R4 cards now illegal as Nintendo wins court case
July 28th, 2010 • 32 Comments
If you like your Nintendo DS gaming illegal, you’d better start stumping up the reddies, because the law is spoiling the fun from today. Nintendo has won a High Court fight that to stop R4 cards – a device that can allow illegal copies of games to downloaded and played – from being bought, sold or advertised in the UK.
The R4 is a blank game card that can be loaded up with pirated software; they can be used to get hold of new releases or re-live old school Gameboy titles, but also play games created by bedroom developers, which was the defence of manufacturers Playables and Wai Dat Chan.
The judge pointed out that as a defence it was fairly piss-poor – ‘homebrew’ development and games may be a legitimate use for the cards, but it was hardly the most obvious use – that and the fact the cards had to bypass security measures to work.
Commenting on the case, Nintendo said:
“In the UK alone, there have been over 100,000 game copying devices seized since 2009. Nintendo initiates these actions not only on its own behalf, but also on behalf of over 1,400 video game development companies that depend on legitimate sales of games for their survival.”
Presumably people will still be able to get it from some dodgy chinese ebay sellers. Nintendo should stop taking the piss with their prices. They charge premium rates for fairly budget games.
So expect to see the sales of NDS etc fall
Does this mean that game prices will come down as they always cite piracy as the reason prices are high, and DS games are for whatever reason the most expensive, I often end up paying more for a DS game than a PS3 one.
Doesn’t bother me. I’ve been using my ghettoblaster and taping the carts to Memorex C90s on the ‘mono’ setting.
You’ll never take me alive, coppers.
Considering R4 haven’t made a good cart in years I’m wondering if this applies to all manufacturers?
It does apply to all cards, the R4 is just the one cited in the case.
R4 Cards Now Illegal :(
Alex, its not the cards but the software u run on em, got wood?!
I’d heard of these, but I have never seen one. It sounds like a good day for copyrights.
The places that sell them will just have to move to Jersey then, bust most of them already come from HK anyway. I think the only big UK seller is really 7dayshop.
Plus, DS is shit and old now, everybody’s waiting for the 3DS ones… after the 3DS comes out sometime next year and the games all cost £50 for rehashes that we get 6 months after the rest of the world (except Australia).
So they can’t be bought, sold or advertised in the UK anymore… I thought everyone got them direct from China anyway… I got mine from my favourite extreme deals site
‘Readies’ as in ready cash, not ‘reddies’ which is what happens to your bollocks when someone puts chilli powder in your underpants. Spelling fail again.
This wil only impact the DS sales.
Oh and
WTF IS DIS REAL
im a dick fuck me i have 100′s
this is yet another situ where the corprate wins!!!
i have got these for the kids and for the most part just cary backups of games we already own!
as they have a habbit of loosing the origonal!!
however we also use these for running there mp3 collection…..
is this judge in his wisdom saying that this is not a fair use of such carts?
Terry Tibbs is the man to speak to about getting these on the black market
Doubt that judge has ever played a computer game.
Maybe Nintendo should lower their prices
Great news. Hopefully this discourages these devices coming out for the 3DS
@D72
“Doubt that judge has ever played a computer game.”
?? They’re great fun yes, but there obviously bad for the DS in the long run, devlelopers etc.
Gamers should be delighted with this news.
Just ordered 2 of them – they’re going cheap now
They really believe that this will prevent piracy?
Oh dear..
Obviously they don’t otherwise they would have sacked whoever monitors these sorts of things. What they believe is it will reduce piracy, which logic dictates it will.
I doubt this will make a massive difference. People have been pirating so many things for years.Those are and have been illegal for a long time. It just means you buy them from a mate or as mentioned, a HK website!
The only way to stop piracy is to ban eye patches.
“Nintendo DS Cart. Talk to me”
greedy bastards
Perhaps the music / movie industry should take computer makers to court, such as Dell – for providing the hardware to have a machine to copy CD’s and DVD’s. Or perhaps go after the browsers for having a means of browsing the interwebs ‘stealing’ things.
I don’t see the problem, R4 aren’t around – only fakes – DSTi or M5 seem to ring a bell as the ones that are about, sorry I bought one a couple of years ago but don’t play Nintendo anymore. Do you have the story right, or is it carts with software to circumvent copyright protection / play homebrew (or however you want to word it)
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i have no idea where i will be able to get these from now.
oh, and the things you see in my online shop… erm… err… those are just erm… hang on, errrrrr
they are not actually R4′s or DSTT’s. they are customized cases for micro sd cards, to keep them safe from being lost.
thats it….
plonk your valued micro sd card into one of my special cases, and you can then keep it stored in your nintendo DS where you wont lose it.. ah ha.
think that will work?
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The “nearly the same internals as all the previous models of DS” comment was as trollish as you can get, since it’s blatantly wrong and you try to refer to it as a fact, while bashing the system.