French Court – Flash Carts not illegal

A French court decided that, just because something can be used in illegal activities, that thing itself is not illegal. That’s pretty obvious logic. But Nintendo has been hot to get flash carts banned because they enable piracy. But that French court threw out Nintendo’s case.

But I found the second part of the judgement far more interesting–Nintendo shouldn’t restrict development to only proprietary SDKs. This one is less common sense and creates a rather interesting precedent [for French courts, of course]. Nintendo’s Wii SDK, for example, is not expensive but hard to get. So, if there are libraries that someone else has developed that don’t use the Wii SDK, then the French court says that that is okay basically. Yet, I don’t think that’s quite the pandora’s box that it suggests because Nintendo can still find other means to restrict what games are released.