Nintendo recently asked the US to help it crack down on what they claim is a 1 billion dollar lose in sales due to piracy last year.

The console giant listed countries such as China, Korea, Brazil, Hong Kong, Paraguay and Mexico in its appeal.

Nintendo filed its comments under a ‘Special 301′ process which allows the public to underscore specific areas of concern for the US Trade Representative.

“While China remains the primary source of pirated Nintendo DS and Wii games, Korea has emerged as the leader in distributing illegal game files via the internet,” Nintendo said in a statement.

While I find these estimates of an amount of money lost due to piracy to be a little sketchy, operating under the likely assumption that most of those buying pirated copies would never pay the full price, it is certainly a big deal. And is a problem for my favorite hand held console, the Nintendo DS, because of a Chinese-made item named the R4:

It’s called the R4, and it’s here to rain on Nintendo’s parade. The R4 fits right into the DS’s cartridge slot. Data is stored on a Micro SD and downloaded via a flash drive. The R4 has a small slot that the Micro SD card goes into. The China-made piracy device is available all over Akihabara, where retailers advertise it vaguely: “New R4 shipment has finally arrived! You know what it does! Absolutely no questions will be answered concerning this product…” or “Guaranteed for one week only! Of course we can’t explain what the R4 will do…”

Meanwhile, in Japan they are using the DS in junior high school classes. I wonder how many of those kids have pirated software…

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With my week long celebration of the New York Giants’ Superbowl win, the greatest upset in sports history, (maybe second greatest) I totally forgot to mention this ad that aired during the game for Salesgenie.com:

My first thought after this was, “Wow, that is racist.” Not to mention that this is just a bad commercial.

For more on these ads (there was also an Indian one) check out the New York Times “An Ad With Talking Pandas, Maybe, but Not With Chinese Accents“

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Tomorrow the New York Football Giants take on the New England Patriots in Superbowl XLII in Glendale Arizona. Now, thanks to Chinesepod, you can now attempt to talk to people in Mandarin about this most wonderful of games:

And for those of you in China who attempt to use the vocabulary in this lesson, you will probably encounter the same response that the person in the dialog does, which is complete indifference.

As for the game, I am hesitantly optimistic about the Giants’ chances for winning against the Patriots, as unstoppable as Brady and company may seem. GO GIANTS!!!!

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