R4 Crushing Japanese Industry With Its Mighty Jaws

Although I’ll be the first to agree that the R4 and similar flash cards have not been good for the industry, I probably wouldn’t label them as any form of terrorism. Yutaka Kobota, president of the Association of Copyright for Computer Software in Japan, isn’t so level headed. In an interview kindly translated by the folks at 1UP, he made the following bold claim in relation to Japanese sales of flash cards,

This is an issue that affects our national interests, and personally, I see it as a form of information terrorism that is crushing Japan’s industry.

It may seem a touch pedantic to fuss over the use of ‘terrorism’ but Mr Kobota is being a bit of a drama queen. I have to wonder at this point what form a terrorist flash card dealing organisation would take. Perhaps a paramilitary organisation threatening to murder judges unless their demands for the free distribution of Advance Wars: Dual Strike are met. Or we could be dealing with a looser collection of terrorist cells. Each one operating independently, indiscriminately hacking into servers and filling them with Mario Kart DS ROMs. Or maybe we’re just talking about a bunch of geeks getting games for free.

There’s no real justification for piracy. I remain extremely skeptical towards anyone who claims to ‘try out’ pirated games before buying. Equally so, i’ve never really approved of pirating games that someone would supposedly never pay for. Still, this kind of hysterical wailing and gnashing of teeth by industry figures never plays well. I sincerely doubt that ‘Japan’s industry’ will be brought to it’s knees by R4 sales. Yes, they may be affected and by all means go after the people that sell R4s. Just don’t make it sound like a threat to national security.

Via: Joystiq