Japan prohibits import of R4 cartridges - Nintendo Sues

[dlevere]

Someone in the UK got sued by Nintendo and faced jail time for a year because he imported 26,000 carts. They got serious about the cartridges - dead serious.

Nintendo’s ongoing struggle against the now-infamous R4 cartridge continues, as another blow against the potentially devious device has been dealt in Japanese government. While the R4 has been illegal to sell in Japan since 2009, importing the thing was still technically legal. Now, however, that too has been prohibited by the Japanese Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry.

For those of you new to this perpetually unfolding saga of prohibition, let's recap: The R4 is a flash cartridge for the Nintendo DS, which allows users to play homebrew and/or pirated games on their handhelds. You can probably guess which usage was more common.

So far, distributing the R4 (and similar devices) has been banned in Japan, France and the UK. Additionally, Amazon and eBay have discontinued sales of the cart at the behest of Nintendo. Australian-based distributors of the cartridges have been successfully sued by Nintendo, and a man in the UK went to prison for a year for importing over 26,000 carts.

So, if you have to run an illegal import/export business, take our advice and shift away from the R4 and refocus on something less dangerous to work with, like cursed Egyptian artifacts, or mint-in-box time-traveler’s bones.

[Source] Joystiq

[bungholio]

I'm a little confused on this.

The R4 is a flash cartridge for the Nintendo DS, which allows users to play homebrew and/or pirated games on their handhelds.

Do they mean you can play backups, as in you obtain the game and back it up? Or do they mean you can easily download a game off the internet, put it on the cart, and play without a single problem? If it's the former, I'm all for being able to run a backup in case my actual bought copy fails somehow, because I don't want to shell out more money for something I already had. If it's the latter, I'd say keep giving people a boot in the butt to Nintendo.

[Helder]

R4 Sucks balls of the hairy kind! Get the AceKard2i which is much better in all aspects of its compatibility and updates and of course cheat support which is why I own one for every NDS I own.