Nintendo Wins Lawsuit Over R4 Mod Chip Piracy

schliz writes "The Federal Court has ordered an Australian distributor to pay Nintendo over half a million dollars for selling the R4 mod chip, which allows users to circumvent technology protection measures in Nintendo's DS consoles. The distributor, RSJ IT Solutions, has been ordered to cease selling the chip through its gadgetgear.com.au site and any other sites it controls, as well as paying Nintendo $520,000 in damages."

Comments

Re:Games from different regions?

[bbqsrc]

This article seems rather flawed. R4 is a cartridge that takes micro-SDHC cards that could use homebrew applications on your DS. The DS is not region-locked whatsoever. They're evidently attempting to apply previous understanding of consoles to this one and falling rather short.

This is also not the only homebrew cartridge available for the DS, and by far not the best, but probably the most well known. I bought one so I could use emulators and DSLinux :)

How come the usual BS didn't work?

[aussie_a]

Modding consoles, selling chips to mod consoles and selling services to mod consoles have been deemed legal in Australia in the past due to the justification that they allow you to play backed up versions of games you've legally bought. Of course this is a valid reason to want to mod a console, but its also a "nudge nudge, wink wink" situation as the people who would actually mod their console only for playing backed up versions of their game would be in the extreme minority.

But this bullshit justification has always been enough in the past to stop people from facing the consequences of selling chips to get around DRM in consoles. So how come the excuse didn't work this time? Is it because its a civil trial? I understand the burden of proof is much less in civil, but if this was a successful avenue for corporations to take, I'm sure Sony would have done it years ago with the original Playstation. Did the defendants in this case mess up and get caught actively encouraging people to use their chip to pirate games?

I RTFA, but it was completely silent on how Nintendo managed to win this court case.

Re:Feh

[tepples]

I gotta admit I can list off about 16 people who all own DS's and Modchips, and half of them have yet to pay for a legal copy of a game for the DS. The other half run *mostly* modded games. None of them use the R4 for any legal 3rd party applications.

Then add tepples as #17 and replace "None" with "One". The microSD card that I used with my R4 back when I was still into DS includes MoonShell, DSOrganize, Colors!, Lockjaw, and a couple saved game management utilities, but no pirated DS games.

freedom protection

[sixsixtysix]

i don't care if 99% use something for piracy, the other 1% should never be affected. i should be allowed to tinker with whatever i buy, and if i can do something myself, i should be able to pay someone else to do it for me, whether it be modding my own hardware(or am i licensing the hardware?) or archiving my legally purchased media to whatever format i choose(seeing as i am allowed to record and archive content off the tv, why can't i use the internet as a dvr?).
what's even more ridiculous is the bullshit development licensing consoles have in the first place. anyone for that system, would have to be for development licensing fees on windows, linux, mac, etc. they are all computers ffs!