14 DAY TRIAL // Piracy is one of the biggest, if not the very biggest concern of the gaming industry. It's the most physical form of expressing the anarchist inside gamers without constructing home-made bombs and trying to overthrow a government. Some hackers decide to cheat the protections on different software to “stick it to the man,” others, the more idealist ones, claim the right to have free access to information while some just seek fame or some kind of profit from it. In the end, piracy is taking something that a lot of people have worked to create and making it available under your own terms.
The act may seem like common thievery, but it's kind of an altruistic act really. Most groups that crack or in other way bypass security protocols for games put a lot of effort and work time into this process and most of them end up giving the game, along with their work, for free. Still, games are serious business and it's a billion-dollar industry so piracy is bound to be addressed with serious force. Stealing from the rich may be a way to earn the public favor, as opposed to stealing from the poor, but the rich have more henchmen.
In Japan, Capcom along with 54 other game makers, which also include Nintendo, have filed a second law suit against the four importers and sellers of the R4 Revolution DS device. The Tokyo District Court is expected to set things straight for the companies that have been wronged by this. The R4 DS cartridge contains a Micro SD card that allows users to run illegally copied DS games and homebrewed software on their platform.
A similar action was taken by the companies in July 2008 when they managed to win an injunction halting the sales of such devices. But it seems similar products are still being used, so they've felt that a second law suit was required. "We are expecting the entire society, including users, to recognize that our company and other software manufactures have extremely sustained damages from proliferation of illegal instruments, such as the game copying devices, and the computer industries have sustained serious damages because of those vendors, and we expect to influence the society to eliminate such illegal instruments from the market," Capcom said.