I would throw in a whole bunch of Mario references, but the pipe that James Burt of Brisbane (in Queensland, Australia) has sunk himself into is probably long enough without it.

James, age 24, has been fined for uploading a copy of the Super Mario Bros Wii game onto a (now closed) website for others to download. The total amount of the fine is $1.5 Million Australian Dollars, which works out to be roughly $1,309,240US. Oh, and he also has to pay court costs of $100,000AUD. Under Australian law, to copy and distribute a game (or any other media really) without the permission of the copyright holder is a breach of the Copyright Act.

Nintendo chased after him because when he got the game a week earlier than the official release date he proceeded to try out his piracy skills pretty much ASAP. The official release date was November 12th 2009. James made the download version available on the 6th.  And Nintendo didn’t take their time in going after him either – they hired a forensic investigator to track James down and had obtained a search order from the Federal Court by November 23rd.

The managing director at Nintendo Australia, Rose Lappin, had this to say about the incident:

“Piracy is massive and getting bigger and bigger but I think the courts are taking it more seriously now as you can see by this. As an industry it’s a major problem and the cost is massive to the industry and to developers. Some of these guys say there are more downloads and patches than there are actual sales for them. That’s shocking for our industry.”

She also mentioned how having pirated copies of any games available for downloading hurts the industry itself, and the retailers whom they partner with. According to James’ MySpace page, he was a manager at an EB Games store too. If he was still working there at the time he was effectively doing himself out of a job by making a pirated copy and chasing away any money that may have come in his pay packet.

While some web users appear to have taken the stance of “But hang on a second, it’s one of the highest selling games of all time. Surely this is just to prove a point?”, others have asked “But what about the downloaders?”.  What would you do – go looking for the person who took your product and made it free without your consent for millions worldwide, or sort through (and individually fine) the thousands of people who fell prey to such temptation?

So the moral to this story? Keep your gaming legal, or Nintendo might send you a whole lot of shell! (Sorry!)

(Source: News.com.au)