this is a terror tactic by Nintendo to discourage other possible pirates.

That or Reggie just wanted to make sure he would win his bet : p

There is always lots of views where piracy are concerned, but the reality is its a crime and wrong. In the case of this guy, had he not uploaded the game to the net then he wouldn't be in the mess he is now, 50K people wouldn't of downloaded it and we wouldn't be posting on this forum about it, I feel little to no sympathy in this case as he was the architect of his own downfall.

Since you and a lot of other people seem to have missed it, he settled out of court. I blame the media for this one using the word "fined" which is wrong since he and Nintendo came to the agreement.

Given the guy was not going to be able to afford the settlement anyway and is going to have to declare bankruptcy, the difference between say $50,000 and $1.5 million doesn't make a difference, except that Nintendo gets a big number put in all the news headlines to scare off potential future pirates. While the $1.5 million might seem ridiculous to even settle on, if the court had ruled he pay it instead, he would not be able to declare bankruptcy so he took the smart way out.

I must say I disagree with the majority in this thread - the 1.5 million $ is far too overblown fine for such an act. Sure, the guy did a stupid thing, but mostly all people do stupid things. His stupid act ruined his whole life, and the mistake wasn't such dreadful as killing or heavily injuring another person.

Let's face it - atleast 50% or more of those 50 000 ppl wouldn't buy the game anyway. They have to have a modded Wii to be able to play the game, and we all know that 90% people with modded Wii's ain't too keen on buying many original games. So, saying that N lost 50 000 sales is stupid.

There is a reason why people pirate games. IMHO, no game should cost more than 30$, and most shouldn't be more than 15$. It's the companies greed on one side, and peoples passiveness on the other that we have current situation. A game in my country costs 1/8 of the normal salary. If there wasn't a digital distribution like steam and other means of importing games, I doubt that I could afford to buy games.

Companies like Nintendo ain't so noble and righteous either, with price fixing, patent infrigiment and other acts in the gray area. But, opposed to this poor guy, they have large lawyer teams which "make everything go away".

While I agree that if you broke the law, you should pay for the deed, but pay accordingly to the crime. And this one is waaay off. A lifetime of slavery to the 1,5 million debt. Not fair at all.

Well, so much circus and Im sure in South America and China the game has been uploaded and downloaded many times.

If I'm not mistaken AU Wii games use to ship at about 100 AUD, right?

They're asking 30 AUD for each download.

Now, first of all, that doesn't mean "they're assuming 30 og every 100 pirates would buy the game and didn't because of this" as someone has said. You'd have to take away all the extra costs and work only with Nintendo's actual profit per game. So take away things like manufacturing (incld packaging), shippiment (and overall distribution), all operational costs and the actual retailer's cut. That's how much each game sold is actually worth to Nntendo. I've seen estimates where Nintendo gets about 65% of gross margin on it's sales to retailers, wich have their own margin before getting to the 100 AUD price point. Now, I've seen studies on this a few years ago, and for th US, so it may not apply perfectly, but retailers used to buy games at about 60%-70% of MSRP. So let's go with 65% again and that lands us at a little 42.25 AUD per game. So charging 30 for each download means that over 70% of the people who downloaded this would buy the game otherwise but won't anymore, wich is a ridiculous claim.

There's several other factors.

First, the download was avaiable prior to launch, wich means even people who would buy the game, even people with preorders, just downloaded it so that they could play earlier, and bought the game anyway. Comparing the number of downloads before and after launch could give you a higher downloaded-and-won't-buy/downloaded ratio, but even that doesn't translate directly to lost sales, as not everyone who downloads and doesn't buy would have bought otherwise.

Another point is the free marketing push. We can say to wich extent this may actually help sales (as they can't say to wich the downloads actually hinder them), but having thousands of people playing the game and obvioulsy showing others must help generating hype.

The fact that the game won't sell to anywhere near 100% of Wii's install base is further proof that applying such high download to lost sale ratio is outlandish. Also, people who can have a Wii that can play downloaded game will, on avarage, buy less original games anyway. Besides, after launch (when the downloaded-and-won't-buy/downloaded ratio is larger as I said earlier) there where many other sources for getting this, so many people would just get it elsewhere, meaning, again, a much lesser lost sale/download ratio on his account.

And that's just for starters, but anyway, I doubt he's acutally paying this :P

Well, reading that just demonstrated how crappy his defense in court probably was. I mean seriously, you needed to upload it to prove to your friends you bought it early. lol.

As for the punishment, yeah, that is a fine appropriate for a business that actually has millions. An individual person's punishment should be within the realm of reality. A $50,000 fine would have been just as effective to the person and piracy overall and he would have been able to actually pay it in a few years.

You know twestern, you better make damn sure that your (future) kids don't download anything illegally and aren't fined like this guy because it would be quite damn ironic to hear about it. I wonder if you'd be as harsh then as you are now. Law was made to punish people should they do something stupid but within all rationality. The offender is supposed to learn from the punishment and be given a chance for redemption. This case? No such chance given which clearly shows that it's a bad verdict.

Definitely the crime and punishment balance is way off in this situation.He better win the lottery if he wants to live a normal life ever again.

Nintendo caught him on the GBAtemp forums, he was stupid enough to upload pictures of his game and receipt after uploading the game. Nintendo would have never caught anyone if he uploaded it through conventional channels as a scene release.

He was even more stupid for settling out of court, there was no advantage in accepting a AU$1.6million penalty.

is it weird that i first thought the title was refering to a game called super mario pirate that had appeared on an AU release schedule