The R4 is a tiny Chinese-made device – costing around £14 – that for more than seven million owners of Nintendo's hand-held console, the DS, has blown wide open its capabilities. Combined with a small memory card and plugged into the back of the DS, it enables the console to play MP3s and videos, as well as store copies of games you already own.

Crucially, however, it also enables the user to play pirated games from the internet which can be downloaded for free. Add to this that it's simple to use, and available through retailers such as Amazon, and you can see why the R4 and devices similar to it are bringing video game console piracy to the mainstream.

Nick Welsh has two young children who love their computer games and own a Nintendo DS. He heard about the device from another parent while on holiday. For Welsh, buying a R4 solved both a logistical and a financial problem. The trouble with kids is you pay £20 or £30 for a game, and they could only play it once, he says. Let's say I sit down and download 10 new games, the way it ends up is they'll only really play one or two or those, and the others get replaced. I wouldn't be able to afford that number of games.

Since all the games can be stored on one memory card, which stays in the device, it also offers convenience. You can have 70 or 80 games on a 2GB card, says Welsh, and they're all on the back of the machine. There's no fiddling around with cartridges – it's all there to hand.

Jodi Daugherty, Senior Director for Anti-Piracy at Nintendo, has been tackling pirates for 14 years and believes the fight against the R4 is one of the most challenging she has faced. What is different with these devices is how they're distributed and the impact they have with regards to the internet, she says.

As well as issuing warning letters to the websites on which the games are hosted, Nintendo is also targeting both the Chinese manufacturers and the distributors who sell the devices, and have conducted several raids on factories. Last July, Nintendo – along with some 50 game producers – launched a lawsuit in Japan against distributors of the R4 and similar devices.

Daugherty also says that Nintendo are working with online retail giants Amazon to curtail the global sales/distribution of game copying devices which violate our intellectual property rights.

Region Locking to be Introduced on DSi

As a frequent traveller I find that geographical functionality sucks. I wonder who the smart arse is at Google who thinks that Blogger menus should be shown in Thai language just because I happen to be browsing in Thailand.

Based on article from slashgear.com

Nintendo’s new DSi console launch is disappointing in that DSi titles will be region-locked.

According to a Nintendo spokesperson, while normal DS titles will continue to be region-free (i.e. games you buy in Japan will work on European and US handhelds) apps and software for the DSi will be region-locked. That includes both downloads from the new DSi Store and any cartridges that are DSi-specific.

Nintendo’s justification for this is that they plan custom internet-connected software and functionality that will be unique to the different regions. Presumably that will include geographically-specific language translations. Titles will also be assigned different age recommendations, depending on region.

A federal judge in Minnesota has ordered a new trial in a copyright infringement case involving a woman who was told by a jury to pay $222,000 to various record companies for illegally copying and distributing just 24 songs.

In doing so, US District Judge Michael Davis also rejected a key argument used by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) in the Minnesota case and numerous others - namely, that the mere act of making music available for download in a shared computer folder constitutes illegal distribution.

Davis' ruling is being seen as a setback for the RIAA's controversial campaign against music piracy, especially since he is now the third federal judge to have flatly rejected the trade group's making available argument. What isn't clear, though, is the extent to which his ruling will actually benefit the defendant in this particular case.

The Pirate Bay has successfully appealed the decision of an Italian judge who had ordered ISPs to block access to the popular BitTorrent tracker last month. The Court of Bergamo decided that this block was unlawful, and that Italian users should regain access to the site.

This August, out of nowhere, The Pirate Bay was “censored” in Italy following a decree from a public prosecutor. The block didn’t prove to be particularly effective, as traffic from Italy only increased. Nevertheless, The Pirate Bay was determined to reverse the decision, and in that mission they have succeeded.

The Court of Bergamo has now lifted the block, and ISPs are again allowed to grant their users access to the most frequently used BitTorrent tracker on the Internet. More details on the decision, and the reason why the block was reversed, will be made public later.

Update: Pirated Legal Explanation

11th October 2008

The Court of Bergamo decided that this block was unlawful, and earlier this week they explained why. According to the court statement (Italian), no criminal court is allowed to issue an order to ISPs to block traffic to a foreign website, based on alleged copyright infringement. Italian law implements an European Directive, 2000/31 CE, which this means that this ruling should be valid in other European countries as well.

Under Italian law, this is possible only for child porn and for unauthorized gambling, but there is no such provision for copyright infringement, Pirate Bay’s lawyers Giovanni Battista Gallus and Francesco Micozzi explained to TorrentFreak.

The European Parliament has voted in favor of an amendment that will prevent member states from implementing three-stikes laws. Disconnecting alleged file-sharers based on evidence from anti-piracy lobby groups restricts the rights and freedoms of Internet users, according to the amendment.

The power of anti-piracy lobbyists has grown significantly across Europe this year. In the UK, six major ISPs are working together with the music industry to start mass warning file-sharers. France has gone even further, and proposed a law that will enable the entertainment industry to disconnect alleged pirates on their third warning.

Both the MPAA and RIAA have pushed other countries to adopt similar legislation as well, but it will be hard for them to succeed in Europe. In April, the European Parliament spoke out against these anti-piracy measures, by saying it would be conflicting with civil liberties and human rights and with the principles of proportionality, effectiveness and dissuasiveness. This statement was backed up by an official vote.

The amendment, drafted by Guy Bono and other members of the European Parliament, was adopted by an overwhelming majority. 573 parliament members voted in favor while only 74 rejected. Satisfied with this outcome, Bono stated in a response to the vote: You do not play with individual freedoms like that, and said that the French government should review its three-strikes law.

It is scary to see how lobby groups are awarded powers that should only belong to law-enforcement agencies. Evidence should never be collectedly by parties who gather it in their own interests, and it is a relief to see that the European Parliament agrees on this.

Electronic Arts, stung by a siege of criticism from gamers who took issue with the copyright restrictions the company placed on its Spore game, this morning issued an apology and said it would loosen the electronic locks on the game.

We've received complaints from a lot of customers who we recognize and respect, said Frank Gibeau, president of EA's Games Label, the division responsible for Spore: We need to adapt our policy to accommodate our legitimate consumers.

The customer anger erupted largely on video game message boards and in user reviews on Amazon.com's Spore page. The game's ratings have been hammered by critics of the installation restriction, with nearly 2,500 of the 2,900 Amazon reviewers giving Spore only one star.

EA officials said the controversy caught them off guard.

The company said today that it would boost the limit to five computers. It also will allow players to transfer the game an unlimited number of times so long as each copy is installed on no more than five computers at the same time. EA also said it would sometimes let players go beyond that limit, depending on the circumstances.

A Spanish court has ruled that a site providing links to P2P downloads is operating legally. The Provincial Court of Madrid ruled that Sharemula.com, a site offering eDonkey links to movies, music, software and games does not break the law. The court’s decision is final and cannot be appealed.

Following a Federación Antipiratería (Anti-piracy Federation) investigation in 2006, 15 people were arrested in Spain in connection with the operation of Sharemula.com, an eDonkey (eD2k) indexing site. eD2k links are similar to URLs or .torrent files, in that they contain no copyright material themselves, but may point to such works.

Spain’s Brigade of Technological Investigations claimed that the site was illegal and should be closed. Just under a year ago the case was heard, but sadly for the entertainment industry, the court ruled that the case against Sharemula should be dismissed. It said that neither the site nor administrators had operated illegally by offering links to copyright works, since they had not done so for profit or commercial gain.

However, the entertainment industry did not accept the ruling and appealed the decision. The Provincial Court of Madrid ruled in the appeal that the entertainment industry has no case against Sharemula, and since it has broken no laws, the case should be dismissed. This dismissal is final and cannot be appealed.

Danish ISPs have rejected proposals from the music industry body, IFPI, for a 3-strikes and you’re out policy to deal with illicit file-sharers. In a joint statement, the telecoms companies said that they would not be a part of detection and monitoring activities and that the solution to piracy should come from elsewhere.

Efforts to reach a voluntary agreement between the IFPI and ISPs in Denmark on the issue of unauthorized file-sharing have failed. The telecoms companies have completely rejected the demands of the music industry.

The IFPI wanted to be able to hunt down file-sharers, report them to their ISP and have them implement a so-called 3 strikes policy. They proposed that the first time someone got caught sharing copyrighted files, they would receive a warning from the ISP, the second time they would have their Internet connection slowed down. After a third warning, or strike, the user would be disconnected from his ISP and banished from the Internet.

ISPs in the UK recently reached an agreement with the IFPI to send out warnings to alleged file-sharers, but rejected any further sanctions against their customers such as speed capping or disconnection.

Electronic Arts is going to ease up slightly on its digital rights management (DRM).

The upcoming Command & Conquer: Red Alert 3  will still use SecuROM as used in Mass Effect and Spore. But 5 installs will be allowed rather than the previous 3.

Premier Executive Producer Chris Corry responded to Spore's backlash and wrote on EA's official support forums that Red Alert 3 would ease up on its copy protection. In addition to allowing two more installs, the game will only require a one time online authentication. The EA published Mass Effect for the PC previously required users to authenticate their game online every 10 days, this requirement was later removed.

A first for the Command & Conquer series is that Red Alert 3 will no longer require users to insert a disc to play. In addition, if owners need to install the game more than five times, EA Customer Service will be on hand to supply additional authorizations on a warranted case by case basis.

Music and movie studios are attempting to develop a new type of DRM that would allow customers more flexibility in playing content on multiple devices.

The Digital Entertainment Content Ecosystem (DECE) would establish a list of devices in your personal "domain", and minimizes or removes restrictions within that domain.

TechCrunch summarizes DECE and notes that many of the big corporations have decided to support it. The goal is to create for downloads the same kind of interoperability that's been true for physical products, such as CDs and DVDs.

Where it gets really interesting, though, is the group's stated intention to make digital files as flexible and permissive as CDs, at least within the confines of someone's personal domain.

Once you've acquired a file, you could play it on any of your devices -- if it couldn't be passed directly from one DECE-ready device to another, you'd be allowed to download additional copies. And when you're away from home, you could stream the file to any device with a DECE-compatible Web browser.

Cleveland police have charged Alan Ellis, the former administrator of the defunct BitTorrent tracker site OiNK, with conspiracy to defraud the record industry.

Ellis will face magistrates at a committal hearing on 24 September, a police spokeswoman said. Five individuals who were arrested in June for uploading music torrents to OiNK will also appear to answer charges of criminal copyright infringement.

All the alleged offences could carry prison sentences.

The charges follow a lengthy investigation code-named Operation Ark Royal. Ellis was arrested in October 2007 in a raid on his Middlesbrough home. Coordinated raids by Dutch authorities seized the servers that hosted OiNK.

Police at the time alleged that running the BitTorrent tracker had been extremely lucrative, making hundreds of thousands of pounds.

OiNK was operated on an invitation-only basis, and accepted donations from members. It was prized by members for the high quality encoding of many of the files it tracked, and for its frequent pre-release uploads.

Spore was without doubt the most anticipated game of the year. The game itself has blown away the people who have played it, but the DRM encouraged thousands to get their copy illegally. Already Spore has been downloaded more than 500,000 times on BitTorrent, and this number is increasing rapidly.

Users aren’t too happy with the absurd DRM restrictions that come with the game. EA decided that people who buy a legitimate copy of the game, are only allowed to install it three times.

The idea behind DRM is that it will stop people from pirating the game, but in reality, it often has the opposite effect. As Forbes points out, many commenters on various BitTorrent sites now legitimize downloading this game because the official copies include some heavy and intrusive DRM.

You have the power to make this the most pirated game ever, to give corporate bastards a virtual punch in the face, deathkitten writes in a comment on The Pirate Bay. He or she is spot on. Spore has been the most downloaded torrent on The Pirate Bay for over a week, which is unique for a game.

The Pirate Bay, the controversial BitTorrent tracking site in Sweden, has become ensnared in a grisly, high-profile scandal involving the online circulation of autopsy pictures of two murdered children.

The Swedish media are focusing on The Pirate Bay's refusal to remove the links to the torrents of photos uploaded to the internet by its users of photos of two dead children.

The photos are from a police case file concerning the murder of two toddlers. The father of the children has asked the operators of the site to remove the links, but they've declined to do so, based on the group's anti-censorship policies.

The Pirate Bay's co-founder Peter Sunde in a post on his personal blog asks why the Swedish media isn't focusing either on the individual who had uploaded the photo, or on the country's laws regarding the way the government classifies information and provides access to government documents. In this case, someone had accessed the police investigation file, uploaded a torrent file of the photo onto the internet, and linked to the torrent on The Pirate Bay. Under Swedish law, most documents generated by the government are made available to the public unless specifically deemed secret by the courts. In this case, the documents were not sealed by the court.

The operators of the site announced on their blog Friday that they would no longer speak with the media after an incident on a Swedish television station, which Sunde effectively characterized as an ambush.

Sunde had participated in a television interview with Sweden's TV4 Thursday night, as he recounts on his personal blog. He says that he was promised that the interview would focus on policy and the issues of censorship and what gets published on the internet.

But when he arrived at the studio, he was faced with the father of the children who was participating remotely, and asked what he had to say to him, he recounts in a long and angry blog post.

Pirate Bay has been described in Swedish media as 'publisher' of the photos, which is technically not correct, says Mikael Pawlo, an internet entrepreneur based in Stockholm who's been following the case. But Pirate Bay only provides aggregated tracking information on the torrents, which are in turn distributed peer-to-peer, without ever being relayed through Pirate Bay. But he adds: Pirate Bay is also in practice the main distributor of information on how to download the photos.

Sunde takes exception and writes on his blog that the media characterizes the operators of The Pirate Bay as terrorists, and as people totally without emotion, and as bloodthirsty devils. Shame on you Sweden. And shame on you in the media.

Frustrated Spore users are slamming Will Wright's new release with poor, 1-star reviews on Amazon.com.

Of 642 user reviews posted as I write this, 586 are of the 1-star variety, hardly what one would expect for such a hotly-anticipated game. The negative reviews invariably mention the digital rights management (DRM) system built into Spore. This one, posted by Amazon user dwemer22, is fairly typical.

I was EXTREMELY excited about this game... Then I got on Amazon and noticed that a large number of the forums devoted to Spore were complaining of something called "SecuROM." I did a little digging and discovered that SecuROM is a piece of [DRM] software that is installed along with the game to prevent you from installing the game more than three times, in an attempt to combat piracy.

I read further through the forums and the Wikipedia article and discovered that SecuROM does a number of other things too, including sending mysterious packets of data back to the company from your computer (identity theft, perhaps?), prevents you from using certain programs, such as DVD and CD burners, makes it impossible for you to modify your root drive and, worst of all, will NOT uninstall without the help of a third party application. So I cancelled my order...

The pirate version, now available without the nastiness, is therefore, ironically, a superior product.