December 4th, 2009, 4:39AM in Games by Joseph YoungView Comments
From MaxConsole:
We have just heard that Nintendo has today lost a major court case against the Divineo group in the main court of Paris. Nintendo originally took the group to court over DS flash carts, however the judge today has ruled against Nintendo and suggested that they are purposely locking out developers from their consoles and things should be more like Windows where ANYONE can develop any application if they wish to.Incredible news, indeed. I’ve always admired the French courts’ support of the individual rather than the company, and this is a huge slap on the wrist to Nintendo. Not only was one of their greatest annoyances not deterred in any way, but the judge goes on to say that Nintendo engaged in ILLEGAL ACTS by locking developers out in France’s highest court!
The ramifications of this are huge, as it indicates that flash carts are actually legal. Moroever, it could have bigger implications for developers and the like because Nintendo is deemed to be ‘illegally’ protecting their system by locking users out. Therefore, developers should not actually require separate development kits and should just be able to develop applications as they wish on retail versions of Nintendo’s consoles.
And on a final note, this truly was a HUGE court case, up in the main court of Paris France and seems likely to be relevant to the whole of Europe.
Essentially, if people have to ‘hack’ the system and use Flash Carts to do develop, then it’s all fine because Nintendo has left them with little other choice and the system should not be protected in such a restrictive way.
I highly doubt Nintendo is just going to take this sitting down. In fact, it may spur them on to greater efforts to control the flash cart and homebrew community (regarding understandable yet insensible piracy claims). However, they may find the rulings difficult to contest in the future, and hopefully, other justices may use this as a precedent when the war is brought to their shores.
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Heh, a little foolish to even be here, but meh.....
Writing articles might be good practice. A sort of 'daily exercise'.
Anyway, I am 18yrs old, a Gemini born in the year of the sheep. I like RPGs and platformers, and my main console is a NintendoDSi. I play football, American football, and rugby. I love the colors black and white. I hate orange. I'm pretty stocky but tall, definitely a bit heavy at 5'11 and 210lbs, with jet-black hair and brown eyes, and the eternal stubble. I dabble some in programming but work mainly with small processors in calculators, etc.
