ELSPA and Nintendo evaluating R4 chip in UK

by Steven Williamson on 8 February 2008, 13:16

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ELSPA on the prowl

It appears that the recent story regarding the sale of the notorious R4 Revolution for Nintendo DS, the chip that allows users to download and play pirated software illegally, has spurred the Entertainment & Leisure Software Publishers Association (ELSPA) into action in the UK.

ELSPA has confirmed that they are working closely with Nintendo to crack down on pirates and are currently evaluating the cartridge. The R4 chip can currently be bought freely on the Internet from sites such as Amazon and NDS-Gear, and it seems as though ELSPA will be trying to do everything in their power to get it removed from public sale.

“The ELSPA IP crime unit is evaluating the R4 game copying device, as it allows for the downloading and play of illegal Nintendo DS software avaialable by the internet,” an ELSPA spokesperson told MCV.

“We are aware that Nintendo has taken actions against these devices in other countries and we are working closely with them to consider the next step in the UK.”

“Broadly speaking, it is well known that ELSPA’s IP crime unit fights vigorously against products and devices that violate our members’ IP rights, items that include devices that circumvent the security of our members’ products and promote the play of illegally copied software. We take great stock in ensuring that this continues to be the case.”

Source :: MCV


HEXUS Forums :: 6 Comments

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Posted by deleted - Sat 09 Feb 2008 11:55
You can't really blame them. It does however depend on how they go about this, if they try to get sellers such as amazon to stop selling it, well, that's fine. It's different though, if they just see this as a money spinner and target end users like the riaa have done.
Posted by deleted - Sat 09 Feb 2008 17:17
Well that's stupid, it's like saying you have to ban PCs or BitTorrent because you can pirate games with them. The R4s “intended” use is to play homebrew games, which just happens to mean it can play other ROMs as well.

Again, that's still not illegal so long as you own a copy of the game, I keep a lot of the DS games I own on my M3 Real because it's much easier to just deal with 1 cartridge.
Posted by deleted - Sat 09 Feb 2008 18:14
As i've said before, the homebrew is getting very good on the DS and it'd be a shame to ban the chip - fortunately i already own an R4, but i don't see the point of pirating games i don't own because most of them are crap :P

Have a look at the gbatemp release list and it's appalling.

Pocket Physics for the win! GBAtemp Forum -> Pocket Physics v0.4

And they've picked it a bit late to start cracking down..
Posted by deleted - Sun 10 Feb 2008 10:16
I see your point about homebrew stuff, but if you genuinely think that the vast majority of people buy them to play “backups” or “homebrew” games… come on. Really?

I'm not saying they should be banned; they do have legitimate uses as mentioned above, but let's not fool ourselves here! Most people buy them so they can download freebies from the net.

/goes off to buy one before Fishcake Jnr loses another game :D
Posted by deleted - Sun 10 Feb 2008 15:44
Flash carts for Game Boys, such as the R4, M3, Supercard and so on have been around since the very first Game Boy, in various formats and have been freely available. I personally own a supercard + passkey for my DSLite, and I use it with MoonShell for watching videos, listenin to MP3s and carrying around images. Combined with some TransFlash cards you can cart loads of video/music around with you which really makes the NDS comparable to a PDA. Opera lets me browse the web, moonshell for media, a stack of NDS carts for games, and I have a PDA tool on there for taking notes etc.

Yes, you can use these carts for playing downloaded roms - but you have *always* been able to do that with flash carts. Why suddenly have a go at them now? Maybe its because of the rise of P2P in the past few years, so suddenly every man and his dog can get illegal downloads rather than only those with the right “connections”..so now they are starting to worry about sales.

Either way, they won't be able to ban these, they will have no case in law to do so. If they did, then you would also have to ban CD/DVD writers, VCRS, or anything else that is cabable of enabling piracy..it gets stupid

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