Revolution for DS or, as it is better known - the R4 chip, is the biggest enemy of the Nintendo DS game developers, since it allows the use of pirated software. Its popularity is so big that, according to studies and surveys, about 90% of the DS games in the United States are pirated! In other words, it costs the industry tons of money.

Things could change sooner rather than later, since Nintendo and no less than 54 other companies have filed a suit against the R4 manufacturers, as website Kotaku reports, asking for the cease of marketing, sales and importation of these devices, using the Unfair Competition Prevention Law as legal grounding.

Nintendo released a statement today, saying that the R4 devices "allow illegal uploading from the Internet" and they are "causing severe damage to our company and software makers, and this is something that we cannot possibly overlook". It seems that they're up for a rather lengthy lawsuit, since it appears that the R4 chip itself is not illegal, but what people do with it. And this, as strange as it might sound, will definitely cause some pain to the suing companies, especially because it looks like there are third party developers who created (legit) programs using the format.

Among the 54 companies which filed the suit, there are top names such as Arc System Works, SNK, Capcom, Koei, Jaleco, Square Enix, Sega, Taito, Takara Tomy, Tecmo, Hudson, Bandai Namco Games, The Pokémon Company, Yukes and Level Five. If the members of each of these companies would actually be present in court, we'd probably have a meeting bigger than the E3 summit this year and it surely wouldn't be that boring!

Back to the R4 chip, here is what it is/does: a direct and illegal download conduit for games and other software. It fits a Nintendo DS' game cartridge slot and allows the transfer of anything previously stocked on a flash memory stick, using SD micro cards.