Nintendo rips into R4 pirates with latest court win

By Alex Zaharov-Reutt
Friday, 19 February 2010 11:14

Your IT - Entertainment

The R4 piracy cartridge, used to circumvent protections Nintendo puts in place to stop piracy on the Nintendo DS, is on public sale and display even at my local newsagent for $40, but for how much longer now that Nintendo has won its second lawsuit in a couple of weeks against the scourge of piracy?

Nintendo, a company that is arguably the world’s most successful electronic games company, has scored two impressive wins against piracy in Australia over the past two weeks.

First, it was an AUD $1.5m win against a pirate who uploaded a copy of Super Mario Bros Wii to the Internet a week before its general release, due to a slip up by a retailer who sold the game before it was meant to go on sale.

Now, through the Federal Court of Australia, Nintendo has won an AUD $520,000 settlement against a distribution company known as RSJ IT Solutions which distributed the mod-chip used to defeat Nintendo’s anti-piracy protections in a cartridge known as the R4.

Two directors, James and Patrick Li, who run the gadgetgear.com.au site, have also been ordered to pay AUD $100,000 each, and to cease selling the R4 cartridge immediately.

The cartridge takes a standard MicroSD or MicroSDHC card, onto which pirated games can be loaded, limited only by the capacity of the card in play, and the ability of the pirate to download pirate copies of Nintendo DS games.

RSJ IT and gadgetgear.com.au has now been told to stop selling the chip, although many are already in the marketplace, but with places like even my local newsagent offering the chip for sale, the R4 cartridge won’t disappear overnight. 

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