Distributor of mod chips needs to pay Nintendo damages, says Australian judge

Nintendo and an Australian distributor of a mod chip for the DS have settled out of court, but with a binding verdict from a federal judge, reports ITnews. The distributor needs to cease its activities directly and pay Nintendo damages of over half a million Australian dollars. Individual users that wish to sell their chip, can look forward to a 100.000 dollar fine.

At stake is selling the R4 chip for the Nintendo DS. With this chip, that fits the console’s game cartridge slot, users can copy their own content (saved games, UGC, etc) directly to the DS memory. In practice, the chip is used to a large extent for distributing illegal copies of games.

Internationally, similar cases elicit different responses in courts. In Spain and France, the courts ruled differently in similar cases. The judges upheld that users have a “freedom to tinker”. The French judge ruled that a manufacturer is not allowed to just shut out other developers and even suggested that Nintendo should consider adopting a more open attitude towards developers, like Apple did with its appstore.

A judge in Spain ruled similarly. The judge affirmed that, indeed, the chip violates Nintendo DRM, but that it also enhances opportunities for legal use. Therefore, the court ruled, a ban on the mod chip would go to far.

The High Court in South Korea did rule that selling hardware for the primary use of playing pirated games is punishable.

19 February 2010