Game Brain | Law and order for Mario and Luigi?

By Brian Diefenbach
Western Herald

What do you think of when you hear or see “Nintendo”? If you’re a gamer, you probably think of the many happy moments of your youth glued to your Super Nintendo Entertainment System.

Many non-gamers credit the “Big N” with making games fun and accessible to the whole family with the Wii. I can’t count how many times I’ve heard older people call a game console a “Nintendo” regardless of its brand.

Unfortunately, it seems that even the most beloved entertainment companies are really soulless corporate a-holes after all.

To be fair, I can’t in good conscience blame a company for suing individuals and companies that infringe on their products. You’d feel the same way if someone copied and distributed your work without paying you.

However, there’s such a thing as the letter of the law and the spirit. In the case of Nintendo versus a stupid Aussie gamer, the letter is scarlet and the spirit is mean.

James Burt of Queensland, Australia had the good fortune of picking up Nintendo’s “Super Mario Bros. Wii” a week before its November 2009 release in Australia. If Burt had kept his mouth shut and played his game in peace, he might have been OK.

But as stupid people are wont to do, he “shared” his good fortune with the fine people of the Internet. Burt claims that he copied and uploaded “Mario Bros.” to the Internet for download as a way of proving to his friends that he wasn’t lying about getting the game early.

Well, somebody found out about it and alerted Nintendo. Maybe Nintendo itself has agents trawling the Internet for illicit copies of their wares. Copyright infringement on the Internet is nothing new, but when whole copies of a game are available for free, it pays to keep an eye on the Web.

How Burt did it, I don’t know. Pirating a game ain’t like uploading photos to Facebook. Allegedly, a Wii hacking Web site was involved and has since shut down. The point is, game piracy is a deliberate and at times complex task. To hack a game and copy it takes some skill and specialized software. To distribute and download it means trawling backdoor torrent sites crawling with viruses.

There’s no question of Burt’s guilt; he openly admits his “mistake” and goes far enough to basically blame his Internet friends for making him do it. That excuse didn’t work in grade school when you Sharpie’d up the boys’ bathroom stall; it won’t work in a court of law, either.

Fast forward to February 2010. An Australian court hands Burt a whopping $1,500,000 fine. I wrote out all those zeroes to illustrate a point: that’s a boatload of cash, more than most high school grads will make in their lives.

If you want to get technical, the $1.5 million accounts for the criminal behavior and about 60 percent of lost profits on the estimated 50,000 copies of the game that were downloaded.

To add insult to injury, Nintendo has threatened to delay future Australian releases based on Burt’s behavior. Nintendo said it was “disappointing” for them. Disappointing for you? As if those poor gamers in Australia don’t have enough red tape from their own government covering their video games.

I get it, Nintendo. You want to make an example of the guy. Like I said earlier, I can’t blame you for being angry and wanting to send a message to pirates everywhere. But you might as well have asked for the death penalty and put the poor guy out of his misery.

Sack the guy with a couple thousand-dollar fine and call it even. Burt’s not a corporation; he’s a human being. Even violent criminals do their time and get released. Maybe we’ll have to reinstitute debtor’s prisons and make him the first inmate.

Or, the whole thing is just a twisted public relations stunt by Nintendo. Think about it: all the media attention he’s garnered in Australia could be used as an anti-piracy message. Burt seems to be pretty average by gamer standards; middle-class, Caucasian, 24 years old. What better way to target the gamer demographic than by making an example of one of them?

That isn’t to say Burt is innocent or was framed. Nintendo may have just capitalized on a high-profile piracy case. Maybe they promised him a reduced fine (or waived it entirely) in exchange for his cooperation. Or maybe I’ve been watching too much “Law and Order.”

The music industry has used this tactic for years in the United States. It seems that “Down Undies” (my affectionate nickname for Australians) are not immune to “The Man’s” boot heel either.

Whatever the case, we can take away a few things from Burt’s misfortune. One: software piracy carries a stiff penalty. Two: don’t mess with Nintendo. They are one of the most litigious entertainment companies in the world. I could write a whole column on the history of Nintendo’s legal battles.

I’m not condoning piracy of any kind. But if you must download or copy a game without giving the manufacturer and creator their cut, you’d better not get caught.

And for those of you wondering whether an esteemed gaming authority such as myself partakes of pirated games, I respectfully invoke my Fifth Amendment right. U-S-A! U-S-A!

Brian Diefenbach, a copy editor and columnist for the Western Herald, is a senior majoring in graphics and printing science. For more Game Brain, visit WesternHerald.com

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Posted by heraldstaff on Feb 18 2010. Filed under Weekend Scene. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry

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