News R4 cartridges banned in the UK

It was only a matter of time really, surprised shops got away with selling them so blatantly for so long. Sure they have legitimate uses but 90% of the people that buy these use them to play games for free.

 

Good.

As it stands, hand-held piracy is far too easy. So easy, in fact, that many people don't even realise what they're doing is illegal. I've seen parents buy R4 carts for their children just thinking it's another game.

Little anecdote: A close friend of mine is a modeller for Rockstar Leeds. He had just finished slaving over (aka crunch time) the PSP port of 'Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars' which they had sent to Sony for certification only a couple days previous. He was riding the bus home one day when a child and his mother sat down next to him. Out of his pocket the kid pulled out a PSP. What game did he boot up? You guessed it, Chinatown Wars.

Yup, before the game was even on store shelves, this little kid was playing it. He told me it felt like all his hard work had just been thrown in his face.

So yeah, I'm glad the developers got a little victory today - no matter how small.

 

Cool story bro. Lets ban memory cards! Without them this kid can't play pirate PSP games.

 

I assume you're equating the legal uses of memory cards to that of an R4 card? Are you seriously that naive? Or are you just clutching at straws?

The Judge in this case (who knows the law better than everyone here) said it perfectly:

There are plenty of things which have been banned in the UK that also have perfectly legal uses (hello, knives?). It's the judge's job to decide if the illegal uses outweigh the legal ones and if so, are there any alternative methods available of accomplishing those legal uses?.

Any "reasonable person" (which our law is based on) will agree that the percentage of users who own R4 cards for pirating purposes is probably well over 90% (and that's being conservative). You can argue all day long that you just want to use it to play MP3s or portable video files, but the fact remains that is not what the vast majority of people use it for.

The judge in this case decided that yes, the illegal uses outweigh the legal ones and yes, there are plenty of alternative ways to complete the legal tasks that the R4 offers (phones, iPod's, mp3 players etc).

Now, lets apply that same test to your ridiculous and facetious "memory card" argument:
Do the illegal uses of memory cards outweigh the legal uses? No.
Is there alternative hardware that can accomplish the same task? No.

Do not assume that legal decisions are devoid of context.

 

Ban personal computers, without PC's nobody can pirate any digital content