Building home brew video games for the Nintendo DS (and any form of modding for that matter) just got a lot harder for UK residents. A UK court ruled that blank cartridges such as R4DS are illegal and that retail stores are banned from selling, marketed or importing such cartridges in the UK. While many stores have shut down as a result of the ruling, reports suggest that others are defying the court ban and still selling such cartridges.

Nintendo welcomed the ruling, and said it had bought the legal action against two retailers, Playables Limited and Wai Dat Chan, on behalf of the thousands of video game studios that depend on legitimate sales of games for their financial survival. "The court affirmed that game copiers first circumvent Nintendo's security systems before any non-infringing application can be played on Nintendo's hand-held products," said the Japanese games giant in a statement.

A report today on Exclaim Magazine says that the Canadian Copyright Board has raised the levy on CDs up 40 percent. That means that the levy will be bumped up from 21 cents to 29 cents and that the price of a spindle of 100 CDs will cost an additional $8. DVDs won’t be affected by the change.

Michael Geist said in the article that the bump in the levy doesn’t make any sense since many people burn music from legitimate sources like iTunes and paid for music albums. Also, many people back things up on DVDs now, probably because DVDs store more as another reason that doesn’t seem to be mentioned in the article.

The article rightly notes that various collectives have been lobbying to put a levy on iPods and removeable storage devices, but were unsuccessful.

One might wonder, though, has the economy been more of a scape goat than anything else as an excuse to do things that would otherwise spark controversy? Take, for instance, the increase in royalty rates on textbooks back in 2006. There wasn’t even a hint of an impending economic storm (unless you’ve been following Robert Schiff from the very beginning) and yet they pushed for increasing the royalty rates. Perhaps it’s thoughts like this that make the decision that much more confusing in the first place though. There’s no word on whether or not it’s a good idea to just stimulate the economy by encouraging consumer spending on entertainment products in the first place.