The UK's Entertainment and Leisure Software Publishers Association claims that the vast majority of North American DS owners are pirates, and not the fun kind with peglegs and parrots, either.
Our partners in crime, say the ELSPA, are R4 chips, which allow DS owners to download illegal pirate DS software from the Internet.
"In America it's thought 90 per cent of Nintendo DS users are playing pirated games because of R4s," said John Hiller, manager of the ELSPA's Intellectual Property Crime Unit.
The R4 chip, which costs about $50, circumvents the piracy protection in the DS by tricking the console into thinking its seeing a legitimate game. The chips, instructions on how to use them, and the ROMs of DS
games are all very easy to find online.
It's certainly true that DS piracy is rampant, but that estimate of 90
percent seems entirely too high to me. Nine out of ten people in North
America are playing pirated DS games? Really? Perhaps I'm naive, but I just don't buy that the middle-aged men I see playing Brain Age and the young girls playing Hannah Montana are closet software pirates. Feel free to tell me I'm wrong.
Chips are down for Super Mario [The Sunday Post]
