Lik Sang On Nintendo Piracy Judgment

Thanks to several readers for pointing to the official statement over at Lik-Sang.com's website, regarding Nintendo's $600,000 anti-piracy court case judgment against their GameBoy and GameBoy Advance 'backup' devices, which we covered a couple of days ago. The Lik-Sang.com statement claims that the current Lik Sang site is not involved in this court case, but goes on to reference the official statement of Lik Sang International, posted as a comment on the original Slashdot story. The statement says that LSI are appealing the decision, and further argues that "..the very same hardware under attack is used by thousands of hobbyist users and even professional developers for legitimate purpose. Very embarrassing for Nintendo: even the large publisher[s].. bought hundreds and hundreds of Flash Cartridges from my company for beta testing."

Re:Before you moderate it down...

[Anonymous Coward]

I thought that copyright infringement was a crime.

Facts about the Gameboy Advance:

The BIOS is not directly readabl as the PC has to be in a certain range before memory accesses to the BIOS region read the correct data. The plan failed when people found bugs in the GBA BIOS that gave them access: one of BIOS routines would happily read the BIOS memory and return it to the calling program.

Multiboot transfers are encrypted, but there is now hardware that supports the multiboot protocol.

One might also consider the cart interface to be some sort of "embedded security" because it is not a standard interface, but this argument sounds a little weak.

As far as I know, the Gameboy Color and Gameboy Advance are mostly or even fully documented for programming purposes on hobbyist websites.

People interested in pir...stea...illicitly obtaining copyrighted material in order to play games without having to purchase them can use one of the many emulators available or write the games to compatible flash rom cartridges and use the real hardware to play them. The same hardware used for flashing the cartridges also allows users to read the contents of game cartridges.

On the other hand, this hardware is also used by commercial and hobbyist developers alike. It is less expensive and makes development less inconvenient.

Don't I have the right to backup?

[Anonymous Coward]

Isn't it a granted right that I can backup every software I paid money for? Ok, in this case "piracy" might be involved. But Lik-Sang is hardly to blame for it like a car manufacturer is hardly to blame for how many people were killed in accidents. I hope this is clear... or.. nah I doubt it is clear since still many people who probably do not even RTFA keep saying that the opposite is the case. However, backup units ARE/WERE(?) great development devices. But that is over now for the sake of.. nothing?

Missing the point?

[specialJay]

Me thinks the other comments are just missing the point. Nintendo wants control over these devices. They do not want these devices available for just anyone since they can be used for illegal purposes as well as for legitimate development. By going after the source of these so-called "backup units" they are making it more difficult for the casual user to be able to use the GBA ROM files that are pervading the net and eating into the profits of their developers.

If you're a legitimate developer, there are proper channels to go through to obtain these devices to facilitate your development. Nintendo just wants some degree of control over their distribution, and rightly so.

Re:Missing the point?

[Anonymous Coward]

"If you're a legitimate developer, there are proper channels to go through to obtain these devices to facilitate your development. Nintendo just wants some degree of control over their distribution, and rightly so."

Licenced developers can get them but if your company needs 200 flash cartridges and 50 flashers,
would you like to pay 50$/cart for a 3rd party one or several hundred $ / cart for a Nintendo flash cart?
A big company could easily save 25-50000$usd on buying 3rd party ones. What would you do?

I myself have both Nintendo flash carts and most of the 3rd party ones and I can tell you that I
much rather use the 3rd party ones.
Also, a few years ago when the GBA first came out Nintendo couldnt provide enough of the test units.
And at that time they cost several thousands of dollars. Not only that but they sent the ones
they had to the developers in Japan first, so many of us developers in the US and Europe had to wait
months to actually get them! That is really a good way to show your developers support.