Slashdot Mirror
UK Courts Rule Nintendo DS R4 Cards Illegal
CheShACat writes "A UK high court ruled today that R4 cards for the Nintendo DS are illegal, finding two vendors guilty of selling 'game copiers.' The ruling by Justice Floyd is quoted as saying, 'The economic effect on Nintendo of the trade in these devices is substantial as each accused device can store and play copies of many Nintendo DS games [...] The mere fact that the device can be used for a non-infringing purpose is not a defence.' No word in the article as to what law in particular they were found to have broken, nor of the penalty the vendors are facing, but this looks like bad news for all kinds of hardware mod, on any platform, that would enable homebrew users to bypass vendor locks."
Nintendo won a related lawsuit in the Netherlands recently, in addition to the one in Australia earlier this year.
One big feature of jailbreaking iPhones is that you can install apps on your iPhone in a similar manner that you could install NDS games on an R4. Does this also mean that jailbreaking an iPhone is illegal there, too? It should be noted that a major feature of the R4s, and similar devices, was that you can run homebrew on your NDS, which I have. There's some decent homebrew (not that great of a selection, but still some good stuff) available, such as the (excellent) roguelike game POWDER.
It gets better.
Now that the UK has banned guns, they are starting to go after knives.
They don't seem to be content with fighting knives, they want to go after kitchen knives too.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
I had a CycloDS for my DS, but your DSi's firmware blocked it from working. This page reminded me to look, and sure enough, I can now buy a nice Acekard 2i for like $15 and/or a Supercrad DStwo for about $35 that does things your console should do natively (such as GBA and SNES emulation), both of which use the same 16 GB Micro SDHC card that my CycloDS uses, all of which will work with my nice Nintendo DSiXL.
Of course, since I own physical copies of all the games I put on my flash cart, it's all ethically sound, if not legally unassailable. Fortunately for me, I am much more concerned with living ethically, if not legally, especially when in regards to stupid, anti-consumer laws like the ones that would outlaw this sort of thing. Although Nintendo might be screwed even in that case, because "Jailbreaking" a mobile device is now legal in the US. Since my DS is a mobile device, and the Acekard / DStwo are methods of "jailbreaking," -- i.e., running unapproved software -- well, seems to me the much loved DMCA that Nintendo would no doubt use to shut these things down in the US... wouldn't actually shut them down.
So thank you, Nintendo. Thank you for reminding me to look for a DSi compatible flash cart, and reminding me I need to do my part to support small development studios like the Supercard and Acekard teams.
because you can use something else as a doorstop. Can you use anything else to run homebrew?
Anyway, Auntie says that HMRC have siezed 165,000 of these things, that's a sizeable market. Hopefully pissing off that many ordinary consumers of Nintendo products (don't forget, all those people will have bought DSs) will hopefully hit them where it hurts.
FGD 135