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Capcom, Nintendo Lead R4 Piracy Lawsuit

Tom Ivan's picture

By Tom Ivan

October 15, 2009

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Capcom, Nintendo and 53 DS software manufacturers have filed a lawsuit in the Tokyo District Court against four companies alleged to have been importing and selling the R4 Revolution game copying device.

The firms are seeking an injunction to block the distribution of such devices as well as damage compensation.

In February, the court ruled in favour of the game companies and made it illegal to import and sell the R4. But Capcom said in a statement that game copying devices are still widely available, leading the companies to take legal action.

“,,, Since we observe many cases that the vendors ignore our warning or the vendors do not show any sincere response to our warning, we decided to take legal action at this time.

“We are expecting the entire society including users to recognise that our company and other software manufactures have extremely sustained damages from proliferation of illegal instruments, such as the game copying devices, and the computer industries have sustained serious damages because of those vendors, and we expect to influence the society to eliminate such illegal instruments from the market.”

savagehenry's picture
On October 15th savagehenry said:

This is all coming a bit late. M3's N6's and R4's have been on the market for several years now. So even if Capcom were to get an injunction to stop the import and sale of these adapters there are still huge swathes of the community who already running adaptors and downloaded games quite happily.

Nothing beats free and with handheld games being particularly expensive I can certainly see the advantage of having these adapters, whether they are "Legal" or not is just besides the point, the simple fact of the matter is the end users want to play the latest games, if they can download it and save some cash then they will.

Doesn't matter how good the protection on your device, whether that be PSP or DS. There is always going to be some clever bugger that will manage to circumvent it. With games so readily available on various torrent sites the problem isn't going away any time soon. The same could be said of Pandora Tool and the various mod chips that you can get for 360, PS3 and Wii (that's only from this generation).

There seems to be an issue with the method of distribution, maybe the next generation will take the sort of direction that Sony have take with PSP, whereas software is downloaded directly from the source. However it only takes a little knowledge and a hex editor to circumvent any license certificate which ties the product to a user account. You could implement some sort of IFF (identify Friend or Foe) system to authentic directly from the network every couple of days renewing licenses or revoking them at will, but that would be reliant on having a permanent connection to the internet.

The technology is there, if companies wanted to make it more difficult for people to copy their product and post it up, but if maybe would mean changing the whole manufacturing process to do so and I guess once you've weighed up the pro's and con's of doing this it's probably far cheaper for these big companies to go after "Illegal" uploads / downloaders and manufacturers of various adapters and mod chips, making examples of them as they go.

The current system of distribution and copy protection at the moment on all systems is flawed, they should be looking more closely at how to fix that instead of going after small fry third party hardware developers and end users.

Raul23's picture
On October 16th Raul23 said:

Actually the PS3 remains uncracked to this day, amazingly enough. Which is actually really, really amazing after three years, this being the 21st century and all.

The idea that there will be no place left in the world for people to sell mods and hacks openly is a bit scary too.

savagehenry's picture
On October 16th savagehenry said:

I heard that there is already a solution for PS3 in the pipeline coming out of Australia.. not that I agree with chipping to play copies but a multi region BRD/DVD mod would be most appreciated. I use the PS3 as my DVD player since the my Pioneer multi region packed in.. but for the moment I haven't been able to play any of my region one dvd's and have resorted to ripping them and storing them on a DNLA server.

People have tried to stop Mod chips and adapters being sold in the past, but they've always been swimming against the tide. They get rid of one company and two more will pop up in it's place!!