> 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.
Imo it wasn't that bad, but maybe that was just because code-centric sites like github didn't exist yet. It tried to provide you with a simple landing page for your open source project that can offer you a download button, centered around releasing compiled, versioned software. Their offering of a VCS (svn and CVS IIRC) was more of an added bonus. But once github was there you started wondering how sourceforge ever seemed good.
I’m not sure what the first part of that URL does, but I didn’t click on it because it’s suspicious to prepend something to an Internet Archive link. I don’t recognize that domain but perhaps you can explain what it is and what it does?
I don't think that's the only possibility, but I am wondering why Once Were Nerd was targeted. Is he famous enough to serve as a good example for a new policy? Did he cut someone powerful off in traffic? Did his videos threaten someone's business? Cui bono?
That is a self-contradictory statement. If people were not motivated by financial gain, then bribery would not exist. You could say people might be motivated by power and influence, but even those things boil down to one singular thing, and that is accumulating wealth.
I was also using eMule through Wine, but I randomly discovered that all my files were shared on the network, not only the ones in folders that I specifically chose. So pay a lot of attention in order not to share sensitive data.
There's also a native client for Linux, it's called aMule. Give it a try instead of the official client.
It really is alive and kicking, and now there's a smarter way to find things compared to the integrated file search (which can lead to fake content, viruses or... worse).
There are some forums (yes, old-school web forums) with neatly organized content. You just copy-paste the e2dk link into the client, and voilà.
Some forums are even publicly accessible, so it's clear that nobody is seriously persecuting people for piracy in Italy.
devil's advocate says that lawyer is just doing the job hired to do by the copyright owner. if a copyright owner didn't care, they wouldn't hire these lawyers. if a lawyer is somehow the copyright owner, well, they obviously care
Patent trolls and the like are often lawyers who decided it wasn't enough working hard to do evil/represent evil - they want to be evil without really working either.
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
On the other hand, your criminal record matters far less in Germany than it does in the US. Most employers never ask for your record, especially in white collar jobs, and the ones that do usually only look for relevant offenses. If you are convicted for fraud that will make it harder to get a job as accountant, but an conviction for insulting an official or for drug possession years ago is unlikely to have a major impact.
Obviously you shouldn't be charged for stuff like that (and there was backlash for that incident), but the are less than it might appear to the American reader. Being convicted does not turn you into the scum of society in Germany
? you think police officers came in the middle of night to an old defenseless grandmother about her post showing discomfort about labour politicians as simply fun partying debates ?
what did they go to her home for ? sipping champagne , taking care of the old woman and having oxford like debates ???
I don't think they came in "the middle of the night", full stop. That's just another embellishment you've pulled out of thin air. I think if you had a strong case, you wouldn't need embellish it so.
> Detectives were last night accused of acting like East Germany's feared Stasi secret police for quizzing Helen Jones over her calls for the resignation of local councillors embroiled in the WhatsApp scandal exposed by The Mail on Sunday.
The article says clearly “last night”, what you think happened doesn’t change what was said by the woman who explicitly stated what happened to her and had to live through it that night.
(on rechecking yes i’m wrong about daytime vs nighttime indeed they visited at morning)
but even with that you think its acceptable if it’s daytime for police to knock on doors due to facebook posts about not liking current ruling councillor stuck in a scandal ???
if this gets politically acceptable get ready for china like atmosphere in future around politics (without china like infrastructure or growth) forced disappearances , thoughtcrimes & thought police…
The doorcam footage is clearly in broad daylight, it's dated February, and further down the article it says:
> At around 1.30pm last Tuesday ... a detective sergeant and another officer knocked at her door
You've made some edits to your post since I replied, so...
> but even with that you think its acceptable if it’s daytime for police to knock on doors due to facebook posts
It's handled on a case by case basis. The police will generally notify someone if they're the subject of a harrassment complaint, and it's not uncommon for them to visit either to give a verbal warning or to advise them on the law. That's... just how the system works in the UK and has done for a long time. Police in the UK are often in and around the community, working with it and giving out advice where it may help to prevent crimes.
Perhaps the police were too keen to visit in person this time. Perhaps they felt pressured to demonstrate a response by the fact that the complainant was linked to the council. That's another issue entirely. But this single incident is not the sign of a steep decline into authoritarianism that you want it to be.
That is saying that last night the detectives were accused, not that they visited the woman last night.
Also note it doesn't say who is making this accusation about the detectives, the article is not designed to inform you but to provoke a reaction.
Also consider that they will be carefully selecting what posts of hers to quote rather than telling you everything she wrote that lead to the complaint.
Many European countries also have "election silence", basically a blanked ban on political speech, usually for a day or two before and during an election. This is supposedly done to "give people space to deliberate without undue influence."
When such laws were introduced, they basically only applied to mainstream media organizations and actual political agitators; debating politics at the family table was (and still is) allowed. However, the way they're worded, they also apply to any user sharing / liking political posts on social media.
No, still doesn’t change what’s true and is reality.
its unfortunate left wing bias in mainstream media has atrophied the ability for any reliable news media to exist with extensive coverage and neutral reporting. (not unique to the left, right wing actors can do just the same it’s just right now left leaning political actors control most of legacy mainstream media)
Foreign actors are definitely taking advantage of that to fuel tensions as much as they can. Doesnt change reality tho.
That UK has a severe free speech issue and two tier policing, one for native brits(the lower tier) and one for politicians and favoured religious vote banks.
Even if mainstream media had a left wing bias - which is a big stretch in the UK given that it's mostly owned by Rothermere, Murdoch, Barclay and Marshall - why would that prevent reliable and neutral media from existing?
it is not a left or right wing thing, these events are happening.
Even the US Vice President alluded to this happening.
Are all UK opposition politicians right wing tabloid dummies too ? They are all clearly saying this is happening. Reform UK party that is right now slated in polls to be the next winner if elections were to happen have publicly acknowledged this is happening.
Why make everything into a left vs right match ? if free speech dies here right now by people you support (people who call daily mail a tabloid “right wing” rag) when they go out of power and people you oppose win, they’ll use the same instruments to suppress people you do support.
Basic freedoms are deserved by all citizens, police shouldn’t go around arresting 12,000 citizens for facebook posts or grandmas for voicing their worries not even violent posts or jibes, just criticism and concerns.
While the same country has struggled across years to arrest and prosecute violent offenders targetting british orphanages and harming children. police did nothing about it despite knowing it, and continues to resist protecting children.
You think everything is normal ?
Not everything is a football match, the score wont reset after “the game” round is over. Once these freedoms are lost they will be far more harder to bring back. people will be even more defenseless. Nothing good comes out of making everything expendable in a left vs right match.
Common citizens lose everything from it, while politicians on top from both aisles win with more power to do anything and everything they want when they rule.
Sure, I hope those texts act as warm blanket to console you as western society loses its hard earned freedoms from the rise of extreme left and extreme right.
You’ll need them, much more than I will
To realise where things went wrong.
you’ll need it for consoling if most people dont wake up and realise that the masses are slowly losing all of their freedoms from both the extreme left and extreme right in democracies globally.
Democratic backsliding is a fact that’s happening in all major countries.
No media literacy course will save us all from it, if we don’t call out these issues and make it unpopular to do these things by governments.
So you think everything and everyone across the world is making a politically coordinated event to lie about reality ?
I don’t even vote for the republicans and since when has couches been equated to real things reported widely by media, politicians, citizens, watchdog groups become completely irrelevant because a politician you hate/dislike agreed with those things.
This is not a football match or he said she said, it’s happening and if you have to resort to calling a sitting vice president as “couch**” to deny reality instead of being able to clearly state no one innocent is being jailed for simple disagreements on facebook. then no you probably subconsciously know it’s happening too and need to depend on slander to deny reality.
it is especially ironic considering there are uk citizens getting police visits for saying things far less rude than what you said about US vice president.
You can disagree with ones politics but if you want to defend your ability to have that freedom (to disagree with ruling parties) it does require you to defend the freedoms and rights of people you disagree with politically too…
> So you think everything and everyone across the world is making a politically coordinated event to lie about reality ?
In a word, yes. More nuanced would say that anyone in power is willing to lie and make a politically coordinated event to lie about reality if it helps their agenda. More specifically, I would have you look at current US Administration as the greatest example. They are not the first nor only ones to do this, but they are the most brazen in their use of it
>because the couch fucker sure is known to be trustworthy
Just because he's a "couch fucker", doesn't mean he's wrong in that case. Some EU countries do have genuine issues with free speech. He's right about that one.
People should use critical thinking and judge WHAT is being
said independent of WHO is saying it.
Unfortunately people do not use critical thinking anymore to judge topics in a nonpartisan way, because of fear of being attacked/ostracized by the colective groupthink mob based solely on adherence to a political ideology.
Isn't it using critical thinking to be able to know that a particular source of information is not credible after said source admitted to be "willing to create stories” after falsely claiming a certain population was eating people's pets?
I think it'd be worth double- and triple-checking anything he says, yes, beyond trivial examples about the color of the sky. He's a known liar. He lies for political gain. He is disgusting.
>I think it'd be worth double- and triple-checking anything he says
That's what I'm advocating for, but people I was replying to didn't even want to do that and were dismissing anything out of the box just because they don't like the source, which is detrimental to any honest and useful debate.
>He's a known liar. He lies for political gain. He is disgusting.
I never said he doesn't lie, of course he does, he's a politician, all of them lie, but even a broken clock is right twice a day.
I said some of the things he says are bang on the money and shouldn't be discarded on the basis that the information comes from a mouth you don't like, as that's just closed minded partisan zealotry and not using critical thinking.
But of course they should be discarded. Why shouldn't they? There are better sources and better people sharing opinions.
Maybe we can take what he says seriously if he comes clean about his past dangerous lies. Until then, he should at the very least be shunned if not ignored entirely.
>But of course they should be discarded. Why shouldn't they?
I rest my case. There's no point in arguing with zealots who don't want to even listen to reason let alone critically analyze information shared with them, but choose to automatically believe and disbelieve it based on their favorite or hated source.
>There are better sources and better people sharing opinions
Your "better sources" might be someone else's "worst sources". Where is that universal ground truth located at? Isn't that discovered though conversation, argumentation and debate like in university campuses, instead of blindly trusting your favorite partisan source? That's no different than religious zealotry that burned Galileo at the stake for saying thins considered "untrue" at the time.
> Even the US Vice President alluded to this happening
gives zero additional weight to the credibility of the claim. He's someone who has openly acknowledged about lying for political gain.
"If I have to create stories...then that's what I'm going to do."
He directly says he will lie to you and make up stories to drive his political agenda. He's not even trying to suggest he's representing reality; he's making up stories, telling fiction.
If any news organization openly admits they're going to continue to just write blatant lies to push their agenda, would you continue trusting that source?
I do agree, free speech is far less protected in many European countries than it is in the US. I don't doubt there are plenty of crazy stories of someone getting arrested for their speech in some places in Europe. But JD Vance telling me any specific story about it and I don't see much else making the same claims, my default is to assume it's probably untrue, because he told me he will lie to me. Why would I trust his statements?
Ah yes, but were they really people's pets? They just claimed people were eating animals commonly owned as pets. Even in my neighborhood, there are plenty of cats that are not owned by anyone. "They're eating the dogs. They're eating the cats." That's the quote I'm familiar. I've never heard "They're eating the pet dogs. They're eating the pet cats." Isn't that a difference that a critical thinker would be able to notice?
Claiming they're eating cats and dogs, regardless of pet status, is incredibly racist. Trying to say "Nooo he meant strays" is not critical thinking. It's excusing horribly racist ideology and talking points.
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.
> No, they re-release a couple of them, as it conveniences them,
It's significant more than a couple these days. But the number doesn't really matter, it's an ongoing process, and nobody knows which are released at which point. So nobody can claim any more that it's dead content.
> And the handheld consoles aren't competing with nintendo for people interested in playing retro games.
That doesn't matter, it's still not legal. If people want to play old games, OK, then do it, but let it stay with the fans, uncommercial. Don't the f** make money with it, and the h** don't make public advertisement for it. It's illegal, and owners are going after you for it if it's too obvious, because they have the right.
I'm more interested in ethics than I am in law. Sit down in a court room for a day if you want to see how the infallible law fucks person after person who committed a vitcimless crime of ignorance, or being too poor to get a good lawyer. Or don't, if you don't want to lose faith in "due process."
So, ethically, I don't think it's ok for companies to dangle a 30 year old videogame around saying "you can't play this because we might want to sell it to you again someday. And by the way the version we sell to you may not be the version you treasured from your childhood, we might fuck up the aspect ratio, or cut content, just because we don't give a shit. Neener neener."
Foolish nonsense. I want to play old videogames. If they sold it to me, I'd buy it off them. I'm not ok that I need to re buy the same game ten times. You used to be able to play old games on new systems by just sticking the disk in. Now you don't even get a disk.
The games industry is rotting. I don't care if companies lose money from emulation (they're not, because they aren't selling what we're buying). Enshittify away, I will continue to rip roms and play them on the device I please, and if that device is sold to me with a garbage SD card full of 10,000 bunk roms, so be it.
> 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.
Arguably this is a flaw in copyright laws. If a copyright owner refuses to make their copyrighted work available to the public, there should be some kind of "use it or lose it" exception - after all, this is all supposed to be in the public interest, in the end. (Haha yeah I know.)
But, that raises the issue of a company's older work competing with their newer work. They use copyright as a tool to withhold their own work, to increase the market for newer works. And companies like Disney use a "vault" model to artificially create demand for older works.
The question is, should companies be allowed to do this?
I don't think they should, and just because I'm a filthy commie. I disagree that older works are competing in a meaningful way - the market has demonstrated it's happy to pay again and again for the same game on new platforms, especially if it comes with upgrades or QOL improvements. Nintendo could easily make money selling a new version of Mario 2 with new levels by og Nintendo level designers. I'd buy it and I have that game on like five different systems.
Not to mention, it's not like I'm not gonna buy tears of the kingdom even though I like to occasionally replay ocarina of time or whatever.
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.
You can either grant IP for everyone equally, or point at some companies that they are rich and consumer hostile anyway so they don't get no IP, or abolish IP altogether.
What Nintendo is doing is no different than what everyone is doing, except that you hate them.
IMO the problem isn't that copyright lasts too long, although that matters too, but rather that you don't need to provide copyrighted material.
So basically Nintendo, and others, just hold their copyright material hostage to artificially inflate it's value. The scarcity around Nintendo games is intentional and purely artificial. This shouldn't be allowed.
If you want to maintain copyright on old ass shit, then fine, but you actually have to still sell that old ass shit. Otherwise what are you claiming copyright on? A product that doesn't exist? Why would you do that? Only for nefarious reasons.
This is actually a problem that spans far beyond the vault-like behavior that HBO and Nintendo have been exhibiting.
There's this notion of something called the copyright cliff where works that are quite old but remain under copyright are almost completely unavailable. And in the cases of books, this is not due to artificial scarcity at all, but rather that it's not economically viable to try to extract value from them. And so they just remain unpublished. Yet to get an unauthorized copy is still copyright infringement. It's good example of how copyright doesn't work very well in achieving its stated purpose.
Who is we? the combined world's governing bodies? the US corporate legal protections systems? japanese corruption?
Regardless, that is not how IP works and I do not think you think this is a proper resolution.
"just because we want it" or "it's been x years" does not pass legal scrutiny and would be dismissed in any legal venue on improper cause. You are free to not purchase the product whe navailable, where made no promises at time of orignal purchase, and are in no way harmed from the decision making of the firms.
is 30 years too long for copyrighting/trademarks? Maybe...but can't really argue that if for those 30 years they have actively defended the IP and proliferation of it from other vendors/firms. And even then.....the world is not the US.
The solution is to never purchase from the IP holder as a matte or protest. But with global scales, good luck affecting any corporations decision making.
We is, in the US, the federal government as directed by congress and the president. (In Canada where I actually live, s/congress/parliament/g and s/president/governor general (but only theoretically)/g).
> Regardless, that is not how IP works
This is exactly how IP laws work. More than that, in the US it's how they're constitutionally required to work - IP is defined as a time limited monopoly in the constitution and the federal government has no right to grant more than that. The current, "so long that it might as well be forever" copyright is spitting in the face of the US constitution.
> but can't really argue that if for those 30 years they have actively defended the IP and proliferation of it from other vendors/firms
I absolutely can. The purpose of IP is to encourage more things to eventually fall into the public domain by being published publicly. At some point, and I think 30 years is well past that point, it does more harm by preventing things from falling into the public domain than it does good by encouraging publishing.
Just because a company found a way to extract money from society, and are still doing so, doesn't mean we should allow them to do so forever.
When originally passed copyright (Statute of Anne in 1710) the term was 14 to 28 years, notably less than 30. As the world has only begun to change more rapidly since then, it's clear that it should have gotten shorter, not longer.
Not the entire library, though. Games that aren't offered in any form anywhere, and also games that weren't localized (like Mother 3) shouldn't have copyright enforceable. It's either you give up production of the game or you produce it forever, no other sane way to go about it
I hate overzealous copyright prosecution as much as anyone, but I’m very wary of a model where you have to use something you own to maintain ownership.
There are things that work that way (RF spectrum), but in general I think it would cut against the purpose of copyright. I do think there’s value in giving creators exclusive rights to their own work, and making it contingent on distribution would hurt small companies more than big.
Rent-seeking brings lots of money to lots of politicians, so they encourage it. Those same politicians also have the power to legally murder people, or lock them up for life. "Should" is irrelevant - focus on the "is".
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
If we still feel like individuals must be punished for such things let's start by dismantling all the bigcorps that downloaded e.g. anna's archive (openai, meta, for starters).
It would be easier to take the suggestion seriously if there was some proportionality. People aren’t being executed for copyright infringement, and presumably there should be remedies for corporate misbehavior that sponsors of destroying the company.
Companies aren't living things and therefore cannot be killed. "Destroying" a company is a much more morally sound outcome then someone dying.
Also, we do not literally need to "destroy" a company. If we think those jobs or IP is valuable, just nationalize it. Everyone keeps their jobs, the IP lives on, and for a lot of companies they now enjoy competent leadership. When ready, the company can be resold to the private sector.
So that's be, at the least, a 7.5B fine. But I'd argue the scope of pirating over 150 million items for commercial use warrants a harsher sentence than the minimum.
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.
The rule of law is one of the greatest achievements of western society and a major reason for the west's global dominance.
True, it was always imperfect due to the realpolitik of power. But that doesn't change the fact that the very idea of rule of law is in opposition to rule of power.
Natural Law is fair by definition. It is merely a reflection of ancient ethical norms.
Positive Law -- the laws set down by kings and legislatures -- is much less fair, but sometimes, however rarely, it tries to embody a codification of the Natural Law.
The way the Positive Law is enforced and prosecuted is an utter disaster. In civil courts, justice is bought and sold as a rule; fairness (and even adjudication itself!) is an exception. It's so bad, so transparently twisted, that I think it's fair to say that humans in general have shown that they cannot be trusted with the administration of things such as civil laws. Too corruptible.
Why is slavery wrong? Does human life have no innate (non-relative, not bestowed) dignity, in your view?
When judges refer (as they frequently do) to uncodified notions of "fair play" or "good faith and fair dealing," what are they basing those notions on? Is it not a continuation of the ancient Natural Law inclination towards promise-keeping, reflected in many human societies as the oath-breaking taboo?
You obviously are against that 'one sect', but natural law IS the thing. This is what most people consider to be the norm that governs how we behave. It's not written down, it's what you know is right or wrong. Let me give you some examples:
- Raping woman on the street - wrong
- Giving starving person some food - good
- Stealing from your employer - wrong (unless you are not paid or cheated)
- Killing random person - wrong
- Caring for your spause and children - good
and the list goes on
And the general rule, written down by 'that sect' in their book is 'love your neighbor as you love yourself', you should prefer to live among people who really apply this in their life, whenever you share their beliefs or not, because it's so much easier to live among such people than to live among selfish people who will not hesitate to harm you if only their actions go unpunished.
This is just communism. If everyone did this, you would have a community-based economy and society. Communism.
The sheer idea of competition is antithetical to this world view. Because you would never compete against yourself - but you MUST compete against your neighbors. You would never advocate against yourself, either.
Look, it's a nice idea, everyone hold hands and sing Kumbaya. But it's not a Christian thing, Marx figured this out much more concretely. Like, he thought about the actual economic and political consequences of it.
And, I don't know, maybe it could work. But I think it's important we're all on the same page about what we're asking for.
Competing against someone means advocating for yourself instead of them.
Nobody would ever advocate against themselves - that's self-destructive. So, following the golden rule, competition is immoral. You shouldn't advocate against others, because you wouldn't do it to yourself.
More concretely, when you compete you are trying to take money away from other people and give it to yourself. Right? Because a customer could go to them - but you want the customer to go to you. So you get 5 bucks your competitor wouldn't have.
What we're noticing here is one of two things: either the golden rule is not at all a rule, and we have to make exceptions, or capitalism at a conceptual level is immoral.
One of these two has to be true, no way around it. Personally, I suspect Jesus would never allow capitalism. He would say everyone should share, so everyone can be prosperous.
If your competitor is lazy and grows to accept more money for less quality that is immoral. The moral thing to do is to compete against that company so that you provide better products and services for lower cost. That is the moral thing. Communism is neither here nor there, it's a completely different thing. Happy now?
The Bible explicitly states that judgment is immoral, and is the sole duty of God. If someone is committing a sin, it is not your job to fix them of that sin - and actually by doing so, you yourself are sinning.
If your competitor is lazy, the moral choice is to do nothing, and let God handle it. You do not know what is or is not a sin, because you are not the arbiter of morality - God is. Casting judgement on your competitor is sinful.
Really, no matter how you cut it, I think it's obvious Jesus Christ was a communist. He would absolutely not be happy with capitalism. Are we helping other's out of the goodness of our heart? No. Are we giving to the community? No.
In an ideal world where everyone follows the golden rule, the only outcome could possibly be communism. And, there would never be any problems, ever. Because nobody would be greedy - there would be no grounds for capitalism to even form. A revolution could not occur.
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 jurisdiction is different. The alleged offense is different. The stage of legal proceedings is different.
There's no contradiction between an American court finding that using legally acquired copies of copyrighted material for AI training constitutes fair use, and Italian police launching an investigation because they suspect someone might be selling illegal copies of copyrighted material.
No one is claiming that the law is wrongly interpreted. We're saying that the law is wrong.
How is it legal to generate the content of that YouTube with genAI but not to actually tape it with real people. Why does an AI have more rights than this YouTuber.
If the law were truly consistent, surgeons would go to jail for cutting people with knives.
As soon as you recognize that context should matter in law, consistency is no longer possible.
I’m not defending big companies pirating books or saying YouTubers should go to jail, I’m just saying there are material differences in context that make it juvenile to demand perfect consistency.
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.
There at least two documented cases of the major AI companies downloading millions of books of torrents. Anthropic is in litigation about it right now, meta was in the news about it. I would be surprised if it's not all of them.
Hence, the "usually". Poisoning your sources with potentially illegally acquired content is a separate problem from the legal status of the compiled system's output. I mean, if you steal the book you use as an inspiration for your own book, would the author or bookseller of the stolen book then have any rights to your work? This is a fundamental problem, not one where the specific fails of companies matter.
> LLMs are not being trained for personal use, they're being trained to be sold to the masses.
Come again? Deepseek and numerous other smaller models can be run locally, for free.
I think what’s really behind this attitude is that “information wants to be free” when I’m pirating IP from a big, faceless corporation. But when it’s _my_ IP being pirated, it’s theft.
Yes, it's called power dynamics. You're weak and irrelevant, they're rich and powerful. When they do the same things you do, the consequences are different. I can make selfish decisions all day long and the blast radius is pretty small. When rich people make selfish decisions, or worse, when political leaders do, the entire economy suffers and in the worst cases millions of people can die.
In some developed nations, we're almost comically unaware of power dynamics, sometimes to the point of inverting power dynamics.
Consider a McDonald's employee versus a Police Officer. The McDonald's employee can make almost any mistake and it's not a big deal. Pickles on your burger when you didn't want pickles? Eh, you'll get over it.
When Police Officers make mistakes, innocent people die. Taxpayers pay out sometimes millions of dollars.
Based on that, you would expect the standard of behavior for Police Officers to be much higher than a McDonald's cashier. But no, we've inverted it.
If the Police Officer accidentally kills someone they shouldn't, they'll likely keep their job. If a McDonald's cashier's drawer comes up 1 dollar short, they're terminated immediately.
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.
To be clear, scraping the entire internet so that ChatGPT knows what Mickey Mouse is may not be a fair use of copyright. Or to be more specific, being able to generate images of Mickey Mouse may not be legal- that is the ingestion of those images that give the model the ability to generate images of copyrighted material. I guess the courts will decide that soon-ish?
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.
My personal opinion is that since the laws haven't changed and society is still harshly punishing individuals for copyright infringement all the companies that have downloaded e.g. anna's archive should be dismantled, or at the very least their executives should be jailed.
Maybe the laws should be changed, maybe not, but the fact is that they haven't been.
It's not as if individuals are the only ones who bear the consequences though- huge companies sue each other all the time over copyright.
I guess it's a function of the legal system at all levels that money buys you more access to justice- not sure if that's a copyright issue specifically.
The consequences are not at all proportional. Individuals get their lives ruined, some even driven to suicide. Often they're not even profiting, at least not directly.
Companies shield the executives and workers breaking the law (and profiting from it!) and barely get fined, if at all. Often they're just told to cease & desist.
> 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.)
For covers, the recording is not considered the same as the original, but the underlying composition (notes and lyrics) are. Both composition and recording are separately covered by copyright.
> making something that is merely similar, but clearly different from the original, is not a copyright violation
Is a cover a copy? For music, it's not like I'm selling you sheet music- I'm still outputting something you listen to that won't be the same as the original.
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.
No, but we don't need it to define what's our expectations of the effects from capitalism in it's later stages of maturity. Can we agree that the function of a corporation at least is to satisfy it's investors and maximise profits?
So lobbyism is just a manifestation of this function, the attempt of a corporation to communicate with society in order to influence decisions that impact their profits.
Corporations are not the only types of machines that have interest in making connections to other machines in the capitalist universe. Humans are also embedded in this universe, but for other interests.
Therefore it's reasonable to think that capitalism working as intended will in time start producing corporations that work against the interests of the common good.
Capitalism is to capital what monarchism is to monarch.
You've used terms in the past like "autocracy", "cascading failure", "plastic", "human capital", "optical media", and "infotainment". Is that what precision looks like? Was that CD, CD-ROM, CD-RW, DVD-RAM, BluRay, etc, made of polyethylene or polypropylene, or maybe polyvinyl chloride?
All of language is tenuous overlap between speaker intent and listener interpretation. In this instance, how do you interpret the definition of capitalism for this context? Better to add meaning.
In cases like these it's sufficient to substitute "capitalism" for "crony capitalism". However, the people making these statements are unlikely to ever agree that there can exist a non-crony-capitalism.
No wonder the statement from Video Games Europe[0] in response to the Stop Killing Games initiative was laughed at from every corner of the internet. It didn't say anything unexpected but just underlined why these types of preservation initiatives are so important. Should Abernic ship devices loaded with illegal ROMs? Probably not. But to prosecute a customer who bought the product legally for it is a sad joke.
Italian here.
The title is a bit misleading: the raid was not ordered by the government but by justice system. They are two different entities.
Unfortunately, in Italy, we have a long tradition of situation like this one: in the early 90s, a police operation against software piracy (https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Italian_Crackdown) destroyed the whole BBS ecosystem, but at the end no guilty sentence.
I am betting an euro that the YouTuber will not get any penal consequence.
I have an opposing viewpoint here. Incompressible to me how normalised copyright theft has become in the commercial emulation space.
There are huge YouTube channels such as Linus Tech Tips reviewing $100 devices that contain copyrighted games that would have retailed for over a million dollars. This is not normal and is very different from an individual downloading some ROMs.
And to clarify the story, this guy is being investigated because it was suspected he was selling these devices, not just reviewing them.
It's not incomprehensible, it's actually quite understandable.
Being able to play a full catalog of retro games these days is just not possible without piracy and emulation. Sure some games are still available like with what Nintendo is doing with NES games or MSFT is doing with original Xbox games. But go outside of that narrow catalog and finding the other games legally is impossible outside of going into retro game stores and hoping they have a copy.
I'll use the Need for Speed franchise here as an example. You point blank cannot find legit ways of playing the original underground games, they aren't sold in stores, and not sold via any digital avenue. I would have loved to pay for both underground games but I was forced to pirate them since there was literally no other option.
Using “forced” in the passive voice is telling here. Wouldn’t it show more agency to say you chose to pirate them because your desire to play them outweighed your estimate of the moral / legal downsides?
Wouldn't it show more agency to acknowledge you chose to focus on the word 'forced' because your desire to make a rhetorical critique outweighed your interest in engaging with the substantive issue of abandoned software preservation?
Perhaps. I admit I find the phrase “I was forced to pirate this game” so jarring that it is really hard to process the text around it, so maybe I missed some substance.
People have the right to be greedy capricious dickheads with the property (physical, intellectual, and real) that they own and you are infringing on that right.
Like, they can write the best and most entertaining video game of all time, one that makes you pass out if not almost die from joy, and they have the right to sell only a single copy for $10 quadrillion and sue the shit out of anyone who plays it without their permission.
And there is no right, or need, to play a video game as far as I'm aware.
None of what you described is a moral downside. Yes, people already admit that it is illegal to engage in copyright infringement regarding stuff that it is impossible to buy in the first place.
That has little to do with the fact that it does not contain any moral downsides to doing that.
> People have the right to be greedy capricious dickheads with the property (physical, intellectual, and real) that they own and you are infringing on that right.
IMO they shouldn't - not for intellectual property.
Look, IP laws like Copyright make a lot of sense when we're encouraging innovative and rewarding companies for putting something unique and desirable on the market.
But if it's not on the market, there's nothing to incentivize or protect. Then it just becomes hoarding, or, more often - using IP as leverage to artificially inflate the value of it. Basically, you can not sell things, thereby making the thing more scarce on purpose, so later on you can maybe scrape more cash.
This sucks. It's bad for consumers, it's bad for markets. So, maybe we should consider disincentivizing this.
Proposal: if you do not sell copyrighted material, you forfeit the copyright. You keep all the protections and incentives of copyright. But! You essentially legalize pirating old shit or you force companies to put their money where their mouth is and distribute said old shit.
If this old shit is truly a harm to someone's bottom line, then uh, you need to be selling it. Otherwise there's no bottom line to harm.
> People have the right to be greedy capricious dickheads with the property (physical, intellectual, and real) that they own and you are infringing on that right.
I'm pretty sure the post you're replying to was referring to "legit ways" as in the purchase would be actually from the current rights holder. Buying on the secondary market comes with its own problems:
1. The people who made-- er, own the rights to the game get no financial benefit. Functionally, what is the difference to EA if I download a copy of NFS: Underground, or if I buy a copy from some rando on eBay? Yes, the courts care, but it's not exactly like I'm supporting the artists.
2. You are not guaranteed a legitimate copy. eBay sellers will ship duplicated discs all the time, whether contemporary copies or ones made recently to meet the demands of retro gaming. Can you claim you got duped and offload your moral responsibility to the seller? Maybe. But you could still be a pirate.
3. Copyright law is complicated, and you might still be pirating if you do get a legitimate copy. The arcade cabinet is a great example. Did the seller own it outright, or was it on a lease that got abandoned when the game was no longer profitable? In the latter case, your purchase would not be covered by the US first-sale doctrine. So you could spend £4095 and then may as well hoist the jolly roger.
4. The used game market is a long-standing problem currently being solved by games publishers. It will not be long before there are no old CDs of retro games available because they never existed in the first place.
I've just always been weirded out when people hold up gray market purchases of used media as some paradigm of moral responsibility. It's like a financial transaction with the transfer of physical media is some magical incantation that erases all questions of ownership.
There was a brief attempt in late 90s Japan by game publishers to curtail used game sales by campaigning against it on back covers of games in late 90s/early 2000s. They stopped after the court said no to it.
Additionally, the market is also seeing used games as collectibles like cars and are inflating their prices that make it out of reach to actual buyers in favor of collectors. (cf. WATA Games)
> I would have loved to pay for both underground games but I was forced to pirate them since there was literally no other option.
The alternative is to play a different game, which is what the media rights holders want you to do. Or buy it at a second hand shop or off a collector. People aren't mandated to sell you something in the form you want, and you aren't entitled to buy it.
Like I have a growing collection of scifi books that are out of print. I don't complain that I can't pirate the ebooks in order to read them, I look for them where they can be found.
So it's not immoral for a rights holder to manipulate you into buying more product...but it is immoral for me to continue to use the product I want, even after the company has made it impossible for me to compensate them for it?
I didn't make any comment on morality, and there's no "continue to use the product" in this entire discussion. It's "buy an old product that a company doesn't sell"
For most of human history, it has been completely normal. It was fine to make your own cave painting look exactly like the one you saw on a visit to a neighbouring cave. It wasn't til the early 1700 that there was any formal idea of copyright, and almost 1900 before it became pervasive.
Even today, nobody gets their panties in a knot if you sell a copy of the Mona Lisa. Everyone accepts that the copyright has long expired. In other situations (as in retro games) the only question is how long, and under what circumstances, copyright should persist. Reasonable people can disagree. Making it a moral issue is a bit tiring.
It says that the legal basis for the investigation is article 171 ter of the Italian Copyright Law, which lists a lot of things that boil down to selling what you have no right to sell. https://www.wipo.int/wipolex/en/text/477668 The one part that is different is "c) promotes and organizes the unlawful activities under paragraph 1" which might also apply to a reviewer who does not directly sell things. But it's not just "promotes or organizes" either, so I think they'd want indications of quite substantial involvement before launching an investigation.
Need to do this to music too. Otherwise you'll end up in a situation where the game still can't be distributed in its original state because the music that's used is still under copyright. Even when the original developers of a game re-release it, sometimes they have to change the soundtrack if they used licensed music because acquiring a new license may be too expensive or just entirely disallowed.
i can do this without the snark: it's infringement, it's not theft, and changing the word to theft doesn't strengthen your argument at all. copyright inherently immoral in my opinion, and even outside my extreme opinion, it's current implementation in the US objectively doesn't align with what most people would call "good".
i doesn't make sense to respect the draconian copyright laws to the extent of not distributing 40 year old video games, that are easily obtained after 5 seconds of online searching, and whose theoretical potential purchase has zero impact on the actual working class people and families that originally made them. you are, at best, allowing Nintendo to maybe make a few bucks, if Nintendo even had the option to still buy these games in any way (they usually dont, i think)
There is also another market for these games with platforms like Pico-8 and Tic-80 where games are open source and one can simply pull the curtain, read the code and learn how the saussage is made. Many of these modern retro games are way more fun than most of the older copyrighted content and the community is thriving too.
Perhaps he should have put/ said a disclaimer on each video.."This reviews is not intended to promote....".
That would put him on an an equal footing with any geologists that couldn't predict an earthquake.
Oh, wait...
>The creator, assuming he didn’t do anything wrong, complied with demands, providing full transcripts of his conversations and chats with gaming handheld manufacturers.
To me, it's kind of strange that buying and showing something that is sold legally (like a console purchased from China, which I assume went through customs, or even sold on Amazon in some cases) can make someone a criminal.
I believe this should be protected under freedom of speech: he's legally buying a product and demonstrating what it does. Maybe posting a referral link and profiting from it could be considered questionable, but come on...
If you want to stop piracy, start by blocking these devices at customs and investigating the businesses that import and sell them to the public. Never put someone in jail for what is, after all, a form of journalism.
> buying and showing something that is sold legally (like a console purchased from China, which I assume went through customs, or even sold on Amazon in some cases)
Going through customs does not make something legal to buy or possess.
Customs is a spot-check that doesn’t catch everything and Customs cannot possibly verify every single product’s legality.
Many people buy illegal drugs internationally and just hope they get through customs, for example. That doesn’t make it legal.
Well, but they are controlling that, the fact that they fail to check it shouldn't be on you.
But besides that, if they consider that aliexpress is selling illegal stuff, they can easily block access to ali express in the country, decline all credit card transactions to ali express, block in customs any package coming from ali express... since is basically a criminal organization.
I mean, they are selling the product in amazon.it and you put in jail a reviewer?
I play video games through emulation, mainly because if I were playing, for example, Dissidia Final Fantasy on a regular Playstation Portable, I wouldn't be able to scan the text with my screen reader, or get AI image descriptions. I tried to buy all the PSP games I wanted to play, but that store was shut down. So now I don't think I could pay Sony for these games even if I wanted to.
Blind people use audio description to watch television and movies. And yet, none of the streaming services have Doctor Who with audio description, for example, in the US. So even if I paid to watch it, I'd have to pirate the audio description track.
And yet, companies can pirate all the books, videos, art and music they want, and have the best lawyers on staff to remind the courts who are really in charge. May the rich be brought low, or the poor be lifted up.
That would make a difference, but "he claims to have taken things one step further by not including any affiliate links in his content", and indeed I checked some, and the links were, if any, normal links.
You say that, next thing you know this guy installs bsnes on a Raspberry Pi going on a rampage on innocent Goombas from an illegal ROM of Super Mario World. What then?
He’s clearly a dangerous maniac and a threat to the society.
don't know about YT but my brother recently introduced me to finance scams inside facebook, based on AI generated videos of prominent politicians and members of the government. How this shit keeps happening is beyond me.
I think he means that leftists with a real political will wants to cancel private property in favor of a single shared property.
Which means no copyright, or copyright owned by the state. And the state to be in charge to collect royalties from foreign countries.
Wokeness and the hammer and sickle covered in blood are symbols that often appears concurrently true left parades (at least in Europe, though actually occasionally in the right too)
So I think he connected the two concepts by association.
I am not saying copyright laws or my frozen crypto account are woke.
The link is the method: In all the cases, being called out for saying something politically slightly incorrect, the youtube handheld thing case in Italy, and my Bitcoin funds in Austria => people are punished before any wrongdoing is proven. Different issues, same "guilty first, check later" mindset.
> 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.
Oh well... didn't realize Italy was like that
>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.
> and an old file-sharing software called eMule.
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.
Maybe you can tell me, since I only noticed around 2007-2008.
Did Sourceforge always suck balls?
Sourceforge used to be a primary location for getting software.
It did suck balls, but we were grateful to have it in a time where it was possibly the best option.
Imo it wasn't that bad, but maybe that was just because code-centric sites like github didn't exist yet. It tried to provide you with a simple landing page for your open source project that can offer you a download button, centered around releasing compiled, versioned software. Their offering of a VCS (svn and CVS IIRC) was more of an added bonus. But once github was there you started wondering how sourceforge ever seemed good.
It was never a great user experience but as the dotcom boom died out and the money went away, they got worse and worse as they got sold a few times.
eMule is doing fine and well tho
maybe we should make more p2p kademilia software to combat the social media giants
Soulseek is doing even better.
I downloaded episodes of South Park using eMule over dial up internet.
> Sourceforge
That's another trip down memory lane...
For the real trip see this: https://webarchive.di.uminho.pt/web.archive.org/web/20090203...
I’m not sure what the first part of that URL does, but I didn’t click on it because it’s suspicious to prepend something to an Internet Archive link. I don’t recognize that domain but perhaps you can explain what it is and what it does?
Here’s the bare archive on IA:
https://web.archive.org/web/20090203182724/http:/freshmeat.n...
> Italy doesn't really care about copyright violations, unless it's soccer or if it's for profit.
Or protected names like mozzarella or parmigiano cheese.
Better not to name your next project after them.
>Italy doesn't really care about copyright violations, unless it's soccer or if it's for profit.
I'm almost certain someone got paid off and pulled some stings. They don't do anything unless money is involved.
I don't think that's the only possibility, but I am wondering why Once Were Nerd was targeted. Is he famous enough to serve as a good example for a new policy? Did he cut someone powerful off in traffic? Did his videos threaten someone's business? Cui bono?
> They don't do anything unless money is involved.
I disagree. They could have done it to be under the spotlight and progress their career.
>progress their career
i.e. money
someone was bribed != people are motivated by financial gain
That is a self-contradictory statement. If people were not motivated by financial gain, then bribery would not exist. You could say people might be motivated by power and influence, but even those things boil down to one singular thing, and that is accumulating wealth.
> an old file-sharing software called eMule.
I still use it, on linux using wine. There is a lot of random stuff you usually don't find via Torrenting.
I was also using eMule through Wine, but I randomly discovered that all my files were shared on the network, not only the ones in folders that I specifically chose. So pay a lot of attention in order not to share sensitive data.
There's also a native client for Linux, it's called aMule. Give it a try instead of the official client.
Holyshit emule is still alive and kicking? Man. I remember using that, Kazaa and Morpheus almost daily back in the aughts.
It really is alive and kicking, and now there's a smarter way to find things compared to the integrated file search (which can lead to fake content, viruses or... worse).
There are some forums (yes, old-school web forums) with neatly organized content. You just copy-paste the e2dk link into the client, and voilà.
Some forums are even publicly accessible, so it's clear that nobody is seriously persecuting people for piracy in Italy.
Nobody cares about copyright unless for profit. Sometimes it's just a lawyer that wants fees
devil's advocate says that lawyer is just doing the job hired to do by the copyright owner. if a copyright owner didn't care, they wouldn't hire these lawyers. if a lawyer is somehow the copyright owner, well, they obviously care
Patent trolls and the like are often lawyers who decided it wasn't enough working hard to do evil/represent evil - they want to be evil without really working either.
> didn't realize Italy was like that
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
>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...
On the other hand, your criminal record matters far less in Germany than it does in the US. Most employers never ask for your record, especially in white collar jobs, and the ones that do usually only look for relevant offenses. If you are convicted for fraud that will make it harder to get a job as accountant, but an conviction for insulting an official or for drug possession years ago is unlikely to have a major impact.
Obviously you shouldn't be charged for stuff like that (and there was backlash for that incident), but the are less than it might appear to the American reader. Being convicted does not turn you into the scum of society in Germany
Can't unmake the fact that you are convicted criminal forever though.
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> uk is starting to arrest and jail or threaten to jail old grandmothers
The linked article doesn't make any mention of arrest, jail, or threats thereof.
I've previously posted a rebuttal about this "thousands arrested for social media" claim: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41488099
? you think police officers came in the middle of night to an old defenseless grandmother about her post showing discomfort about labour politicians as simply fun partying debates ?
what did they go to her home for ? sipping champagne , taking care of the old woman and having oxford like debates ???
Please…
I don't think they came in "the middle of the night", full stop. That's just another embellishment you've pulled out of thin air. I think if you had a strong case, you wouldn't need embellish it so.
> Detectives were last night accused of acting like East Germany's feared Stasi secret police for quizzing Helen Jones over her calls for the resignation of local councillors embroiled in the WhatsApp scandal exposed by The Mail on Sunday.
The article says clearly “last night”, what you think happened doesn’t change what was said by the woman who explicitly stated what happened to her and had to live through it that night.
(on rechecking yes i’m wrong about daytime vs nighttime indeed they visited at morning)
but even with that you think its acceptable if it’s daytime for police to knock on doors due to facebook posts about not liking current ruling councillor stuck in a scandal ???
if this gets politically acceptable get ready for china like atmosphere in future around politics (without china like infrastructure or growth) forced disappearances , thoughtcrimes & thought police…
The doorcam footage is clearly in broad daylight, it's dated February, and further down the article it says:
> At around 1.30pm last Tuesday ... a detective sergeant and another officer knocked at her door
You've made some edits to your post since I replied, so...
> but even with that you think its acceptable if it’s daytime for police to knock on doors due to facebook posts
It's handled on a case by case basis. The police will generally notify someone if they're the subject of a harrassment complaint, and it's not uncommon for them to visit either to give a verbal warning or to advise them on the law. That's... just how the system works in the UK and has done for a long time. Police in the UK are often in and around the community, working with it and giving out advice where it may help to prevent crimes.
Perhaps the police were too keen to visit in person this time. Perhaps they felt pressured to demonstrate a response by the fact that the complainant was linked to the council. That's another issue entirely. But this single incident is not the sign of a steep decline into authoritarianism that you want it to be.
That is saying that last night the detectives were accused, not that they visited the woman last night.
Also note it doesn't say who is making this accusation about the detectives, the article is not designed to inform you but to provoke a reaction.
Also consider that they will be carefully selecting what posts of hers to quote rather than telling you everything she wrote that lead to the complaint.
Do you actually know what she wrote?
Many European countries also have "election silence", basically a blanked ban on political speech, usually for a day or two before and during an election. This is supposedly done to "give people space to deliberate without undue influence."
When such laws were introduced, they basically only applied to mainstream media organizations and actual political agitators; debating politics at the family table was (and still is) allowed. However, the way they're worded, they also apply to any user sharing / liking political posts on social media.
In Greece the bars are closed during voting to 1) Keep people sober. 2) Avoid politicians buying people drinks for votes on the day.
As a New Zealander, I was most surprised to learn we had a daily telegraph.
Looks like webworm has covered them
https://www.webworm.co/p/badnews
This is extremely interesting, thanks a lot for showing it to me. Wow
Does that change your opinion on any of this?
No, still doesn’t change what’s true and is reality.
its unfortunate left wing bias in mainstream media has atrophied the ability for any reliable news media to exist with extensive coverage and neutral reporting. (not unique to the left, right wing actors can do just the same it’s just right now left leaning political actors control most of legacy mainstream media)
Foreign actors are definitely taking advantage of that to fuel tensions as much as they can. Doesnt change reality tho.
That UK has a severe free speech issue and two tier policing, one for native brits(the lower tier) and one for politicians and favoured religious vote banks.
Even if mainstream media had a left wing bias - which is a big stretch in the UK given that it's mostly owned by Rothermere, Murdoch, Barclay and Marshall - why would that prevent reliable and neutral media from existing?
The Daily Mail is a right-wing tabloid rag by Rupert Murdoch. That's propaganda and untrustworthy on its face
it is not a left or right wing thing, these events are happening. Even the US Vice President alluded to this happening.
Are all UK opposition politicians right wing tabloid dummies too ? They are all clearly saying this is happening. Reform UK party that is right now slated in polls to be the next winner if elections were to happen have publicly acknowledged this is happening.
Why make everything into a left vs right match ? if free speech dies here right now by people you support (people who call daily mail a tabloid “right wing” rag) when they go out of power and people you oppose win, they’ll use the same instruments to suppress people you do support.
Basic freedoms are deserved by all citizens, police shouldn’t go around arresting 12,000 citizens for facebook posts or grandmas for voicing their worries not even violent posts or jibes, just criticism and concerns.
While the same country has struggled across years to arrest and prosecute violent offenders targetting british orphanages and harming children. police did nothing about it despite knowing it, and continues to resist protecting children.
You think everything is normal ? Not everything is a football match, the score wont reset after “the game” round is over. Once these freedoms are lost they will be far more harder to bring back. people will be even more defenseless. Nothing good comes out of making everything expendable in a left vs right match.
Common citizens lose everything from it, while politicians on top from both aisles win with more power to do anything and everything they want when they rule.
> Even the US Vice President alluded to this happening
Like the Haitian immigrants eating neighbor's pets?
The US VP is a highly untrustworthy individual.
You may want to consider a course on basic media literacy and critical reading.
Might help you when reading some of your news sources.
Sure, I hope those texts act as warm blanket to console you as western society loses its hard earned freedoms from the rise of extreme left and extreme right.
You’ll need them, much more than I will To realise where things went wrong.
What texts?
you’re courses you speak of.
you’ll need it for consoling if most people dont wake up and realise that the masses are slowly losing all of their freedoms from both the extreme left and extreme right in democracies globally.
Democratic backsliding is a fact that’s happening in all major countries. No media literacy course will save us all from it, if we don’t call out these issues and make it unpopular to do these things by governments.
> Even the US Vice President alluded to this happening.
Ah yes, because the couch fucker sure is known to be trustworthy. Good god, do you also believe everything you read on Facebook and see on Fox news?
So you think everything and everyone across the world is making a politically coordinated event to lie about reality ?
I don’t even vote for the republicans and since when has couches been equated to real things reported widely by media, politicians, citizens, watchdog groups become completely irrelevant because a politician you hate/dislike agreed with those things.
This is not a football match or he said she said, it’s happening and if you have to resort to calling a sitting vice president as “couch**” to deny reality instead of being able to clearly state no one innocent is being jailed for simple disagreements on facebook. then no you probably subconsciously know it’s happening too and need to depend on slander to deny reality.
it is especially ironic considering there are uk citizens getting police visits for saying things far less rude than what you said about US vice president.
You can disagree with ones politics but if you want to defend your ability to have that freedom (to disagree with ruling parties) it does require you to defend the freedoms and rights of people you disagree with politically too…
> So you think everything and everyone across the world is making a politically coordinated event to lie about reality ?
In a word, yes. More nuanced would say that anyone in power is willing to lie and make a politically coordinated event to lie about reality if it helps their agenda. More specifically, I would have you look at current US Administration as the greatest example. They are not the first nor only ones to do this, but they are the most brazen in their use of it
>because the couch fucker sure is known to be trustworthy
Just because he's a "couch fucker", doesn't mean he's wrong in that case. Some EU countries do have genuine issues with free speech. He's right about that one.
People should use critical thinking and judge WHAT is being said independent of WHO is saying it.
Unfortunately people do not use critical thinking anymore to judge topics in a nonpartisan way, because of fear of being attacked/ostracized by the colective groupthink mob based solely on adherence to a political ideology.
Isn't it using critical thinking to be able to know that a particular source of information is not credible after said source admitted to be "willing to create stories” after falsely claiming a certain population was eating people's pets?
So if he'd come out and say "the sky is blue", you'd consider it false without thinking twice just because to you he's not a credible source?
That's exactly what not using critical thinking means, when you just blindly agree or disagree with information based on the source alone.
I think it'd be worth double- and triple-checking anything he says, yes, beyond trivial examples about the color of the sky. He's a known liar. He lies for political gain. He is disgusting.
>I think it'd be worth double- and triple-checking anything he says
That's what I'm advocating for, but people I was replying to didn't even want to do that and were dismissing anything out of the box just because they don't like the source, which is detrimental to any honest and useful debate.
>He's a known liar. He lies for political gain. He is disgusting.
I never said he doesn't lie, of course he does, he's a politician, all of them lie, but even a broken clock is right twice a day.
I said some of the things he says are bang on the money and shouldn't be discarded on the basis that the information comes from a mouth you don't like, as that's just closed minded partisan zealotry and not using critical thinking.
But of course they should be discarded. Why shouldn't they? There are better sources and better people sharing opinions.
Maybe we can take what he says seriously if he comes clean about his past dangerous lies. Until then, he should at the very least be shunned if not ignored entirely.
>But of course they should be discarded. Why shouldn't they?
I rest my case. There's no point in arguing with zealots who don't want to even listen to reason let alone critically analyze information shared with them, but choose to automatically believe and disbelieve it based on their favorite or hated source.
>There are better sources and better people sharing opinions
Your "better sources" might be someone else's "worst sources". Where is that universal ground truth located at? Isn't that discovered though conversation, argumentation and debate like in university campuses, instead of blindly trusting your favorite partisan source? That's no different than religious zealotry that burned Galileo at the stake for saying thins considered "untrue" at the time.
The point is:
> Even the US Vice President alluded to this happening
gives zero additional weight to the credibility of the claim. He's someone who has openly acknowledged about lying for political gain.
"If I have to create stories...then that's what I'm going to do."
He directly says he will lie to you and make up stories to drive his political agenda. He's not even trying to suggest he's representing reality; he's making up stories, telling fiction.
If any news organization openly admits they're going to continue to just write blatant lies to push their agenda, would you continue trusting that source?
I do agree, free speech is far less protected in many European countries than it is in the US. I don't doubt there are plenty of crazy stories of someone getting arrested for their speech in some places in Europe. But JD Vance telling me any specific story about it and I don't see much else making the same claims, my default is to assume it's probably untrue, because he told me he will lie to me. Why would I trust his statements?
Ah yes, but were they really people's pets? They just claimed people were eating animals commonly owned as pets. Even in my neighborhood, there are plenty of cats that are not owned by anyone. "They're eating the dogs. They're eating the cats." That's the quote I'm familiar. I've never heard "They're eating the pet dogs. They're eating the pet cats." Isn't that a difference that a critical thinker would be able to notice?
Claiming they're eating cats and dogs, regardless of pet status, is incredibly racist. Trying to say "Nooo he meant strays" is not critical thinking. It's excusing horribly racist ideology and talking points.
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> Who's actually being hurt here?
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.
> No, they re-release a couple of them, as it conveniences them,
It's significant more than a couple these days. But the number doesn't really matter, it's an ongoing process, and nobody knows which are released at which point. So nobody can claim any more that it's dead content.
> And the handheld consoles aren't competing with nintendo for people interested in playing retro games.
That doesn't matter, it's still not legal. If people want to play old games, OK, then do it, but let it stay with the fans, uncommercial. Don't the f** make money with it, and the h** don't make public advertisement for it. It's illegal, and owners are going after you for it if it's too obvious, because they have the right.
Is this too obvious?
https://www.amazon.it/s/ref=nav_bb_sb?field-keywords=anberni...
I'm more interested in ethics than I am in law. Sit down in a court room for a day if you want to see how the infallible law fucks person after person who committed a vitcimless crime of ignorance, or being too poor to get a good lawyer. Or don't, if you don't want to lose faith in "due process."
So, ethically, I don't think it's ok for companies to dangle a 30 year old videogame around saying "you can't play this because we might want to sell it to you again someday. And by the way the version we sell to you may not be the version you treasured from your childhood, we might fuck up the aspect ratio, or cut content, just because we don't give a shit. Neener neener."
Foolish nonsense. I want to play old videogames. If they sold it to me, I'd buy it off them. I'm not ok that I need to re buy the same game ten times. You used to be able to play old games on new systems by just sticking the disk in. Now you don't even get a disk.
The games industry is rotting. I don't care if companies lose money from emulation (they're not, because they aren't selling what we're buying). Enshittify away, I will continue to rip roms and play them on the device I please, and if that device is sold to me with a garbage SD card full of 10,000 bunk roms, so be it.
> 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.
Arguably this is a flaw in copyright laws. If a copyright owner refuses to make their copyrighted work available to the public, there should be some kind of "use it or lose it" exception - after all, this is all supposed to be in the public interest, in the end. (Haha yeah I know.)
But, that raises the issue of a company's older work competing with their newer work. They use copyright as a tool to withhold their own work, to increase the market for newer works. And companies like Disney use a "vault" model to artificially create demand for older works.
The question is, should companies be allowed to do this?
I don't think they should, and just because I'm a filthy commie. I disagree that older works are competing in a meaningful way - the market has demonstrated it's happy to pay again and again for the same game on new platforms, especially if it comes with upgrades or QOL improvements. Nintendo could easily make money selling a new version of Mario 2 with new levels by og Nintendo level designers. I'd buy it and I have that game on like five different systems.
Not to mention, it's not like I'm not gonna buy tears of the kingdom even though I like to occasionally replay ocarina of time or whatever.
> official retro-gaming is still thriving
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.
A very small percentage do. Nearly 90% of games from before 2010 can no longer be legally purchased.
> That seems... very excessive?
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.
Scrolled way to far down for this. Yep, like most laws infact.
Technical forums assume that law is code, and everything is processed as if/then statements.
> 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 can sell them only because we grant them mo monopoly rights to do so.
It's been more than 30 years since the games creation, let's revoke them now.
I mean, yes, but it is how IP works.
You can either grant IP for everyone equally, or point at some companies that they are rich and consumer hostile anyway so they don't get no IP, or abolish IP altogether.
What Nintendo is doing is no different than what everyone is doing, except that you hate them.
The person you are responding to is pretty clearly of the opinion that "30 years is too long a term for copyright" not "they just hate Nintendo".
IMO the problem isn't that copyright lasts too long, although that matters too, but rather that you don't need to provide copyrighted material.
So basically Nintendo, and others, just hold their copyright material hostage to artificially inflate it's value. The scarcity around Nintendo games is intentional and purely artificial. This shouldn't be allowed.
If you want to maintain copyright on old ass shit, then fine, but you actually have to still sell that old ass shit. Otherwise what are you claiming copyright on? A product that doesn't exist? Why would you do that? Only for nefarious reasons.
This is actually a problem that spans far beyond the vault-like behavior that HBO and Nintendo have been exhibiting.
There's this notion of something called the copyright cliff where works that are quite old but remain under copyright are almost completely unavailable. And in the cases of books, this is not due to artificial scarcity at all, but rather that it's not economically viable to try to extract value from them. And so they just remain unpublished. Yet to get an unauthorized copy is still copyright infringement. It's good example of how copyright doesn't work very well in achieving its stated purpose.
"we grant them monopoly rights to do so"
Who is we? the combined world's governing bodies? the US corporate legal protections systems? japanese corruption?
Regardless, that is not how IP works and I do not think you think this is a proper resolution.
"just because we want it" or "it's been x years" does not pass legal scrutiny and would be dismissed in any legal venue on improper cause. You are free to not purchase the product whe navailable, where made no promises at time of orignal purchase, and are in no way harmed from the decision making of the firms.
is 30 years too long for copyrighting/trademarks? Maybe...but can't really argue that if for those 30 years they have actively defended the IP and proliferation of it from other vendors/firms. And even then.....the world is not the US.
The solution is to never purchase from the IP holder as a matte or protest. But with global scales, good luck affecting any corporations decision making.
We is, in the US, the federal government as directed by congress and the president. (In Canada where I actually live, s/congress/parliament/g and s/president/governor general (but only theoretically)/g).
> Regardless, that is not how IP works
This is exactly how IP laws work. More than that, in the US it's how they're constitutionally required to work - IP is defined as a time limited monopoly in the constitution and the federal government has no right to grant more than that. The current, "so long that it might as well be forever" copyright is spitting in the face of the US constitution.
> but can't really argue that if for those 30 years they have actively defended the IP and proliferation of it from other vendors/firms
I absolutely can. The purpose of IP is to encourage more things to eventually fall into the public domain by being published publicly. At some point, and I think 30 years is well past that point, it does more harm by preventing things from falling into the public domain than it does good by encouraging publishing.
Just because a company found a way to extract money from society, and are still doing so, doesn't mean we should allow them to do so forever.
When originally passed copyright (Statute of Anne in 1710) the term was 14 to 28 years, notably less than 30. As the world has only begun to change more rapidly since then, it's clear that it should have gotten shorter, not longer.
Access to NES, SNES and N64 games is a perk of Nintendo's paid online subscription so pirate copies do compete with that to some extent.
Not the entire library, though. Games that aren't offered in any form anywhere, and also games that weren't localized (like Mother 3) shouldn't have copyright enforceable. It's either you give up production of the game or you produce it forever, no other sane way to go about it
I hate overzealous copyright prosecution as much as anyone, but I’m very wary of a model where you have to use something you own to maintain ownership.
There are things that work that way (RF spectrum), but in general I think it would cut against the purpose of copyright. I do think there’s value in giving creators exclusive rights to their own work, and making it contingent on distribution would hurt small companies more than big.
The only thing you own is the right to a time-limited monopoly of commercialization.
>They are just manufacturing a scarcity right now, or at least they are trying
Rent-seeking is not really something that governments should encourage.
Rent-seeking brings lots of money to lots of politicians, so they encourage it. Those same politicians also have the power to legally murder people, or lock them up for life. "Should" is irrelevant - focus on the "is".
Deciding on how society should run is a matter of should, unless you're a sociopath who doesn't care about improving the world.
If you can show me where I can buy a gameboy formfactor method to play SNES games sold by Nintendo, I will buy two right now and mail you one.
The chinese are selling things that nintendo isn't, that people want. Beautiful capitalism.
Seems hardly something worthy of arresting, let alone jailing someone.
That the current PM's party, FdI, is a neo-fascist political party should also help add some context.
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'.
That's a maximum. It's extremely unlikely that they would actually get jail time. Maybe a suspended sentence at worst.
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
> That seems... very excessive?
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).
it's "up to 3 years" but also "down to" a €50 fine.
> didn't realize Italy was like that
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.
Related reading: A swashbuckling tale of Italian software piracy – 1983-1993 (2022) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42611818
I also remember a PS1 warez group that was of Italian origin.
France too: https://torrentfreak.com/opendns-suspends-service-in-france-...
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).
> Oh well... didn't realize Italy was like that
It's not "like that" unless Lega Calcio is involved. Lots of mafia and lots of profit to be hurt.
> 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.
Welcome to the modern world.
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.
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
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But the issue here is not that it "might be used"
> 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
If we still feel like individuals must be punished for such things let's start by dismantling all the bigcorps that downloaded e.g. anna's archive (openai, meta, for starters).
It would be easier to take the suggestion seriously if there was some proportionality. People aren’t being executed for copyright infringement, and presumably there should be remedies for corporate misbehavior that sponsors of destroying the company.
Companies aren't living things and therefore cannot be killed. "Destroying" a company is a much more morally sound outcome then someone dying.
Also, we do not literally need to "destroy" a company. If we think those jobs or IP is valuable, just nationalize it. Everyone keeps their jobs, the IP lives on, and for a lot of companies they now enjoy competent leadership. When ready, the company can be resold to the private sector.
Fine, jail the company for 3 years. Or at least the executives.
Given that the piracy charges can be fined as low as €50, it can be discussed proportionately.
I totally agree that the AI companies should be accountable for their intellectual property leaching.
Anna's archive contains 52,875,045 books, 98,598,895 papers.
So that's be, at the least, a 7.5B fine. But I'd argue the scope of pirating over 150 million items for commercial use warrants a harsher sentence than the minimum.
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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.
Make it make sense.
> 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.
Law is not fair. The law is the reflection of power relations.
Let's not give up just like that.
The rule of law is one of the greatest achievements of western society and a major reason for the west's global dominance.
True, it was always imperfect due to the realpolitik of power. But that doesn't change the fact that the very idea of rule of law is in opposition to rule of power.
Outside of mass violence against the political class or praying they suddenly start listening to us, what exactly is there to do?
Property Laws usually applies to weak in power. Courts teach to masses to show how they lack true power and wealth. It's for show
Natural Law is fair by definition. It is merely a reflection of ancient ethical norms.
Positive Law -- the laws set down by kings and legislatures -- is much less fair, but sometimes, however rarely, it tries to embody a codification of the Natural Law.
The way the Positive Law is enforced and prosecuted is an utter disaster. In civil courts, justice is bought and sold as a rule; fairness (and even adjudication itself!) is an exception. It's so bad, so transparently twisted, that I think it's fair to say that humans in general have shown that they cannot be trusted with the administration of things such as civil laws. Too corruptible.
>Natural Law is fair by definition. It is merely a reflection of ancient ethical norms.
There is no such thing.
Serious questions, then:
Why is slavery wrong? Does human life have no innate (non-relative, not bestowed) dignity, in your view?
When judges refer (as they frequently do) to uncodified notions of "fair play" or "good faith and fair dealing," what are they basing those notions on? Is it not a continuation of the ancient Natural Law inclination towards promise-keeping, reflected in many human societies as the oath-breaking taboo?
Natural Law isn't real, and won't hurt you - it's just one particular sect's form of copium.
You obviously are against that 'one sect', but natural law IS the thing. This is what most people consider to be the norm that governs how we behave. It's not written down, it's what you know is right or wrong. Let me give you some examples:
- Raping woman on the street - wrong
- Giving starving person some food - good
- Stealing from your employer - wrong (unless you are not paid or cheated)
- Killing random person - wrong
- Caring for your spause and children - good
and the list goes on
And the general rule, written down by 'that sect' in their book is 'love your neighbor as you love yourself', you should prefer to live among people who really apply this in their life, whenever you share their beliefs or not, because it's so much easier to live among such people than to live among selfish people who will not hesitate to harm you if only their actions go unpunished.
In empirical reality, we observe that most people, especially successful people, talk about following these principles but do not follow them.
> love your neighbor as you love yourself
This is just communism. If everyone did this, you would have a community-based economy and society. Communism.
The sheer idea of competition is antithetical to this world view. Because you would never compete against yourself - but you MUST compete against your neighbors. You would never advocate against yourself, either.
Look, it's a nice idea, everyone hold hands and sing Kumbaya. But it's not a Christian thing, Marx figured this out much more concretely. Like, he thought about the actual economic and political consequences of it.
And, I don't know, maybe it could work. But I think it's important we're all on the same page about what we're asking for.
Treat others the way you want to be treated. Even when competing you should not cheat, lie, steal or otherwise commit wrong-doing.
Competing against someone means advocating for yourself instead of them.
Nobody would ever advocate against themselves - that's self-destructive. So, following the golden rule, competition is immoral. You shouldn't advocate against others, because you wouldn't do it to yourself.
More concretely, when you compete you are trying to take money away from other people and give it to yourself. Right? Because a customer could go to them - but you want the customer to go to you. So you get 5 bucks your competitor wouldn't have.
What we're noticing here is one of two things: either the golden rule is not at all a rule, and we have to make exceptions, or capitalism at a conceptual level is immoral.
One of these two has to be true, no way around it. Personally, I suspect Jesus would never allow capitalism. He would say everyone should share, so everyone can be prosperous.
Again... sounds like communism to me.
If your competitor is lazy and grows to accept more money for less quality that is immoral. The moral thing to do is to compete against that company so that you provide better products and services for lower cost. That is the moral thing. Communism is neither here nor there, it's a completely different thing. Happy now?
Of course I'm not happy, because you're wrong.
The Bible explicitly states that judgment is immoral, and is the sole duty of God. If someone is committing a sin, it is not your job to fix them of that sin - and actually by doing so, you yourself are sinning.
If your competitor is lazy, the moral choice is to do nothing, and let God handle it. You do not know what is or is not a sin, because you are not the arbiter of morality - God is. Casting judgement on your competitor is sinful.
Really, no matter how you cut it, I think it's obvious Jesus Christ was a communist. He would absolutely not be happy with capitalism. Are we helping other's out of the goodness of our heart? No. Are we giving to the community? No.
In an ideal world where everyone follows the golden rule, the only outcome could possibly be communism. And, there would never be any problems, ever. Because nobody would be greedy - there would be no grounds for capitalism to even form. A revolution could not occur.
Doesn't sound like YCombinator's recipe for success
That has nothing to do with communism, go educate yourself, and actually try
I am consistent on this one, personally. Let LLMs train on anything and let YouTubers do things like this one. It's all fine to me.
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 jurisdiction is different. The alleged offense is different. The stage of legal proceedings is different.
There's no contradiction between an American court finding that using legally acquired copies of copyrighted material for AI training constitutes fair use, and Italian police launching an investigation because they suspect someone might be selling illegal copies of copyrighted material.
No one is claiming that the law is wrongly interpreted. We're saying that the law is wrong.
How is it legal to generate the content of that YouTube with genAI but not to actually tape it with real people. Why does an AI have more rights than this YouTuber.
Consistency is the hobgoblin.
If the law were truly consistent, surgeons would go to jail for cutting people with knives.
As soon as you recognize that context should matter in law, consistency is no longer possible.
I’m not defending big companies pirating books or saying YouTubers should go to jail, I’m just saying there are material differences in context that make it juvenile to demand perfect consistency.
The pirate party is a single issue party about abolishing copyright and having no plan for what to do next. I'm not surprised it didn't go anywhere.
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.
> But AI-Companies usually do not steal data.
There at least two documented cases of the major AI companies downloading millions of books of torrents. Anthropic is in litigation about it right now, meta was in the news about it. I would be surprised if it's not all of them.
Hence, the "usually". Poisoning your sources with potentially illegally acquired content is a separate problem from the legal status of the compiled system's output. I mean, if you steal the book you use as an inspiration for your own book, would the author or bookseller of the stolen book then have any rights to your work? This is a fundamental problem, not one where the specific fails of companies matter.
The difference is obviously one of intent. LLMs are not being trained for personal use, they're being trained to be sold to the masses.
Very few people download(ed?) movies or music with the intent to distribute it. They downloaded it because they wanted to consume the media.
> LLMs are not being trained for personal use, they're being trained to be sold to the masses.
Come again? Deepseek and numerous other smaller models can be run locally, for free.
I think what’s really behind this attitude is that “information wants to be free” when I’m pirating IP from a big, faceless corporation. But when it’s _my_ IP being pirated, it’s theft.
Yes, it's called power dynamics. You're weak and irrelevant, they're rich and powerful. When they do the same things you do, the consequences are different. I can make selfish decisions all day long and the blast radius is pretty small. When rich people make selfish decisions, or worse, when political leaders do, the entire economy suffers and in the worst cases millions of people can die.
In some developed nations, we're almost comically unaware of power dynamics, sometimes to the point of inverting power dynamics.
Consider a McDonald's employee versus a Police Officer. The McDonald's employee can make almost any mistake and it's not a big deal. Pickles on your burger when you didn't want pickles? Eh, you'll get over it.
When Police Officers make mistakes, innocent people die. Taxpayers pay out sometimes millions of dollars.
Based on that, you would expect the standard of behavior for Police Officers to be much higher than a McDonald's cashier. But no, we've inverted it.
If the Police Officer accidentally kills someone they shouldn't, they'll likely keep their job. If a McDonald's cashier's drawer comes up 1 dollar short, they're terminated immediately.
Oops. Messed that up, didn't we?
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.
Okay, but in that case humans should legally be able to pirate all the books, music and movies they can or are learning from.
Sovereign is he who makes the exception.
I haven't heard Carl Schmitt doctrine in long time. I hope it doesn't become as prominent as it once was.
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.
Dead internet theory confirmed.
Well, the Ministry of Truth is working on it, at least.
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.
Even if they do reissue said older games whenever possible for them, these are often times in altered form from the originals as well.
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.
Well, I object to copyright in general, regardless of the parties involved. We should not promote regression in the name of fake "fairness."
Which companies are violating copyright on a massive scale? And what impact? (a bigger, badder impact sounds implied by you)
One example is basically all of the major AI players have used Annas Archives/Libgen's database to unlawfully access millions of books.
To be clear, scraping the entire internet so that ChatGPT knows what Mickey Mouse is may not be a fair use of copyright. Or to be more specific, being able to generate images of Mickey Mouse may not be legal- that is the ingestion of those images that give the model the ability to generate images of copyrighted material. I guess the courts will decide that soon-ish?
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.
My personal opinion is that since the laws haven't changed and society is still harshly punishing individuals for copyright infringement all the companies that have downloaded e.g. anna's archive should be dismantled, or at the very least their executives should be jailed.
Maybe the laws should be changed, maybe not, but the fact is that they haven't been.
RIP Aaron Swartz.
It's not as if individuals are the only ones who bear the consequences though- huge companies sue each other all the time over copyright.
I guess it's a function of the legal system at all levels that money buys you more access to justice- not sure if that's a copyright issue specifically.
The consequences are not at all proportional. Individuals get their lives ruined, some even driven to suicide. Often they're not even profiting, at least not directly.
Companies shield the executives and workers breaking the law (and profiting from it!) and barely get fined, if at all. Often they're just told to cease & desist.
> 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.)
> The case is arguably even more clear cut: copyright protects more-or-less exact copies.
What about songwriting? Or even music performance- me performing a song doesn't produce a more or less exact copy.
For covers, the recording is not considered the same as the original, but the underlying composition (notes and lyrics) are. Both composition and recording are separately covered by copyright.
> making something that is merely similar, but clearly different from the original, is not a copyright violation
Is a cover a copy? For music, it's not like I'm selling you sheet music- I'm still outputting something you listen to that won't be the same as the original.
I'm surprised this is Italy and not the US.
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.
Nope, commerce of anything illegal is handled by GDF. Drugs even.
It's astounding how much authoritarianism people are willing to tolerate in the name of maximising the economic incentives for producing entertainment media.
> willing
Don't mistake the IP cartel's backroom lobbying for the will of the people.
These topics are full of people defending it. Every single time.
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.
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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.
No, but we don't need it to define what's our expectations of the effects from capitalism in it's later stages of maturity. Can we agree that the function of a corporation at least is to satisfy it's investors and maximise profits?
So lobbyism is just a manifestation of this function, the attempt of a corporation to communicate with society in order to influence decisions that impact their profits.
Corporations are not the only types of machines that have interest in making connections to other machines in the capitalist universe. Humans are also embedded in this universe, but for other interests.
Therefore it's reasonable to think that capitalism working as intended will in time start producing corporations that work against the interests of the common good.
Capitalism is to capital what monarchism is to monarch.
You've used terms in the past like "autocracy", "cascading failure", "plastic", "human capital", "optical media", and "infotainment". Is that what precision looks like? Was that CD, CD-ROM, CD-RW, DVD-RAM, BluRay, etc, made of polyethylene or polypropylene, or maybe polyvinyl chloride?
Fair point, and A+ for effort.
All of language is tenuous overlap between speaker intent and listener interpretation. In this instance, how do you interpret the definition of capitalism for this context? Better to add meaning.
Money in politics. An excess of political power in the halls of commerce as opposed to the other estates of the realm.
In cases like these it's sufficient to substitute "capitalism" for "crony capitalism". However, the people making these statements are unlikely to ever agree that there can exist a non-crony-capitalism.
But when will we have jail time for CEOs who invade our privacy?
I’m sure right after street criminality will be taken care of.
No wonder the statement from Video Games Europe[0] in response to the Stop Killing Games initiative was laughed at from every corner of the internet. It didn't say anything unexpected but just underlined why these types of preservation initiatives are so important. Should Abernic ship devices loaded with illegal ROMs? Probably not. But to prosecute a customer who bought the product legally for it is a sad joke.
[0]https://www.videogameseurope.eu/news/statement-on-stop-killi...
Italian here. The title is a bit misleading: the raid was not ordered by the government but by justice system. They are two different entities.
Unfortunately, in Italy, we have a long tradition of situation like this one: in the early 90s, a police operation against software piracy (https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Italian_Crackdown) destroyed the whole BBS ecosystem, but at the end no guilty sentence.
I am betting an euro that the YouTuber will not get any penal consequence.
I have an opposing viewpoint here. Incompressible to me how normalised copyright theft has become in the commercial emulation space.
There are huge YouTube channels such as Linus Tech Tips reviewing $100 devices that contain copyrighted games that would have retailed for over a million dollars. This is not normal and is very different from an individual downloading some ROMs.
And to clarify the story, this guy is being investigated because it was suspected he was selling these devices, not just reviewing them.
It's not incomprehensible, it's actually quite understandable.
Being able to play a full catalog of retro games these days is just not possible without piracy and emulation. Sure some games are still available like with what Nintendo is doing with NES games or MSFT is doing with original Xbox games. But go outside of that narrow catalog and finding the other games legally is impossible outside of going into retro game stores and hoping they have a copy.
I'll use the Need for Speed franchise here as an example. You point blank cannot find legit ways of playing the original underground games, they aren't sold in stores, and not sold via any digital avenue. I would have loved to pay for both underground games but I was forced to pirate them since there was literally no other option.
Using “forced” in the passive voice is telling here. Wouldn’t it show more agency to say you chose to pirate them because your desire to play them outweighed your estimate of the moral / legal downsides?
>you chose to pirate them because your desire to play them outweighed your estimate of the moral / legal downsides?
textbook bs of putting other people action under microscope, no one is this precise in making decisions related to day to day stuff.
Wouldn't it show more agency to acknowledge you chose to focus on the word 'forced' because your desire to make a rhetorical critique outweighed your interest in engaging with the substantive issue of abandoned software preservation?
Perhaps. I admit I find the phrase “I was forced to pirate this game” so jarring that it is really hard to process the text around it, so maybe I missed some substance.
What are the moral downsides of pirating a game you can't buy anywhere?
People have the right to be greedy capricious dickheads with the property (physical, intellectual, and real) that they own and you are infringing on that right.
Like, they can write the best and most entertaining video game of all time, one that makes you pass out if not almost die from joy, and they have the right to sell only a single copy for $10 quadrillion and sue the shit out of anyone who plays it without their permission.
And there is no right, or need, to play a video game as far as I'm aware.
None of what you described is a moral downside. Yes, people already admit that it is illegal to engage in copyright infringement regarding stuff that it is impossible to buy in the first place.
That has little to do with the fact that it does not contain any moral downsides to doing that.
> People have the right to be greedy capricious dickheads with the property (physical, intellectual, and real) that they own and you are infringing on that right.
IMO they shouldn't - not for intellectual property.
Look, IP laws like Copyright make a lot of sense when we're encouraging innovative and rewarding companies for putting something unique and desirable on the market.
But if it's not on the market, there's nothing to incentivize or protect. Then it just becomes hoarding, or, more often - using IP as leverage to artificially inflate the value of it. Basically, you can not sell things, thereby making the thing more scarce on purpose, so later on you can maybe scrape more cash.
This sucks. It's bad for consumers, it's bad for markets. So, maybe we should consider disincentivizing this.
Proposal: if you do not sell copyrighted material, you forfeit the copyright. You keep all the protections and incentives of copyright. But! You essentially legalize pirating old shit or you force companies to put their money where their mouth is and distribute said old shit.
If this old shit is truly a harm to someone's bottom line, then uh, you need to be selling it. Otherwise there's no bottom line to harm.
What's immoral about it? The company decided it doesn't want to make money off of it anymore, so he's not giving them any!
Just because it's against the rules doesn't mean it's hurting anyone.
> People have the right to be greedy capricious dickheads with the property (physical, intellectual, and real) that they own and you are infringing on that right.
...why?
>You point blank cannot find legit ways of playing the original underground games
Did you mean to type "You point blank cannot find legit ways of playing the original underground games without paying $20"?
Need for Speed Underground sells for between $15 and $24 on the used market: https://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_nkw=Need+For+Speed+Undergro...
Every single version listed on Wikipedia, except for the arcade version, is available.
edit: the arcade is £4095, including VAT with free delivery (presumably in the UK).
https://www.libertygames.co.uk/store/video_arcade_machines/d...
I'm pretty sure the post you're replying to was referring to "legit ways" as in the purchase would be actually from the current rights holder. Buying on the secondary market comes with its own problems:
1. The people who made-- er, own the rights to the game get no financial benefit. Functionally, what is the difference to EA if I download a copy of NFS: Underground, or if I buy a copy from some rando on eBay? Yes, the courts care, but it's not exactly like I'm supporting the artists.
2. You are not guaranteed a legitimate copy. eBay sellers will ship duplicated discs all the time, whether contemporary copies or ones made recently to meet the demands of retro gaming. Can you claim you got duped and offload your moral responsibility to the seller? Maybe. But you could still be a pirate.
3. Copyright law is complicated, and you might still be pirating if you do get a legitimate copy. The arcade cabinet is a great example. Did the seller own it outright, or was it on a lease that got abandoned when the game was no longer profitable? In the latter case, your purchase would not be covered by the US first-sale doctrine. So you could spend £4095 and then may as well hoist the jolly roger.
4. The used game market is a long-standing problem currently being solved by games publishers. It will not be long before there are no old CDs of retro games available because they never existed in the first place.
I've just always been weirded out when people hold up gray market purchases of used media as some paradigm of moral responsibility. It's like a financial transaction with the transfer of physical media is some magical incantation that erases all questions of ownership.
There was a brief attempt in late 90s Japan by game publishers to curtail used game sales by campaigning against it on back covers of games in late 90s/early 2000s. They stopped after the court said no to it.
Additionally, the market is also seeing used games as collectibles like cars and are inflating their prices that make it out of reach to actual buyers in favor of collectors. (cf. WATA Games)
> I would have loved to pay for both underground games but I was forced to pirate them since there was literally no other option.
The alternative is to play a different game, which is what the media rights holders want you to do. Or buy it at a second hand shop or off a collector. People aren't mandated to sell you something in the form you want, and you aren't entitled to buy it.
Like I have a growing collection of scifi books that are out of print. I don't complain that I can't pirate the ebooks in order to read them, I look for them where they can be found.
So it's not immoral for a rights holder to manipulate you into buying more product...but it is immoral for me to continue to use the product I want, even after the company has made it impossible for me to compensate them for it?
I didn't make any comment on morality, and there's no "continue to use the product" in this entire discussion. It's "buy an old product that a company doesn't sell"
For most of human history, it has been completely normal. It was fine to make your own cave painting look exactly like the one you saw on a visit to a neighbouring cave. It wasn't til the early 1700 that there was any formal idea of copyright, and almost 1900 before it became pervasive.
Even today, nobody gets their panties in a knot if you sell a copy of the Mona Lisa. Everyone accepts that the copyright has long expired. In other situations (as in retro games) the only question is how long, and under what circumstances, copyright should persist. Reasonable people can disagree. Making it a moral issue is a bit tiring.
> And to clarify the story, this guy is being investigated because it was suspected he was selling these devices, not just reviewing them.
Do you have another source for that? I don’t see it in the article. It says the exact charges aren’t known due to the way their legal system works.
It says that the legal basis for the investigation is article 171 ter of the Italian Copyright Law, which lists a lot of things that boil down to selling what you have no right to sell. https://www.wipo.int/wipolex/en/text/477668 The one part that is different is "c) promotes and organizes the unlawful activities under paragraph 1" which might also apply to a reviewer who does not directly sell things. But it's not just "promotes or organizes" either, so I think they'd want indications of quite substantial involvement before launching an investigation.
The article mentions promotion. It also says he turned off affiliate links.
They seized 30 consoles of different types, which is not consistent with someone selling a lot of one.
The copyright on games and software should really expire after maybe 20 years.
Sure, everyone should know that this is technically illegal, but not following these laws isn't "incomprehensible".
Need to do this to music too. Otherwise you'll end up in a situation where the game still can't be distributed in its original state because the music that's used is still under copyright. Even when the original developers of a game re-release it, sometimes they have to change the soundtrack if they used licensed music because acquiring a new license may be too expensive or just entirely disallowed.
They should be freed as soon as they aren't being sold by the creator.
copyright theft? they're stealing copyrights?
i can do this without the snark: it's infringement, it's not theft, and changing the word to theft doesn't strengthen your argument at all. copyright inherently immoral in my opinion, and even outside my extreme opinion, it's current implementation in the US objectively doesn't align with what most people would call "good".
i doesn't make sense to respect the draconian copyright laws to the extent of not distributing 40 year old video games, that are easily obtained after 5 seconds of online searching, and whose theoretical potential purchase has zero impact on the actual working class people and families that originally made them. you are, at best, allowing Nintendo to maybe make a few bucks, if Nintendo even had the option to still buy these games in any way (they usually dont, i think)
> This is not normal and is very different from an individual downloading some ROMs.
Just go to archive.org and type something like 'romset' in the search box to see what 'normal' looks like these days, for better or for worse.
Here in HN it's accepted practice to copy copyrighted newspaper articles
There is also another market for these games with platforms like Pico-8 and Tic-80 where games are open source and one can simply pull the curtain, read the code and learn how the saussage is made. Many of these modern retro games are way more fun than most of the older copyrighted content and the community is thriving too.
Even if he was not selling them, reviewing can be construed as promoting which is illegal in Italy.
Perhaps he should have put/ said a disclaimer on each video.."This reviews is not intended to promote....". That would put him on an an equal footing with any geologists that couldn't predict an earthquake. Oh, wait...
Which ones sell with games?
Many AliExpress sellers are offering the devices bundled with a pre-loaded microSD card.
> copyrighted games that would have retailed for over a million dollars
this is, sorry, ....what?
In which universe do people spend a million dollars for a collection of video games? At retail?
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>The creator, assuming he didn’t do anything wrong, complied with demands, providing full transcripts of his conversations and chats with gaming handheld manufacturers.
Incredible.
If you wonder why I say that, please watch this video: https://youtube.com/watch?v=d-7o9xYp7eE
Meanwhile, Anthropic and others aren't raided and are not blocked in Italy.
The YouTuber should have used an LLM for laundering copyright.
The Paco Gutierrez copypasta will now have a new version... but Nintendo didn't deliver the papers directly this time.
To me, it's kind of strange that buying and showing something that is sold legally (like a console purchased from China, which I assume went through customs, or even sold on Amazon in some cases) can make someone a criminal. I believe this should be protected under freedom of speech: he's legally buying a product and demonstrating what it does. Maybe posting a referral link and profiting from it could be considered questionable, but come on... If you want to stop piracy, start by blocking these devices at customs and investigating the businesses that import and sell them to the public. Never put someone in jail for what is, after all, a form of journalism.
> buying and showing something that is sold legally (like a console purchased from China, which I assume went through customs, or even sold on Amazon in some cases)
Going through customs does not make something legal to buy or possess.
Customs is a spot-check that doesn’t catch everything and Customs cannot possibly verify every single product’s legality.
Many people buy illegal drugs internationally and just hope they get through customs, for example. That doesn’t make it legal.
Well, but they are controlling that, the fact that they fail to check it shouldn't be on you.
But besides that, if they consider that aliexpress is selling illegal stuff, they can easily block access to ali express in the country, decline all credit card transactions to ali express, block in customs any package coming from ali express... since is basically a criminal organization. I mean, they are selling the product in amazon.it and you put in jail a reviewer?
https://www.amazon.it/portatile-illuminazione-Joystick-integ...
I don't think putting in jail a customer that is just reviewing what he bought is the way to go.
Meanwhile, AI companies break copyright law at an industrialized scale.
Rules for thee, not for me.
Boo hoo, those poor copyright owners. Who remembers the last time they banded together to get their ass whooped in appellate court? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Authors_Guild,_Inc._v._Google,....
I play video games through emulation, mainly because if I were playing, for example, Dissidia Final Fantasy on a regular Playstation Portable, I wouldn't be able to scan the text with my screen reader, or get AI image descriptions. I tried to buy all the PSP games I wanted to play, but that store was shut down. So now I don't think I could pay Sony for these games even if I wanted to.
Blind people use audio description to watch television and movies. And yet, none of the streaming services have Doctor Who with audio description, for example, in the US. So even if I paid to watch it, I'd have to pirate the audio description track.
And yet, companies can pirate all the books, videos, art and music they want, and have the best lawyers on staff to remind the courts who are really in charge. May the rich be brought low, or the poor be lifted up.
Do already have an LLM that trains on the ASM and resources of old game roms and can generate "new" ones? Easy fix there...
Did he post affiliate links to profit from the sale of said devices?
That makes a whole lot of difference.
That would make a difference, but "he claims to have taken things one step further by not including any affiliate links in his content", and indeed I checked some, and the links were, if any, normal links.
Jail for non-violent crimes? That needs to stop.
You say that, next thing you know this guy installs bsnes on a Raspberry Pi going on a rampage on innocent Goombas from an illegal ROM of Super Mario World. What then?
He’s clearly a dangerous maniac and a threat to the society.
That’s why the only option was to lock him up.
That’s the thing with the hyperregulators. You cheer them on when they’re biting others. You’d better believe they’re going to bite you one day.
Does Youtube still show advertising for finance scams in Italy?
(yes, whataboutism, but I feel the need to point it out)
don't know about YT but my brother recently introduced me to finance scams inside facebook, based on AI generated videos of prominent politicians and members of the government. How this shit keeps happening is beyond me.
We changed the URL from https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/07/youtuber-faces-jail-..., which credits this URL as the original source.
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No clue where you come from but Germany and the UK are just as bad.
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I don't see what's "woke" or even "unwoke" about absurdly aggressive copyright enforcement or your bitcoin account being frozen.
I think he means that leftists with a real political will wants to cancel private property in favor of a single shared property.
Which means no copyright, or copyright owned by the state. And the state to be in charge to collect royalties from foreign countries.
Wokeness and the hammer and sickle covered in blood are symbols that often appears concurrently true left parades (at least in Europe, though actually occasionally in the right too)
So I think he connected the two concepts by association.
What on earth does bitcoin exchanges being locked have to do with wokeness.
I am not saying copyright laws or my frozen crypto account are woke. The link is the method: In all the cases, being called out for saying something politically slightly incorrect, the youtube handheld thing case in Italy, and my Bitcoin funds in Austria => people are punished before any wrongdoing is proven. Different issues, same "guilty first, check later" mindset.
Fucking Vogons
F*cking Vogons