The latest salvo in the never-ending battle between hardware manufacturers and game pirates has been fired, reports Kotaku.

It appears that Nintendo's new 3DS keeps track of whatever flash carts are inserted into the system for play or other uses. If a user uses an R4 cartridge (the most popular method of pirating last generation games for the DS), it will show up in the log. An R4 cartridge essentially allows a user to copy a DS cartridge to another storage device, and distribute accordingly from there.

What happens next isn't entirely clear, but what is clear that resellers can check the log on any given system. This means that pirates may not be able to re-sell systems, or the system may brick itself if used with such devices or with future firmware updates. These updates will be required to play the latest games on the system.

With all the trouble Sony is facing with class action lawsuits for this sort of thing, I wouldn't be surprised to see Nintendo facing similar lawsuits from owners of bricked 3DS systems. With that said, the innocent have nothing to worry about.

Since we KNOW that no game pirates read this website, I'm sure all of our dear readers will be just fine.

Either way, it's always neat to see the latest tricks hardware manufacturers have in store. In the interest of pessimism, pirates over the years have proven to be resilient and creative when it comes to copyright infringement and stealing other people's intellectual property.

Stay tuned folks!