Meet James Burt, the 24-year-old Australian man who recently settled a court case with Nintendo in the amount of $1.5 million for uploading a copy of New Super Mario Bros. Wii to the internet, according to a recent press release from Nintendo.

Now meet Stuart Campbell, a man who did a better job reporting the incident on his blog than a majority of the journalistic publications out there, even though he too fell short of the mark.

According to various publications – both gaming specific and general hard-news oriented – Burt was “fined” more than a million dollars for a single act of piracy and even convicted of piracy on criminal charges.  So what does blogger Campbell have to say about all this?

“The figure has supposedly been arrived at by calculating that the perpetrator’s uploading of the game cost Nintendo 30,000 lost sales, presumably at a cost of AU$50 each. (NSMBW’s sales, incidentally, were 10.5m copies worldwide in its first two months, with over 200,00 of those in Australia – a record for the territory.) It’s being widely implied – or even stated outright – that this is a court judgement. But guess what? As usual, it’s a load of bullshit.” [Link in original].

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It’s obvious when embargoes are lifted in the game industry, as nearly every video game site under the sun suddenly posts the same derivative article at approximately the same time. Embargoes are a scourge, a powerplay by the Publisher’s PR arm handling a video game, which serves no positive purpose for anyone involved. It dillutes the media for gaming sites and compresses the exposure of a game into a single day.

I mean, how many BioShock 2 previews do we need posted on a single day? You’d think a publisher would want the exposure spread out over time, keeping the brand in your head up till the day of release, but no. PR teams think it best that previews all hit on the same day. Worse, the various sites are more than willing to play along, willingly giving up whatever power they may have had. [The whole industry is so controlled by publishers that there is essentially no choice. No access = no info = no audience. Only totalitarian governments have more of a stranglehold over the media that covers them. If any of our readers have a solution as to how principled journalists and site owners can change the state of things and still remain financially viable, please let us know and we'll share your thoughts with the rest of our audience. -Ed.]

Let’s take a gander at which sites played the embargo game today, offering up essentially the same content as everyone else:

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