While we treat the ongoing battle between publishers and DS flash cartridges in Japan as an entertaining spot of cat-n-mouse, in Britain, things are a little more serious, with a man sentenced to prison for importing R4 carts.
Yun Can Meng, a British resident, will spend the next twelve months behind bars after importing 26,500 of the cartridges, with the intention of selling them in the United Kingdom.
R4 carts, and other similar devices, circumvent the copy-protection measures in place on Nintendo’s DS handhelds, allowing users to play not only custom titles or backups of games they legally own, but in some cases pirated copies of games as well.
He was busted after a joint investigation by the The Entertainment and Leisure Software Association’s Crime Unit and local police.
The ELSPA’s Michael Ralinson was understandably pleased, beaming “Our crime unit is pleased with the outcome of this trial and pleased to see the Court of Appeal’s copyright judgement is being robustly enforced. Intellectual property (IP) theft is an important issue for the country’s videogames industry – as is protecting it.”
Imagine how long he’d have been locked up for if they’d caught him with a blank DVD!
UK R4 Card Importer Sentenced [GamePolitics]
picky
Monday, January 18, 2010 at 9:43 PMyeh an interesting analogy….blank r4 carts net prison time, he must have had other game softs or some such
matt30822
Monday, January 18, 2010 at 10:11 PMI wonder if they would try to take down some guy who imports 10 R4 cartridges instead of 26,500. I think we all know that police have better things to do then bust a guy who brings in 10 R4 cartridges that go around copy protection.The only reason that this guy got nicked was because of the pure amount and high figure attached to him.
So lesson is – small orders attract less attention :P
I would have laughed if this guy did get all these in one shipment, in one massive order.
Peter Richards
Monday, January 18, 2010 at 10:39 PMWhy is it that R4 cards *full* of DS games are being blatantly sold at Paddy’s Markets in Sydney every weekend and nothing is ever done about it?
ASDASD
Monday, January 18, 2010 at 11:35 PMBecause you’ve never been to markets till you’ve been to Paddy’s?
It had a themesong, this guy didn’t.
Matt
Tuesday, January 19, 2010 at 3:57 AMbecause they are lazy and much wait for something big and obvious to come by like the guy mentioned.
lcb
Tuesday, January 19, 2010 at 5:56 AMholy crap really? any more fun stuff at paddy’s market? goddamn i need to get myself over there!
mario
Tuesday, January 19, 2010 at 8:50 AMMan r4′s are old news, there are so many other options now, AceCard II, etc. r4 is probly one of the most dated options now, why people are still importing it who knows… But whatever works really. I guess
dead5ega
Wednesday, January 20, 2010 at 11:57 AMR4′s have other uses than just playing Pirated Games…