. It's $50 in the store, but it's not like you don't get the gameplay you desire out of it. My wife and I have had this game since late Decemeber 2009 and we've played it daily ever since. With 8 regular levels and 8 unlockable coin levels to conquer, all the easter eggs to discover and the nostaliga of getting to play a killer 2-D game again on a modern-day gaming console, if you don't think that's worth your $50, I pitty you.

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.