• jsomae@lemmy.ml
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    9 months ago

    Reminder that poor Gary Bowser was jailed for a year and owes 30% of his income to Nintendo for the rest of his life. He uses a wheelchair and has two kids.

    It would be morally wrong to pirate all future Nintendo titles and pay the cover price to Gary’s gofundme. Please don’t do that.

    • teawrecks@sopuli.xyz
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      9 months ago

      Please don’t conflate an open effort to own your own hardware and data with a closed effort to literally sell access to copyrighted content under the table, and try to launder the profits and commit fraud. Yuzu and Bowser are not the same.

      • jsomae@lemmy.ml
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        9 months ago

        you mean the MiGSwitch, a device for dumping and preserving switch ROMs? I would love to have one for personal backups, and it pairs well with yuzu. Team Xecuter is credibly presumed to be the developers, so that’s likely Bowser’s current hobby.

          • macniel@feddit.de
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            9 months ago

            Do you really believe that the last statement by yuzu is their own opinion? It really reads as it was written by a Nintendo lawyer and they just needed to sign it.

            • Perfide@reddthat.com
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              9 months ago

              Yuzu has always expressed that opinion about piracy publicly. Whether they actually believe that is another matter, but it’s nothing new for them to say that.

              • kenopsik@lemm.ee
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                9 months ago

                Basically every emulator developer will say that their platform is not for piracy but for backing up your legally purchased games, but it’s usually just a “wink wink nudge nudge” type of thing for legal reasons.

                • teawrecks@sopuli.xyz
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                  9 months ago

                  This is what Nintendo wants people to think. They want you to think hacking your own hardware is synonymous with copyright infringement. And it’s categorically not. Just like collecting knives isn’t synonymous with committing murder.

                  I agree that Yuzu was toeing a fine line when they should have instead steered far clear of it and only supported playback of homebrew apps without encryption, but that’s not to say they did anything ethically wrong. Backing up your own files shouldn’t be a right we lose just because of criminals walking around “wink wink, nudge nudging” each other. Punish the murderers, not the knife sellers.

          • Scubus
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            9 months ago

            Part of the court case was yuzu linking to pirated data files on their website, so X

            • teawrecks@sopuli.xyz
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              9 months ago

              Ah, hadn’t heard that. Source?

              Also, linking to is very different from hosting. Afaik linking is not a crime.

              • Scubus
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                9 months ago

                this says yuzu had illegal prod.keys in its possession.

                this mentions how yuzu was linking(but not hosting) pirated files.

                And yeah, linking is not a crime. But it does establish intent to support(that’s not the word I’m looking for) a crime.

                • teawrecks@sopuli.xyz
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                  9 months ago

                  It actually doesn’t say that the prod.keys was illegally obtained, just that they had a dumped copy. I don’t know if there was a way for forensics to tell a difference between a copy they dumped from their own hardware and one someone else shared to them. Maybe they had evidence it was shared over discord or something.

                  As for linking, the article doesn’t say they linked to anything illegal, just that they linked to tools which could be used to do something (root your switch) which could be used to do something (share the content of your switch) illegal. IMO there’s nothing ethically wrong with hacking your own hardware to preserve your games. So this would be like me linking to a set of knives on Amazon, and being found guilty of condoning murder.

                  Nintendo also has an abysmal track record with maintaining your digital rights to anything. Ever buy anything on the 3DS or Wii digital stores? Hope you still have that device or dumped a copy of the game, because Nintendo forgot about that purchase.

                  So I also don’t see anything wrong with the links they provided. At the end of the day, you still need to purchase Nintendo hardware and games in order to do anything they instructed you to do. But Nintendo sure would like people to think that hacking your own hardware is synonymous with copyright infringement.

          • Encamped@lemmy.ml
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            9 months ago

            Also believe his (proprietary) software would brick switches if it detected other software, though don’t quote me on that.

    • SuperSpruce@lemmy.zip
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      9 months ago

      There’s no way that kind of punishment is allowed by the 8th amendment. This is definitely an unusual punishment.

    • faith@lemmy.ml
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      9 months ago

      Reminder that “poor Gary” was selling pirated roms.

      • kot [they/them]@hexbear.net
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        9 months ago

        Reminder that “poor Gary” was selling pirated roms.

        Oh, the horror! I guess that justifies ruining his life forever.

      • Pika
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        9 months ago

        I disagree with selling pirated roms but, he also wasn’t part of the development team he was closer to a sales associate then anything. the punishment given to him was cruel and unusable and honestly a failure of the legal system.

        I see this on the same level as forcing a sales associate at Walmart to pay the fine of all the wage violations the company as a whole did. It’s rediculous.

        I personally will never be buying a Nintendo product again out of principle.

      • TrudeauCastroson [he/him]@hexbear.net
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        9 months ago

        I thought he was selling chips that let you do piracy

        Either way, he and his descendants should be indentured servants to Nintendo. His lineage must be shamed.

        • Pika
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          8 months ago

          yes that was what he was doing was selling Hardware mod chips that you could hook to it to be able to run custom firmware which allowed you to pirate games, the issue stemmed from how they were advertising the project. They weren’t advertising the project as a run your own custom firmware/ backup solution, they were selling the product with the intent that it was being used to pirate