> Authorities believe Once Were Nerd's activities may still run afoul of Article 171 in Italy's copyright law, which allows for up to three years imprisonment for violations. (Emphasis mine)
That seems... very excessive? Who's actually being hurt here? No one is buying 20 year old consoles and games that probably aren't even sold by the original company anymore. Seems pretty much like a classic victimless crime IMO.
> Agents accused the creator of promoting pirated copyrighted materials stemming from his coverage of Anbernic handheld game consoles.
Seems hardly something worthy of arresting, let alone jailing someone.
> Italy has a history of heavy-handed copyright enforcement—the country's Internet regulator recently demanded that Google poison DNS to block illegal streams of soccer. So it's not hard to believe investigators would pursue a case against someone who posts videos featuring pirated games on YouTube.
Italy doesn't really care about copyright violations, unless it's soccer or if it's for profit.
Normal people pirating movies, songs, etc. for their private use are not usually prosecuted (there's no need to use protections such as VPNs in Italy). There are some big piracy communities, they use both torrents and an old file-sharing software called eMule.
But if you try to earn money or if you pirate soccer, then it's super risky.
Dangit, the fact that you had to explain it like that makes me feel old. There was a time when that software was found on everyone's PC and held the top spot on sourceforge's most downloaded list.
And these "quirckiness" isn't exclusive to Italy, many countries in Europe have much tougher views on individual freedoms, regulate speech much stronger than crowd in HN is used to.
Granted you may rarely get jail time, just the fact that you should worry about your criminal record is enough to prevent people to even voice ideas
I would hope that is made clear in the court filings. I don't know if Italy has something akin to the right to face your accuser, but surely there is still an expectation that a lawsuit, especially criminal, requires clearly defining who the victim was and how they were harmed.
> Who's actually being hurt here? No one is buying 20 year old consoles and games that probably aren't even sold by the original company anymore.
Actually, they do, and even significant older games. Retro-games are regularly updated and newly released. Sometimes they are even remastered into new games. Old Consoles are also sometimes resold as special time limited offers, and kinda popular.
It's not a multi-billion-dollar-business, but official retro-gaming is still thriving.
>> Agents accused the creator of promoting pirated copyrighted materials stemming from his coverage of Anbernic handheld game consoles.
> Seems hardly something worthy of arresting, let alone jailing someone.
Those handheld-consoles are kinda infamous for being sold with thousands and ten of thousands copies of old games from all kind of consoles and countries. Maybe he advertised such deals. The joke here is that in my country, you can even buy them directly on Amazon, and there never seem to be a problem with it. Not sure if it's the same in Italy, but I would think the same EU-regulations apply there.
> Actually, they do, and even significant older games. Retro-games are regularly updated and newly released. Sometimes they are even remastered into new games. Old Consoles are also sometimes resold as special time limited offers, and kinda popular.
No, they re-release a couple of them, as it conveniences them, often with unasked for changes.
And the handheld consoles aren't competing with nintendo for people interested in playing retro games. Someone that picks up a miyoo to play SNES games on the go has no official nintendo option for this, the switch doesn't have all the SNES games and isn't the same formfactor.
The vast majority of decades-old games will never see the light of sun again. The companies are either dead, or the license is fucked to hell and back and split between too many parties.
And, even if you think it might be re-released, you could end up waiting forever. Not to mention a remaster is not the same game, it's not the same experience. A lot of people play retro games specifically because they like the retro experience.
> Who's actually being hurt here? No one is buying 20 year old consoles and games that probably aren't even sold by the original company anymore.
People are buying them, they just pay the Chinese, and not Nintendo/SONY.
"Who's actually being hurt" and " aren't even sold by the original company" is not a good argument. Nintendo clearly can sell those games for a sum anytime it wants to. They are just manufacturing a scarcity right now, or at least they are trying. They are the ones "being hurt", in the standard sense.
Nintendo contiounsly retail older titles. Snes mini, their e-shops, re-releases. Most games originally released for the PS1 are not owned directly by Sony and many of them retail on Steam.
Well that's the maximum punishment. Even petty crimes like shoplifting has the same limit. If it's a first time offense he'll likely get much less than that.
My observation is that usually such scenario precedes someone trying to start selling something. So if 'A' is considered abandoned, the owner of copyrights to 'A' (or the new owner, who just bought it) will start making legal actions, then once it's been settled and illegal copies removed from the public space, they would go to the market selling 'A'.
I don't think it's that surprising they are basically promoting pirated content. If they had a video about how a cracked version of game is great and where to download it they would probably also get hit
This is the theoretical maximum, but usually you will not be sentenced with this amount of prisons.
Especially if you don't have a criminal records, you can convert the prison period in a fine or other situation (i.e. social services).
Italians have always loved piracy and the government has always been rather strict enforcing the copyright. There's a huge number of piracy websites blocked in Italy and it's been the case for what feels like 20 years.
My guess is that someone tipped the authorities about the crime. So, someone must of been offended about something this streamer did (maybe not the alleged crime).
> No one is buying 20 year old consoles and games that probably aren't even sold by the original company anymore. Seems pretty much like a classic victimless crime IMO.
Hokay, so preface this with that personally I think so what? let people be free... but here's the (an?) argument:
Unlike other markets, media and entertainment is zero-sum. Ultimately revenue is derived from how many person-hours of attention you can acquire, while people have a finite amount of time to be entertained. Media holders have always preferred to keep media access at a trickle (see: Disney's treatment of their "vault" in the early VHS era) so they don't lose your attention on their current products. It's the same with retro games - each hour someone plays a ROM they can't buy anymore is an hour that could have been spent in a new game that they would have to pay for. They would also argue the existence of retro-gaming secondary markets cannibalizes the growth opportunity for remakes with current gen platforms.
Basically, secondhand/reusable markets are detrimental to businesses that depend on new releases because over time the secondary markets' share of the total grows larger than the primary.
In fairness society is appallingly blind to traffic violence and has been for a century thanks to campaigning by car companies to normalise killing people with cars. If you could use a car for copyright infringement it would probably be allowed
> While emulation software is not illegal, a surprising number of these devices ship chock-full of pre-loaded ROMs—the channel showed multiple Sony and Nintendo games running on the device
Honestly I feel that in the US this would have possibly been risky as well
I was briefly hopeful that we'd see meaningful copyright reform in the EU back when the Pirate Party had its moment in the spotlight. But nothing happened.
Now LLMs are stealing everyone's data, claiming be "fair use", getting away scot free, while irrelevant YouTubers are facing threats to be jailed over nothing whatsoever.
This is easy: law is about power and money. LLM training companies represent an even bigger concentration of money than the IP enforcers, so they can pirate all the books in the world without consequence, while the most onerous consequences are reserved for the most trivial guys.
Consistency would be welcome indeed. We have courts saying it's fair use to do this at scale to train LLMs, but minor violations like this trigger man-years of investigations and threats of imprisonment. The contradiction is grating. This circle can be squared only by admitting that there is one law for the wealthy and powerful, and another for the rest of us.
The way single issue parties normally affect policy is that getting a seat signals the other parties to take the issue more seriously (eg in this case balance between interests of copyright holders vs interests of the public), so the lack of plan wouldn't normally yet mean a failure.
> Now LLMs are stealing everyone's data, claiming be "fair use", getting away scot free, while irrelevant YouTubers are facing threats to be jailed over nothing whatsoever.
I’d like to point out that for decades the argument pro-piracy folks made was that you can’t “steal” software since it still remains. It’s only fair to apply that same standard to AI companies who are simply scraping data...
Piracy is making a 1:1 copy, there is no own work involved. But AI-Companies usually do not steal data, they buy them and compile them, and the problem is about whether the compiled data are still the original or something new. Which is similar to how humans do not automatically steal content just because they read a book and take this as inspiration for their own book.
So the problem regarding AI is more nuanced and complicated than the plain copyright-question of piracy. It's more akin to cases of plagiarism, which go case by case.
LLMs are learning in a very similar way humans are learning. So if humans can read a text (or view a video), learn from it and then use the knowledge to produce something, so can LLMs?
Copyright laws have quite strict rules on what constitutes a copy, and this was tested in courts many times. This rules also apply to works produced by LLMs.
That's a load of hogwash. Humans are only allowed to learn from books they buy or loan from libraries. We can't download books en masse from the interwebz just because we want to learn something. We're also not allowed to read stuff on websites and then regurgitate it verbatim pretending we made it. We can't even make songs that are vaguely similar to songs thag other people have made, even if they've been dead for a good while.
The Pirate Party lost their public support after the founder advocated for the legalization of child sexual abuse because (supposedly) without it there could never be any meaningful digital freedom.
Obviously that was a bridge too far for people, and they stopped supporting even the sensible reforms the party was advocating for.
Risking a lot by commenting on this... but what he defended was that possession of images should not be illegal, only the act itself should be illegal.
He used as an example of how the law was bad, that if you witnessed someone doing the act, and filmed it to hand over as evidence to the police, you would end in jail too, something that is obviously unfair.
Game publishers are strangely aggressive about people playing pirated copies 20+ year old video games which haven't been available for purchase for over a decade. Meanwhile they are actively arguing for their right to destroy copies of games they have sold.
It's clear they view old games as competition for new releases, so they want to make those old games as inaccessible as possible. But we the people just want to be able to replay old games from our childhood that we already bought.
It's interesting to me that for critiques of AI, one of the major arguments is "stealing from artists"- and I know that the argument is more nuanced than this- but a lot of the specific legal framework for intellectual property rights and enforcement- current lawsuits that are against AI companies- are based on the same ideas that allow this kind of prosecution.
I know that people saying "stealing from artists" who are against AI scraping mean, my poor friend who posts on deviantart and not Disney, Sony or Nintendo, but in the sense that intellectual property is a law and the mechanism for enforcement is ultimately something like this, I don't get why it's such a popular argument.
Ultimately I hope AI will force us to decide on an updated paradigm of who owns ideas and it won't be a case of me receiving a cease and desist letter if I type a ChatGPT prompt that includes Mickey Mouse or "Miyazaki".
Many people, including myself, object to companies violating copyright on a massive scale without any consequences whatsoever while people like this, who cannot possibly have the same impact, get their lives ruined.
My main point was that if you are against AI scraping, are you also against this guy being able to post this video?
Separate from the level of consequences for an AI company or this guy- for example if he was forced to simply take the video down or pay a small fine relevant to the level of piracy he was encouraging.
> Ultimately I hope AI will force us to decide on an updated paradigm of who owns ideas and it won't be a case of me receiving a cease and desist letter if I type a ChatGPT prompt that includes Mickey Mouse or "Miyazaki".
The principle of copyright is fine for artists. AI and ChatGPT aren't fundamentally changing the underlying logic: artists should have their intellectual property protected and be able to receive compensation for their work free from getting ripped off. The problem is stretching copyright to absurd timelines when the underlying logic also recognizes that novel ideas emerge out of the public commons and ultimately return to them after a certain amount of time. 7 or 8 years is reasonable. 10 tops. Decades or even hundreds of years is absurd.
> Ultimately I hope AI will force us to decide on an updated paradigm of who owns ideas and it won't be a case of me receiving a cease and desist letter if I type a ChatGPT prompt that includes Mickey Mouse or "Miyazaki".
I've been thinking a lot about this lately since I've had some ... questionable images generated by Gemini. If it outputs infringing material is that on me, them, both of us? Does it depend on my prompt/context, what I do with the output, etc.? My instinct (in opposition to your comment about C&Ds) says it's on them because they're charging money for the service and it's _clearly_ been trained on copyrighted material. I think this question and related ones are going to be answered fairly quickly, especially because of how egregious some of the output I've seen is.
I don't want to get into specifics right now because, IMHO, this particular "trick" is an exploit, as it's reproducible and systemic. Google has a bug bounty for Gemini but this scenario (i.e. output containing copyrighted material) is "out of scope" and they request that you submit individual tickets for every infringing instance. It's not clear to me if end users are supposed to do that or copyright holders but that's not a scalable or practical solution to a systemic problem. I would prefer to be responsible and be compensated for my trouble but I may wind up writing a blog post or something about this if I can't get their attention.
The case is arguably even more clear cut: copyright protects more-or-less exact copies. So copying old video games is not allowed. However, making something that is merely similar, but clearly different from the original, is not a copyright violation. For example, you are allowed to make a "Zelda clone" if you only copy broad game principles and vibes, but not specific art or level designs.
Generative AI mostly works by copying fuzzy styles instead of specific texts or images. There are some exceptions where models actually memorize specific material, but these seem to be relatively rare and probably require that the piece in question occurs frequently in the training data.
So in general, training on copyrighted material is probably legal as long as the model is not able to exactly reproduce the training data, while copying video game ROMs is clearly always illegal.
Of course, whether these things are morally okay or not is a different question...
Edit: Of course, to train on copyrighted material, you have to download it first. If you don't pay for the copies, this is arguably still illegal, even if the resulting model doesn't distribute any copies! (An exception might be content that is directly embedded in websites, because copying websites into the browser cache is allowed, even if they are under copyright protection.)
What I want people to take away from this is that governments in the so-called "developed" world act at the behest of corporations. In this case it's to criminalize something that should, at best, be a civil matter. But suing people is expensive and often they have no assets to claim so let's just make it a criminal offense and let the government pay for it and threaten them with violence (ie putting them in prison).
There's a not particularly well-known case of this in the US that I wish more people knew about: the case of Steven Donziger.
Chevron extracted oil in Ecuador and because of lax legislation and oversight, polluted everywhere. Farmers and indigenous people sued (in Ecuador). Donziger handled the case and an Ecuadorian court brought down a $9.5 billion judgement against Chevron.
Chevron filed a RICO suit against Donziger in NYC. A US Federal district court decided the judgement was unenforceable because (in the court's opionion) it had been obtained through fraud with fairly scant evidence of such. Donziger was disbarred. But it doesn't edn there.
In subsequent legal proceedings, Donziger refused to hand over electronic devices to Chevron's experts arguing--rightly--that it was a violation of attorney-client privilege.
In subsequent legal proceedings, Donziger refused to hand over electronic devices to Chevron's experts arguing--rightly--that it was a violation of attorney-client privilege.
A criminal complaint was made but the DOJ declined to prosecute. In an extraordinary move, a judge appointed lawyers at Chevron's law firm to criminally prosecute Donziger for contempt. He was on house arrest for years with an $800,000 bond... for contempt of court.
Criminal prosecution being available to private companies should scare everyone. The government and even the judicial system has been subverted to do the bidding of companies.
So, sadly, a criminal proseuction for revealing a gaming handheld doesn't surprise me at all.
Guardia di Finanza is the most militarized branch of Italian law enforcement and if they knock on your door (provided they bother knocking), you better comply.
To me it seems excessive to call specifically on them - regular police would suffice, if at all - this guy is nothing like the people this formation usually deals with.
It's astounding how much authoritarianism people are willing to tolerate in the name of maximising the economic incentives for producing entertainment media.
Here the worst part, it doesn't even maximize economic incentives! This is about media that isn't even being sold in the first place. There is no financial benefit to anyone for strictly enforcing copyright on media that isn't being profited from in the first place.
I don't think every regression in civil liberties is something that the society collectively accepted to tolerate. I'd say it's more often than not shoved down people's throats by lobbyists. It's just capitalism functioning as it's intended.
"Capitalism" doesn't have a proper definition; it's one of those words that just means whatever the speaker/listener wants it to mean. Better to use more precise terms.
Readit News
That seems... very excessive? Who's actually being hurt here? No one is buying 20 year old consoles and games that probably aren't even sold by the original company anymore. Seems pretty much like a classic victimless crime IMO.
> Agents accused the creator of promoting pirated copyrighted materials stemming from his coverage of Anbernic handheld game consoles.
Seems hardly something worthy of arresting, let alone jailing someone.
> Italy has a history of heavy-handed copyright enforcement—the country's Internet regulator recently demanded that Google poison DNS to block illegal streams of soccer. So it's not hard to believe investigators would pursue a case against someone who posts videos featuring pirated games on YouTube.
Oh well... didn't realize Italy was like that
Italy doesn't really care about copyright violations, unless it's soccer or if it's for profit.
Normal people pirating movies, songs, etc. for their private use are not usually prosecuted (there's no need to use protections such as VPNs in Italy). There are some big piracy communities, they use both torrents and an old file-sharing software called eMule.
But if you try to earn money or if you pirate soccer, then it's super risky.
Dangit, the fact that you had to explain it like that makes me feel old. There was a time when that software was found on everyone's PC and held the top spot on sourceforge's most downloaded list.
Or protected names like mozzarella or parmigiano cheese.
Better not to name your next project after them.
I'm almost certain someone got paid off and pulled some stings. They don't do anything unless money is involved.
I still use it, on linux using wine. There is a lot of random stuff you usually don't find via Torrenting.
Seems aligned with the idea of "perpetual copyright" Italy has been pushing: https://www.aippi.org/news/italy-cultural-heritage-protectio...
And these "quirckiness" isn't exclusive to Italy, many countries in Europe have much tougher views on individual freedoms, regulate speech much stronger than crowd in HN is used to.
Granted you may rarely get jail time, just the fact that you should worry about your criminal record is enough to prevent people to even voice ideas
Already happens in Germany: https://www.economist.com/europe/2025/04/16/the-threat-to-fr...
Dead Comment
I would hope that is made clear in the court filings. I don't know if Italy has something akin to the right to face your accuser, but surely there is still an expectation that a lawsuit, especially criminal, requires clearly defining who the victim was and how they were harmed.
Actually, they do, and even significant older games. Retro-games are regularly updated and newly released. Sometimes they are even remastered into new games. Old Consoles are also sometimes resold as special time limited offers, and kinda popular.
It's not a multi-billion-dollar-business, but official retro-gaming is still thriving.
>> Agents accused the creator of promoting pirated copyrighted materials stemming from his coverage of Anbernic handheld game consoles. > Seems hardly something worthy of arresting, let alone jailing someone.
Those handheld-consoles are kinda infamous for being sold with thousands and ten of thousands copies of old games from all kind of consoles and countries. Maybe he advertised such deals. The joke here is that in my country, you can even buy them directly on Amazon, and there never seem to be a problem with it. Not sure if it's the same in Italy, but I would think the same EU-regulations apply there.
No, they re-release a couple of them, as it conveniences them, often with unasked for changes.
And the handheld consoles aren't competing with nintendo for people interested in playing retro games. Someone that picks up a miyoo to play SNES games on the go has no official nintendo option for this, the switch doesn't have all the SNES games and isn't the same formfactor.
The vast majority of decades-old games will never see the light of sun again. The companies are either dead, or the license is fucked to hell and back and split between too many parties.
And, even if you think it might be re-released, you could end up waiting forever. Not to mention a remaster is not the same game, it's not the same experience. A lot of people play retro games specifically because they like the retro experience.
Yes, but also - people very rarely get the maximum penalty unless they were real dicks about it and provably knew they were breaking the law.
People are buying them, they just pay the Chinese, and not Nintendo/SONY.
"Who's actually being hurt" and " aren't even sold by the original company" is not a good argument. Nintendo clearly can sell those games for a sum anytime it wants to. They are just manufacturing a scarcity right now, or at least they are trying. They are the ones "being hurt", in the standard sense.
It's been more than 30 years since the games creation, let's revoke them now.
Rent-seeking is not really something that governments should encourage.
The chinese are selling things that nintendo isn't, that people want. Beautiful capitalism.
That the current PM's party, FdI, is a neo-fascist political party should also help add some context.
This is the theoretical maximum, but usually you will not be sentenced with this amount of prisons. Especially if you don't have a criminal records, you can convert the prison period in a fine or other situation (i.e. social services).
Italians have always loved piracy and the government has always been rather strict enforcing the copyright. There's a huge number of piracy websites blocked in Italy and it's been the case for what feels like 20 years.
I also remember a PS1 warez group that was of Italian origin.
It's not "like that" unless Lega Calcio is involved. Lots of mafia and lots of profit to be hurt.
Hokay, so preface this with that personally I think so what? let people be free... but here's the (an?) argument:
Unlike other markets, media and entertainment is zero-sum. Ultimately revenue is derived from how many person-hours of attention you can acquire, while people have a finite amount of time to be entertained. Media holders have always preferred to keep media access at a trickle (see: Disney's treatment of their "vault" in the early VHS era) so they don't lose your attention on their current products. It's the same with retro games - each hour someone plays a ROM they can't buy anymore is an hour that could have been spent in a new game that they would have to pay for. They would also argue the existence of retro-gaming secondary markets cannibalizes the growth opportunity for remakes with current gen platforms.
Basically, secondhand/reusable markets are detrimental to businesses that depend on new releases because over time the secondary markets' share of the total grows larger than the primary.
Kill someone in traffic? A few months, maybe a year.
A company breaks copyright on a massive, premeditated, scale? Totally fine, don't worry about it.
A individual imports a device that might be used for copyright infringement? Prepare to get your life ruined.
> While emulation software is not illegal, a surprising number of these devices ship chock-full of pre-loaded ROMs—the channel showed multiple Sony and Nintendo games running on the device
Honestly I feel that in the US this would have possibly been risky as well
Dead Comment
Now LLMs are stealing everyone's data, claiming be "fair use", getting away scot free, while irrelevant YouTubers are facing threats to be jailed over nothing whatsoever.
Make it make sense.
This is easy: law is about power and money. LLM training companies represent an even bigger concentration of money than the IP enforcers, so they can pirate all the books in the world without consequence, while the most onerous consequences are reserved for the most trivial guys.
I’d like to point out that for decades the argument pro-piracy folks made was that you can’t “steal” software since it still remains. It’s only fair to apply that same standard to AI companies who are simply scraping data...
So the problem regarding AI is more nuanced and complicated than the plain copyright-question of piracy. It's more akin to cases of plagiarism, which go case by case.
Very few people download(ed?) movies or music with the intent to distribute it. They downloaded it because they wanted to consume the media.
Copyright laws have quite strict rules on what constitutes a copy, and this was tested in courts many times. This rules also apply to works produced by LLMs.
Obviously that was a bridge too far for people, and they stopped supporting even the sensible reforms the party was advocating for.
He used as an example of how the law was bad, that if you witnessed someone doing the act, and filmed it to hand over as evidence to the police, you would end in jail too, something that is obviously unfair.
Well, the Ministry of Truth is working on it, at least.
It's clear they view old games as competition for new releases, so they want to make those old games as inaccessible as possible. But we the people just want to be able to replay old games from our childhood that we already bought.
I know that people saying "stealing from artists" who are against AI scraping mean, my poor friend who posts on deviantart and not Disney, Sony or Nintendo, but in the sense that intellectual property is a law and the mechanism for enforcement is ultimately something like this, I don't get why it's such a popular argument.
Ultimately I hope AI will force us to decide on an updated paradigm of who owns ideas and it won't be a case of me receiving a cease and desist letter if I type a ChatGPT prompt that includes Mickey Mouse or "Miyazaki".
Separate from the level of consequences for an AI company or this guy- for example if he was forced to simply take the video down or pay a small fine relevant to the level of piracy he was encouraging.
The principle of copyright is fine for artists. AI and ChatGPT aren't fundamentally changing the underlying logic: artists should have their intellectual property protected and be able to receive compensation for their work free from getting ripped off. The problem is stretching copyright to absurd timelines when the underlying logic also recognizes that novel ideas emerge out of the public commons and ultimately return to them after a certain amount of time. 7 or 8 years is reasonable. 10 tops. Decades or even hundreds of years is absurd.
I've been thinking a lot about this lately since I've had some ... questionable images generated by Gemini. If it outputs infringing material is that on me, them, both of us? Does it depend on my prompt/context, what I do with the output, etc.? My instinct (in opposition to your comment about C&Ds) says it's on them because they're charging money for the service and it's _clearly_ been trained on copyrighted material. I think this question and related ones are going to be answered fairly quickly, especially because of how egregious some of the output I've seen is.
I don't want to get into specifics right now because, IMHO, this particular "trick" is an exploit, as it's reproducible and systemic. Google has a bug bounty for Gemini but this scenario (i.e. output containing copyrighted material) is "out of scope" and they request that you submit individual tickets for every infringing instance. It's not clear to me if end users are supposed to do that or copyright holders but that's not a scalable or practical solution to a systemic problem. I would prefer to be responsible and be compensated for my trouble but I may wind up writing a blog post or something about this if I can't get their attention.Generative AI mostly works by copying fuzzy styles instead of specific texts or images. There are some exceptions where models actually memorize specific material, but these seem to be relatively rare and probably require that the piece in question occurs frequently in the training data.
So in general, training on copyrighted material is probably legal as long as the model is not able to exactly reproduce the training data, while copying video game ROMs is clearly always illegal.
Of course, whether these things are morally okay or not is a different question...
Edit: Of course, to train on copyrighted material, you have to download it first. If you don't pay for the copies, this is arguably still illegal, even if the resulting model doesn't distribute any copies! (An exception might be content that is directly embedded in websites, because copying websites into the browser cache is allowed, even if they are under copyright protection.)
What about songwriting? Or even music performance- me performing a song doesn't produce a more or less exact copy.
What I want people to take away from this is that governments in the so-called "developed" world act at the behest of corporations. In this case it's to criminalize something that should, at best, be a civil matter. But suing people is expensive and often they have no assets to claim so let's just make it a criminal offense and let the government pay for it and threaten them with violence (ie putting them in prison).
There's a not particularly well-known case of this in the US that I wish more people knew about: the case of Steven Donziger.
Chevron extracted oil in Ecuador and because of lax legislation and oversight, polluted everywhere. Farmers and indigenous people sued (in Ecuador). Donziger handled the case and an Ecuadorian court brought down a $9.5 billion judgement against Chevron.
Chevron filed a RICO suit against Donziger in NYC. A US Federal district court decided the judgement was unenforceable because (in the court's opionion) it had been obtained through fraud with fairly scant evidence of such. Donziger was disbarred. But it doesn't edn there.
In subsequent legal proceedings, Donziger refused to hand over electronic devices to Chevron's experts arguing--rightly--that it was a violation of attorney-client privilege.
In subsequent legal proceedings, Donziger refused to hand over electronic devices to Chevron's experts arguing--rightly--that it was a violation of attorney-client privilege.
A criminal complaint was made but the DOJ declined to prosecute. In an extraordinary move, a judge appointed lawyers at Chevron's law firm to criminally prosecute Donziger for contempt. He was on house arrest for years with an $800,000 bond... for contempt of court.
Criminal prosecution being available to private companies should scare everyone. The government and even the judicial system has been subverted to do the bidding of companies.
So, sadly, a criminal proseuction for revealing a gaming handheld doesn't surprise me at all.
To me it seems excessive to call specifically on them - regular police would suffice, if at all - this guy is nothing like the people this formation usually deals with.
Don't mistake the IP cartel's backroom lobbying for the will of the people.
Dead Comment