Rather than pursuing individual downloaders as many media companies have done in the past, Nintendo has gone after the technology that games pirates use to copy and play games they find on file-sharing sites.
The ruling is a precedent against circumventing security such as that of Nintendo’s DS console.
In this case, the defendant was Wai Dat Chan and his company, gadget importer Playables Ltd, but the ruling means it is no longer legal to import, sell or advertise the devices in the UK at all, thanks to the High Court precedent established in the case. Nintendo says it has seized over 100,000 game copying devices in the UK alone since 2009.
It follows a similar judgment last week in the Netherlands against the R4 and similar devices, which allow gamers to download software from the internet to play on the Nintendo DS instead of paying £30 ($47) for cartridges.
Software pirates use R4 cards to store and access hundreds of illegally-obtained DS games on one cartridge. Retailers have used numerous arguments, from the legitimacy of the homebrew community (whose hobbyist software requires an R4 or similar device for storage), to anti-competition grounds, but Nintendo has been consistently successful in its aims to quash piracy on the DS by stopping R4 retailers.
"Nintendo promotes and fosters game development and creativity, and strongly supports the game developers who legitimately create new and innovative applications," said Nintendo in a statement. "Nintendo initiates these actions not only on its own behalf, but also on behalf of over 1,400 video game-development companies that depend on legitimate sales of games for their survival."
Consoles are often sold as loss-leaders, with their producers and third-party publishers dependent on games sales for the bulk of their profits. But the games industry has suffered less from piracy than record labels because it is harder to run downloaded games on consoles such as the Nintendo Wii or Sony PlayStation than to play downloaded MP3s on music players such as Apple’s iPod.
Nintendo won a legal battle in the Netherlands as a court found 11 online retailers guilty of infringing on the game maker's intellectual property through sales of R4 cards and mod chips for DS and Wii.
Software pirates use R4 cards to store and access hundreds of illegally-obtained DS games on one cartridge. Mod chips installed in consoles also allow users to play pirated versions of video games.