A man who recieved an early copy of Super Mario Bros. Wii and uploaded it to a website has been hit with a $1.5m fine plus $100,000 to cover court costs.
James Burt, 24, copied and uploaded the game on November 6th, 6 days before the official release date on November 12th.
By the time Nintendo had shut the site down, the game had apparently been downloaded ‘thousands of times’.
Nintendo Austrailia Managing Director Rose Lappin said, “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,” she said. “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.”
That’s just a little bit over the top, no?
