I’ve just visited brakkens marvellous page http://www.tehskeen.com and have found the following:

MaxConsole is reporting that Datel has also been hit in the raids that are going on in France/Germany. It seems Datel’s Flash Cart used some of Nintendo’s copyrighted material to load, thus under French law making it illegal. Nintendo is really putting pressure around the Globe on Flash Carts as I agree with Zeus that they are most likely doing this to remove the competition to their own Flash Cart they will be brining out.

If you haven’t heard Max Louran the owner of Divineo, Supreme Factory and MaxConsole has been arrested due to his sale of modification devices in France. Since then all of the Flash Carts from both retail sites have been removed. While we haven’t been able to obtain any press material regarding the arrest, various customers, friends, associates and enemies of Max from around the Globe are stating he has indeed been arrested. Read more about the arrest here.

This is very distributing news – not that Max has been arrested, God knows the jerk along with his flunkies deserve a lot more then being arrested for their activities in the scene, but it’s bad news for all Flash Cart owners.

Flash Carts have a lot of legitimate uses which outweigh their illegitimate use. They are designed for amateur programmers to develop software for a console they own without having to pay Nintendo’s outrageous licensing fees. Nintendo from day one has always wanted to control the market, but there is nothing wrong with developing legal software for a device that you own. Nintendo is just money hungry.

Of course Flash Carts can be used in an illegal manner, but this doesn’t mean that they are developed to be used illegally and the blame should lie on the people who do illegal things with them and not the companies who produce them.

One lingering question now in my mind is do all Flash Carts, like Datel’s use some sort of copyrighted code in them?

To add my thoughts as well: Flashcards enable the owner of a console or handheld to use homebrew and extend the handhelds features. It’s everyones right to code on a console he/she owns. This page should be basically the proof that not everything is illegal. Of course we do not support piracy and urge everyone to pay for a commercial game you like. Everyone of the PDRoms-Team handles it this way and YOU should too.

-koj

http://tehskeen.com/forums/showthread.php?threadid=5861