Nintendo Asks For Government Help To Fight Piracy 296
Nintendo, in its annual report to the USPTO, has requested help in dealing with piracy overseas, both from the US government and from several other countries in particular. China, Korea, Brazil, Mexico, Spain, and Paraguay are listed as the greatest contributing nations to piracy of the company's products. Nintendo suggests, for example, that "Chinese customs officials must stop shipments of game copiers and other infringing products out of China, and China should work in the coming year to eliminate barriers to its enforcement laws," and that "the Spanish government implement laws protecting the creative copyright industry and enact laws against Internet piracy."
Region restrictions and crap like this (Score:1, Informative)
This is not the correct way to treat gamers, really! Get rid of regional restrictions or go down, I really wish you this, dear Nintendo.
I just want to add that I've only bought Nintendo consoles so far (5 platforms). But I will rethink my opinion about the company, if they don't change their bad attitude.
Re:Whine whine whine (Score:2, Informative)
Well you know, the XBOX extra warranty isn't available in most countries, nor xbox live for that matter.
Re:Whine whine whine (Score:3, Informative)
That is, pretty succinctly, the problem with calculating lost revenue by adding up all of the pirated copies...
It's one of the problems. Another one is people who download large batches of stuff and sort out the crap later - if they had to pay up front they'd be putting some amount more effort into filtering out the crap beforehand.
Re:Whine whine whine (Score:2, Informative)
Nintendo makes a point of always profiting on hardware. They haven't lost money on a single Wii or DS console, and manufacturing cost reductions have not turned into price cuts at retail (they haven't needed to cut prices - they're still selling consoles faster than they can produce them.)
I don't think Nintendo has ever sold a console below break-even point.
Re:The USA is not your mom (Score:3, Informative)
Piracy IS LEGAL here in Spain(for video and audio) (Score:2, Informative)
Yeah, that's right. Here in Spain, it's simply legal to download, upload and/or share music and films, if it's non-profit. Also, it's been ruled that pages that encourage sharing films and music and have revenues from ads are also legal, in part because otherwise google would be illegal, as google also has links to torrent files (try searching for "filetype:torrent" in google).
Unfortunately, Spanish Law makes an exception with copyrighted software. So it's legal to share music and films but not software. Anyway, I'm PROUD to say that software piracy is also widespread here in Spain (the exception is that businesses don't use pirated software).
Re:Piracy? What Piracy? (Score:2, Informative)
Right on. I've had an R4 since day one, and freely admit to downloading NDS ROMS. The only one I've bought is Zelda.
1) Convenience. I have at least a dozen games on a 1 GB MicroSD. That's the ONLY way I'm going to be able to carry around a variety of games without losing half of them.
2) Quality. A lot of DS games really suck. I don't even keep most of the games I try. If I had paid for them, I'd regret it.
Mother 3 is awesome. I ordered a Slot-2 flashcart just so I could play it. I can see why Nintendo didn't bring it over to the US... if you're expecting Earthbound, the style is just as cute and bright, but the story so far is dark and tragic.
Re:The USA is not your mom (Score:2, Informative)
The great thing about Japan is if you go and buy any gaming magazine from a newsstand, it's full of step-by-step instructions and screenshots on how to rip games or use bootlegs. :)
Re:While I can see Nintendo's point, I wish they'd (Score:4, Informative)
I would be willing to pay $5-$10 (includes shipping) for a replacement disk. I send them the original scratched disk and they send me a replacement. They can even send it back in a generic box.
Re:Whine whine whine (Score:3, Informative)