R4 Cards Now Illegal in the UK
The London High Court has ruled that the R4 cards used by pirates and modders of the Nintendo DS are now illegal in the UK. Because the cards circumvented Nintendo’s security systems in order to install unofficial content on the DS, they should not be able to be imported, be advertised or put on sale into the UK, according to the court.Many homebrew gamers had insisted that using custom made games did not constitute piracy, although the cards were used by pirates to download hundreds of free games. The cards were readily available off of Amazon for a few of quid and finding the dodgy games isn’t at all hard.
Nintendo said that they “[foster] game development and creativity, and strongly [support] the game developers who legitimately create new and innovative applications”. Developers will also take this as a victory and will hope the banning of the cards will stop more people from pirating their games. Nintendo claims that 100,000 game copying devices were seized in 2009.
Last week Nintendo won a similar case in Europe over 11 companies that were selling modding kits for the Wii and DS. The company said: “Nintendo protects its intellectual property rights globally and takes action to prevent the distribution of pirated software and devices that allow illegally downloaded software to be played.”
That annoying. I lost my DS lite + legit (see, non-clone) R4 card about a month ago :(.
Without it I have no reason to play DS games ever again.
I pretty much use my TTDS (same thing as an R4) so that I don’t have to carry around a ton of game cards, and so I can make back up copies of my save files.
If I lost my save file of Harvest Moon, I would cry. For days.
I bought one for a few quid and pretty much never used it. Although saying that, I barely used my DS.