geekosystem

Authorities in the U.K. recently apprehended a 41 year-old man for creating and selling thousands of counterfeit Nintendo games. Justin Success Brooks — Yes, that is his actual middle name, not a handle — made fake Wii, DS, and DSi game bundles from pirated software, selling 100-200 games on a single disc or cartridge for the price of one or two retail products. It sounds like a great deal for everybody... Except Nintendo, which eventually came after the man cutting into their business.

In the ever-constant attempt to curb counterfeiting and piracy, Canada's lead intellectual property lobby group, the Canadian IP Council, has released a document titled Counterfeiting in the Canadian Market: How Do We Stop It? detailing the changes it believes should be enacted by the Canadian government to ensure the continued prominence of legal goods. This includes such measures as SOPA-style blocking of websites, the implementation of ACTA, and jail time for downloaders.

Starting in November, Canada will be seeing some new, plastic currency making its way into circulation. The Bank of Canada lists a couple of reasons for this change, one of which is to combat counterfeiting. New bills will have a number of security measures including the good old fashioned transparency check in addition to some other presumably new ones that were not explained in detail. Big surprise. Another bonus is the plastic currencies' increased durability and lifespan. The new polymer bills are estimated to last 2.5 times longer than cotton-paper bills and although they fold and crease, they don't rip.

The U.S. government has just unveiled a new $100 bill, primarily as a means of combatting increasingly tech-savvy counterfeiters. The bill's redesign is said to be particularly focused on the threat of the virtually undetectable "Superdollar" counterfeit, publicized in Rush Hour 2 and elsewhere, which the new hundred-dollar bill will set back with sophisticated technologies like a 3D security ribbon and a color-changing Liberty Bell, in addition to the "portrait watermark of Benjamin Franklin, the security thread, and the color-shifting numeral 100" present in the current $100 bill.