Nintendo continues its anti-piracy crusade

Console maker and game publisher Nintendo forces local distributor to cease and desist selling DS mod chips.

The big media reported it pretty heavily last week - Nintendo's on a tear when it comes to stopping pirates. The company successfully sued a lone gamer for pirating a Nintendo title, and now it's going after the suppliers of R4 SHDC Cards.

R4 cards allows users to a do a whole mess of stuff with their Nintendo DS, from watching movies and listening to music, to working on homebrew mods and applications. Sadly, it can also be used for copying games.

In a chest-thumping press release sent out today, Nintendo's announced a successful action against local supplier GadgetGear. The company has not only agreed to stop importing the R4 cards, but has also agreed - according to the release - that they are in fact "game copying devices [that] infringe both Nintendo's copyright and Nintendo's trademarks and that they are illegal circumvention devices."

Which, to editorialise, is akin to saying that a motor car is an illegal pedestrian murder device that violates the breathing rights of humans everywhere.

GadgetGear is also going to pay Nintendo $620,000 in damages - far less than the $1.5 million the alleged pirate settled to pay last week.

Nintendo also says in the release that it is "contemplating bringing further actions against other sellers of game copying devices in Australia." A quick Google search brings up a huge list of suppliers, both local and OS however - Nintendo's got its work cut out, but then again, it's got a lot more legal power to throw around. 

What's also interesting to note is that a lot of suppliers, like R4card.com.au, explicitly state that using this card for copying is"illegal to use an R4 card for uses such as downloading illegal games, music, pictures, movies etc, this is backup device for property you own."

It's a worrying move, to be sure. Atomic's always supported the homebrew and console modding community; we will continue to do so, but it remains to be seen how far Nintendo's going to take its staunch anti-piracy campaign. Will the company end up targeting modding articles and tutorials?

Only time will tell.

We've contact Nintendo for comment, and will hopefully have a response later today. In the meantime, what do you guys think - any users of R4 cards out there?