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GameCube (Games) Portables (Games) Entertainment Games

Nintendo Wins Lik Sang Piracy Case 55

Posted by simoniker from the mario-sending-heavies-to-collect-cash dept.
Thanks to an anonymous reader for pointing to an Adrenaline Vault article indicating Nintendo has won substantial damages against GameBoy 'backup' device vendor Lik Sang. According to the original Reuters story, "Nintendo Co Ltd said on Thursday it has won one of its 'most significant anti-piracy judgments ever' against a Hong Kong firm that sold devices capable of copying its games and putting them on the Internet for limitless downloading." Nintendo has been awarded an interim amount of HK$5 million (US$641,000) in damages, and they say Nintendo software publishers as a whole lost US$650 million in sales last year due to piracy.
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Nintendo Wins Lik Sang Piracy Case More

Nintendo Wins Lik Sang Piracy Case

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  • Next comes the end to video recording and...gasp...computer data recording. The International "software piracy" issue has esculated and become too much of a scape goat of late to rip away any freedom and right of use that they want to. Watch out.

    • Re:Disgusting (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 19, 2003 @01:50PM (#6245857)
      Eh, I've talked to maybe 20-30 people who have this unit, so this isn't statistically significant, but everyone used it to download copyrighted roms, not for homebrew games. So why don't you blame them for downloading them instead of nintendo for trying to stop them.

  • How does this affect the US? Does it allow Nintendo to go after people who purchased products from Lik Sang? Does it prohibit another Chinese manufacturer from making similar products and selling them here (other than that they too would likely lose a suit in HK)?

    BTW -- Thanks to the DMCA production of this device would be patently illegal in the US. It wouldn't take a court to decide that either... Nice to know the Chinese have more "freedom to innovate" (hey that's catchy;) than US citizens do. Make
  • BS.

    They assume just cause someone download it for free they lost a sale. Most people who download stuff would of never bought it anyways, even if they could not of gotten it free. They should just enjoy the popularity of the product and acept the sales they get. [even a downloader must buy GB to play it on] Anyone with brains does not spend $5-600 a year on GB crap. Well not anyone with a real life or a good drug dealer near by.

    • ...even a downloader must buy GB to play it on... you know the GB and GBA emulaters are quite mature now, right?
    • Anyone with brains does not spend $5-600 a year on GB crap. Well not anyone with a real life or a good drug dealer near by.

      Thanks for clearing that up. I assumed that all the money I was spending on those GB games was because the games were fun and interesting to play. Now, thanks to your marvalous insight, I have realised that I am, in fact, brainless or without a "real" life or drug dealer.

      Just so you know, Nintendo, Sony and Microsoft don't make money on hardware sales, they make it on software sales

  • = $40 billion in the eyes of the *IAA.

    thats not THAT much, is it? /sic
  • before they got taken off of the website. I think the GBA backup device is awsome. I admit to trying games before I buy them, especially when my little brother wants a new game. I download the game onto the cart let him play with it, if he likes it tell my parents to buy it for him. This way, he doesn't waste my parents money by buying games he will never play. Almost half of his GB collection he didn't play more than 2-3 days because the games sucked.

    Just like with all technology, there are good u
    • Anyway, this sucks... I don't think its Nintendo's fault, I think it's the judge's fault. Nintendo just wants to make more money, can't blame them for trying especially since there are many people using the backup devices for pirating.

      But make more money how? How many developers want to develop for a company that has no concern about copyright infingement? This was not about only first party titles. This is just one more venue that Nintendo has to stick with Sony and Microsoft...not for the consumer,
  • What other possible uses does this device have though besides copy carts and dumping roms onto blank carts? In which both are illegal. You don't need to backup your game carts. I don't know anyone since the days of atari that had a video game cart just spontaneously go bad on them.
    • Well I intend for one to make a game one day. I don't have the time right now, working full-time and going to school full-time sort of make it hard to do fun stuff. Which brings in one really useful feature, I can put all of my games on to one cart. So all I am toting around is my GBA, but I still have 3-4 games. Cause you never know if you are going to have enough time to jump in to Golden Sun some more, or if you only have enough time for some mini-games on Wario Ware. Then when I am done, I can take
    • How about carrying around 5 games on one cart, which never has to leave the GB now? Illegal but useful.

    • Re:what other uses (Score:2, Insightful)

      by bobroberts ( 461651 )
      There are plenty of free public domain roms out there which are not illegal to play.
      Plus the flash carts also make a good development system if you want to try your own game on something other than an emulator.
    • For starters, there's an entire underground GBA programming initiative. I've muddled around with it a bit. Wrote a little etch-a-sketch app. Ported my "Life simulator" code. Made partical fire based on the routines at LongbowDigitalArts [longbowdigitalarts.com]. It's great.

      In fact, being able to do that is great, if you get a large enough cartrage (about 300$ for 1GB), you can fit 32 of your GBA games into one cart so you don't have to constantly switch them and fumble around with games and worry about losing them.

      And, for th

  • Companies must have a special ass that they always pull these so called "losses due to piracy" from. I mean, they sure as hell don't seem very plausable.
  • Once again, bad people ruin fair use for good people.

    I have lots of NES and SNES games that I'd love to be able to play on my GBA portably, but can't because the flash carts are impossible to find now. Why? Because people were just warezing like mad with these things. The only time I ran into a person with a flash cart (at a theatre), he bragged about how he had so man games, he couldn't even remember them. The flash cart he carried had 5 of them at the time on it.

    As someone who owns over 250 games, I
    • How would you be able to play SNES games on the GBA? The cpu is very different as is screen size and other issues, a flash card wouldn't help unless you had some amazing emulator that ran SNES games on the GBA which would be piracy in some regions anyway (by argument of copyright protection). Just because you can upload the 65c816 binary code to a cartridge doesn't mean it will run on a gameboy.

      Unless you build your own portable SNES and NES I find it unlikely that you'd play SNES and NES games portably.

  • Not New for Nintendo (Score:2, Interesting)

    by ronfar ( 52216 )
    Nintendo has always agressively gone after people who provide unlicensed content for their systems. The managed to get Tengen, after all. I think they only left Color Dreams/Wisdom Tree alone because they didn't want to mess with the Christian Bookstore market. That was way back in the 8-bit days, when there was no question of copyright violations. (Tengen was publishing content with permission of the copyright holders. Even in the case of Tetris, it was just a case of license confusion.)

    You have an

  • Officiall comments by Alex Kampl / Lik Sang Intl. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by liksang ( 683427 ) on Saturday June 21, 2003 @08:36AM (#6261019)
    I hope with the following Information I am able to give you a little insight into the recent
    happenings and about the misleading press release of Nintendo.

    Before the Nintendo Press release has been distributed, I have delivered a Notice of
    Appeal to Nintendo, as well as to the High Court of Hong Kong. I am not exactly sure
    why Nintendoâ(TM)s press department didnâ(TM)t mention a word about it.
    The Judgment was not a real trial yet, it was a Summary Judgment with a single Judge.
    Usually such Summary Judgments are in case of bounced bank checks where no trial is
    needed and everything is straight forward.

    With all due respect to the High Court of Hong Kong, but no Intellectual Property (IP)
    specialist was assigned to this case. Already at the first hearing the Judge mentioned that
    itâ(TM)s a pity Hong Kong has no IP specialist anymore and that he finds the Copyright Law
    of Hong Kong very confusing. After some research, it looks like the Judge is a specialist
    for maritime laws. He made several comments during the hearings which seemed to
    observers like this was his first IP case ever.

    The Summary Judgment itself was based on the Section 273 of the Hong Kong Copyright
    Ordinance about âoecircumventing a copy-protectionâ. No copy-protection exists in the
    Gameboy or Gameboy Advance game cartridges. The Judge didnâ(TM)t hear a specialist or at
    least an independent 3rd party expert opinion - he took it for granted from the
    explanations by Nintendo that there is a copy-protection.

    Furthermore, the Judge found that âoeby analogy with drugs, it[the setcion 273] is not
    aimed at the drug addict but at the drug traffickerâ. I fail to understand his logic, as this
    would mean that the drug store selling the injection needles to drug addicts or maybe
    even the manufacturer of the container where the drug addict keeps the drug could be
    held liable?

    After legal actions in the USA against Bung Enterprises in the late nineties (for selling
    and manufacturing videogame development and backup equipment) this was the second
    Court Judgment ever regarding products of this nature. Regarding information made
    available to me in the Court Room, the case against Bung and its US distributor Carl
    Industries Inc was brought to an end in their disfavor by Bung not complying with Court
    Orders and not paying ordered penalties. The actual judgment was written by Nintendo
    representatives, without the Judge properly going through the arguments. The legality or
    illegality of the products in question has therefore never been argued in a real trial
    anywhere in the world. A serious trial, with competent Judges, is now definitely needed
    to settle the question once and for all. This is why I have decided to appeal.

    I am not happy about the direction where this is heading, neither are supporters and
    legitimate users of the tools. Again, I have to stress once more, 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, who made the original game used in Court for demonstrating purpose, bought
    hundreds and hundreds of Flash Cartridges from my company for beta testing. And so did
    numerous other top 10 publishers listed in the stock market.

    The products I have sold are not circumventing any copy protections, same as a Floppy
    Disk Drive and a 3.5" Disk doesn't â" in fact there is no copy-protection existing, as
    commonly known by the gaming industry.

    I completely understand Nintendoâ(TM)s fight against piracy, but I believe they are aiming at
    the wrong targets. With Digital Media and the Internet nowadays, publishers will have to
    change their strategy. They just canâ(TM)t win the fight against the Progress without removing
    our primary rights: presumption of innocence and the right for backup. Nintendo doesnâ(TM)t
    need to prove you are a pirate anymore, it is assumed you all are if you have the technical
    means to copy.

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