Are you guilty of downloading pirated songs, movies or games, which result in software companies and the music industry to lose billions of dollars annually? Or are you the one who advocate P2P file sharing by uploading copyrighted material to the internet? Hopefully, you fall in neither of these two groups.
The Federal Court of Australia has ordered a Queensland man to pay a massive fine of A$1.5 million (US$1.3 million) in damages to Nintendo, and to cover the company’s legal fees after he was found guilty of illegal copying and dissemination of a pre-release version of Super Mario Bros Wii to the Wii hack site www.yafaze.com in late 2009, which has since been shut down. The Japanese game console company issued the statement today and said the damages would compensate for the loss of revenue caused by his actions.
Jame Burt, a 24-year-old manager working at games retailer Electronics Boutique in a store in Brisbane since 2004, admitted that he had illegally copied and uploaded the popular game title on November 6th, a week before the game’s official Australian release. Forensic investigators summoned by Nintendo to track down the source of the illegal product found out that Burt was the one behind it. Nintendo obtained a Federal Court order on 23 November to search his premises in Sinnamon Park, Queensland for electronic data related to his email, website and social networking accounts.
“Piracy is massive and getting bigger and bigger but I think the courts are taking it more seriously now as you can see by this,’ said Rose Lappin, Nintendo Australia managing director. ‘As an industry it’s a major problem and the cost is massive to the industry and to developers. Some of these guys say there are more downloads and patches than there are actual sales for them. That’s shocking for our industry.”
In the statement Nintendo said that piracy jeopardizes the strength of the video game industry. “Fewer sales of Nintendo’s hardware and software systems means fewer resources that Nintendo, its licensees, developers and publishers have to create and market new video game products which is ultimately to the detriment of video game enthusiasts.” Australians have always been the first people in the world to receive the newest products or software as the Oceania country is more than 10 hours ahead of Europe and the United States. For the case of New Super Mario Bros, the video game was released in Australia exceptionally early — November 12, 2009 in Australia, November 15, 2009 in North America, November 20, 2009 in Europe and December 3, 2009 in Japan. However, release timings of future Nintendo titles may be postponed due to Burt’s indespicable actions.
“Nintendo Australia is always pushing for games to be released here at the same time as the rest of the world, so we were pleased to get New Super Mario Bros. Wii before anyone else,” the spokesperson said. “Unfortunately, due to the actions of this individual, future release dates may be affected for Australia, which is disappointing for us.”
Via Torrent Freak