So Wednesday, feds raided over 30 business homes and businesses looking for people responsible for the sale, distribution, chip installation, and importing of various consoles including X-Box 360s and Nintendo Wii systems. These acts violate the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998 of course, so after a yearlong investigation Federal Customs Agents decided it was time to make their move. Jodi Daugherty, the Senior Director of Anti-Piracy at Nintendo America, said that piracy losses for Nintendo and it’s designers and publishers may have reached the range of oh … $762 million dollars last year alone.
The names of the companies weren’t mentioned but they happened in Wisconsin, California, Florida, Hawaii, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Idaho, Illinois, Maryland, Michigan, Minnesota, New York, Ohio, South Carolina, Massachusetts and Texas.
Part of me wants to start ranting furiously about this but frankly, you and I and anyone with common sense knows that piracy is crazy these days. Certainly a good portion, I’ll even say a majority of the systems made by those raided were probably used to pirate video games. $762 million dollars seems a somewhat inflated number to me, but ok, let’s say it’s right or it’s around that level.
There’s a strong minority of those video game players out there that just want to play imported games. That’s it. If there was a chance they could go out and buy a game that’s only available in Japan and have it be playable in their X-Box or playable in their Wii or playable in their Playstation 2, they’d lay the money down for it. Unfortunately, that option isn’t available. I’m of the belief that this is BS. It’s causing the video game companies to lose profit in lost sales, period. You don’t want to release a game in the States because you don’t think you’re going to get enough sales to warrant the trouble? Just let them import it and the worse thing that’ll happen is you’ll make a little extra pocket change. You don’t even have to bother translating it, some fanboys will do it themselves and put it all in a pdf guide or something for you. The fanbase is there obviously. This is one of the few things that Sony actually got right with the Playstation 3, a region free system. Everyone makes more money.
Of course the companies are going to want you to believe they’re coming up in loses completely because of piracy instead of … I dunno … general incompetence or the fact that the systems cost a fortune. $500 is a lot of money to throw around for a system with one or two games you might want. Phew people in charge of their own money are going to purchase it and few parents are going to let their kids talk them into it either. You’ve got really want to get that system bad to become motivated enough to spend that kind of dough.
It’s all besides the real point. Is this really the time in this country to be using money and resources for something like this? These raids aren’t going to do anything in the long term. More will fill the void. Meanwhile you’ve got news coming out that there’s about 600,000 bridges in this country with 12% of them classified as structurally deficient and 13% listed as functionally obsolete. A problem that could cost anywhere from 63 billion to 200 billion dollars to fix depending on who you listen to. That’s another article for another day, but it’s something to think about.
I’m a firm believer in having priorities. People falling 60 feet into rivers among twisted metal and chunks of concrete are a bigger concern right now than going after unemployed video game system modders in their garages. Least I think so anyway.
