28th July 2008, 11:48 PM
http://kotaku.com/5030319/nintendo-and-5...4-in-court
While I'm against piracy, I have to note something here.
A very large company will ALWAYS use the law to crush any potential competition, regardless of morality. It always seems to happen. There is a certain hilarity to the idea that an American branch will "fully support" a freedom while their European or Japanese branch sue over the exact same issue. Nintendo's not suing any of these card makers in America because they know they couldn't win, but at the same time, if they truly felt this was horrible, you'd think they would challenge it anyway just to make their position known, but they don't! It says they know how the people would view it if they attempted it. There's something I can't quite articulate, but some sort of inconsistancy is there. Their morality is entirely relative to whatever the laws of a particular nation let them get away with.
As for my position on these cards, from what I can tell their use in pirating games is of course aweful, but these don't seem to be outright copies on a card like I thought (and like China is famous for). These are blank cards, and there's an active homebrew scene out there making perfectly legit stuff for the DS. I'd probably get one of these cards myself if I had any inclination to open up my DS for hacking (as opposed to the PSP, which is hackable via software entirely). I'd love to see what the homebrew scene makes of the touch screen for their own custom games, and really punishing legitimate use because of a few (thousand) bad apples just isn't right. In other words, I am NOT for making these things illegal. What would it mean? Some cop sees a kid with one of these in their DS and the kid is arrested and charged even if the card is just full of custom homebrew? Is that right? Is "sending a message" more important than only punishing the guilty?
Yes, it's hard to deal with copyright violation in today's world, but they are treating this situation like it's time to declare martial law. Copyright violation is NOT sufficiant grounds to make people give up their rights. Granted, we are talking about Japan and European countries with these lawsuits, but ideally we should be moving FORWARD by repealing such laws and advancing freedom to be closer to American ideals (such as repealing the "blasphemy laws" in England), not charging headlong into this sort of overbearing law creation.
I mean it would be like hacking everyone's cell phones to not only listen in to everyone's conversations but create a sonar map of an entire city.
...That was a total BS part of Dark Knight by the way. They need a "bad tech" web site to note just how utterly impossible that is. Last I checked, most cell phones don't even have stereo microphone tech, which is the bare minimum for detecting the direction of a sound bounce, and that's just for starters.
While I'm against piracy, I have to note something here.
A very large company will ALWAYS use the law to crush any potential competition, regardless of morality. It always seems to happen. There is a certain hilarity to the idea that an American branch will "fully support" a freedom while their European or Japanese branch sue over the exact same issue. Nintendo's not suing any of these card makers in America because they know they couldn't win, but at the same time, if they truly felt this was horrible, you'd think they would challenge it anyway just to make their position known, but they don't! It says they know how the people would view it if they attempted it. There's something I can't quite articulate, but some sort of inconsistancy is there. Their morality is entirely relative to whatever the laws of a particular nation let them get away with.
As for my position on these cards, from what I can tell their use in pirating games is of course aweful, but these don't seem to be outright copies on a card like I thought (and like China is famous for). These are blank cards, and there's an active homebrew scene out there making perfectly legit stuff for the DS. I'd probably get one of these cards myself if I had any inclination to open up my DS for hacking (as opposed to the PSP, which is hackable via software entirely). I'd love to see what the homebrew scene makes of the touch screen for their own custom games, and really punishing legitimate use because of a few (thousand) bad apples just isn't right. In other words, I am NOT for making these things illegal. What would it mean? Some cop sees a kid with one of these in their DS and the kid is arrested and charged even if the card is just full of custom homebrew? Is that right? Is "sending a message" more important than only punishing the guilty?
Yes, it's hard to deal with copyright violation in today's world, but they are treating this situation like it's time to declare martial law. Copyright violation is NOT sufficiant grounds to make people give up their rights. Granted, we are talking about Japan and European countries with these lawsuits, but ideally we should be moving FORWARD by repealing such laws and advancing freedom to be closer to American ideals (such as repealing the "blasphemy laws" in England), not charging headlong into this sort of overbearing law creation.
I mean it would be like hacking everyone's cell phones to not only listen in to everyone's conversations but create a sonar map of an entire city.
...That was a total BS part of Dark Knight by the way. They need a "bad tech" web site to note just how utterly impossible that is. Last I checked, most cell phones don't even have stereo microphone tech, which is the bare minimum for detecting the direction of a sound bounce, and that's just for starters.