Nintendo wins lawsuit against modchip dealer for copy protection circumvention

A court in Milan has convicted modchip dealer 'PC box' for unlawfully circumventing the copy protection of Nintendo game consoles. The Italian Court sought a preliminary ruling from the European Court of Justice (ECJ).

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The Italian seller of the mod chips, that are able to bypass the copy protection of game consoles, is convicted to pay damages to Nintendo. The judge ruled that the 'PC Box' dealer illegally sold a device to circumvent the copy protection of the Nintendo DS and Wii game consoles.

The Milan court also involved the ECJ in the process. The ECJ judges ruled that copy protections may be bypassed under certain circumstances, for commercial purposes, when the protections are disproportionate or not meaningful.

Nintendo argued that the PC Box chips were mainly sold to allow pirated games on its consoles. However PC Box noted that Nintendo not only has a copy protection in place on the games it sells, but also the console itself has technology inside to prevent third party software to be used.

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The latter, so argued PC Box, also prevents legitimate uses of the console such as homebrew software and playing movies and music on the devices. With the PC Box mod chip exactly these legitimate uses become possible. Therefore, so PC Box argued, the copy protection Nintendo uses is disproportionate.

After PC Box was unable to demonstrate any other ways Nintendo could use other and less restrictive copy protections, the Milan judge ruled in favor of the Japanese electronics giant. PC Box now has to destroy all its existing equipment, pay damages and all legal costs.

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