[HN Gopher] Retro gaming YouTuber Once Were Nerd sued and raided...
___________________________________________________________________
Retro gaming YouTuber Once Were Nerd sued and raided by the Italian
government
Author : BallsInIt
Score : 226 points
Date : 2025-07-17 11:17 UTC (11 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.androidauthority.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.androidauthority.com)
| logicchains wrote:
| It's astounding how much authoritarianism people are willing to
| tolerate in the name of maximising the economic incentives for
| producing entertainment media.
| gchamonlive wrote:
| 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.
| HPsquared wrote:
| "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.
| 44520297 wrote:
| 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.
| Arch-TK wrote:
| 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.
| HPsquared wrote:
| Money in politics. An excess of political power in the
| halls of commerce as opposed to the other estates of the
| realm.
| gchamonlive wrote:
| 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.
| immibis wrote:
| 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?
| like_any_other wrote:
| > willing
|
| Don't mistake the IP cartel's backroom lobbying for the will of
| the people.
| izacus wrote:
| These topics are full of people defending it. Every single
| time.
| stale2002 wrote:
| 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.
| user_7832 wrote:
| > 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
| progval wrote:
| France too: https://torrentfreak.com/opendns-suspends-service-
| in-france-...
| bmacho wrote:
| > 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.
| crtasm wrote:
| 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.
| mvieira38 wrote:
| 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
| brookst wrote:
| 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.
| _aavaa_ wrote:
| The only thing you own is the right to a time-limited
| monopoly of commercialization.
| izacus wrote:
| 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.
| bmacho wrote:
| 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.
| gpm wrote:
| 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".
| const_cast wrote:
| 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.
| Reubachi wrote:
| "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.
| gpm wrote:
| 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.
| suddenlybananas wrote:
| >They are just manufacturing a scarcity right now, or at
| least they are trying
|
| Rent-seeking is not really something that governments should
| encourage.
| immibis wrote:
| 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".
| suddenlybananas wrote:
| Deciding on how society should run is a matter of should,
| unless you're a sociopath who doesn't care about
| improving the world.
| komali2 wrote:
| 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.
| viraptor wrote:
| > 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.
| PokemonNoGo wrote:
| Scrolled way to far down for this. Yep, like most laws
| infact.
| brookst wrote:
| Technical forums assume that law is code, and everything is
| processed as if/then statements.
| reddalo wrote:
| >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.
| iforgotpassword wrote:
| > 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.
| reddalo wrote:
| > Sourceforge
|
| That's another trip down memory lane...
| benterix wrote:
| For the real trip see this: https://webarchive.di.uminho.
| pt/web.archive.org/web/20090203...
| tough wrote:
| eMule is doing fine and well tho
|
| maybe we should make more p2p kademilia software to combat
| the social media giants
| cactusplant7374 wrote:
| Soulseek is doing even better.
| Andrex wrote:
| Maybe you can tell me, since I only noticed around
| 2007-2008.
|
| Did Sourceforge always suck balls?
| MattGrommes wrote:
| 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.
| beAbU wrote:
| Holyshit emule is still alive and kicking? Man. I remember
| using that, Kazaa and Morpheus almost daily back in the
| aughts.
| reddalo wrote:
| 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 voila.
|
| Some forums are even publicly accessible, so it's clear
| that nobody is seriously persecuting people for piracy in
| Italy.
| bugtodiffer wrote:
| Nobody cares about copyright unless for profit. Sometimes
| it's just a lawyer that wants fees
| dylan604 wrote:
| 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
| BolexNOLA wrote:
| 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.
| NL807 wrote:
| >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.
| leereeves wrote:
| 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?
| amelius wrote:
| > 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.
| timhh wrote:
| That's a _maximum_. It 's extremely unlikely that they would
| actually get jail time. Maybe a suspended sentence at worst.
| snickerdoodle12 wrote:
| 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.
| raverbashing wrote:
| 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
| snickerdoodle12 wrote:
| 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).
| brookst wrote:
| 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.
| snickerdoodle12 wrote:
| Fine, jail the company for 3 years. Or at least the
| executives.
| bobdvb wrote:
| Given that the piracy charges can be fined as low as
| EUR50, it can be discussed proportionately.
|
| I totally agree that the AI companies should be
| accountable for their intellectual property leaching.
| snickerdoodle12 wrote:
| 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.
| const_cast wrote:
| 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.
| CalRobert wrote:
| 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
| bubblebeard wrote:
| 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.
| yread wrote:
| 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
| _heimdall wrote:
| > 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.
| 627467 wrote:
| > 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
| sunaookami wrote:
| >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...
| wongarsu wrote:
| 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
| mebizzle wrote:
| Can't unmake the fact that you are convicted criminal
| forever though.
| qoez wrote:
| 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.
| p0w3n3d wrote:
| 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'.
| riffraff wrote:
| it's "up to 3 years" but also "down to" a EUR50 fine.
| slightwinder wrote:
| > 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.
| komali2 wrote:
| > 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.
| slightwinder wrote:
| > 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.
| masfuerte wrote:
| Is this too obvious?
|
| https://www.amazon.it/s/ref=nav_bb_sb?field-
| keywords=anberni...
| antonvs wrote:
| > 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?
| const_cast wrote:
| > 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.
| JohnTHaller wrote:
| A very small percentage do. Nearly 90% of games from before
| 2010 can no longer be legally purchased.
| dfxm12 wrote:
| _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.
| bapak wrote:
| > 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.
| thefz wrote:
| > 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.
| duped wrote:
| > 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.
| TriangleEdge wrote:
| 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).
| viraptor wrote:
| The Paco Gutierrez copypasta will now have a new version... but
| Nintendo didn't deliver the papers directly this time.
| Tade0 wrote:
| 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.
| thefz wrote:
| Nope, commerce of anything illegal is handled by GDF. Drugs
| even.
| elric wrote:
| 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.
| meowface wrote:
| 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.
| drweevil wrote:
| 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.
| yorwba wrote:
| 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.
| navane wrote:
| 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.
| brookst wrote:
| 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.
| HPsquared wrote:
| Sovereign is he who makes the exception.
| clarionbell wrote:
| I haven't heard Carl Schmitt doctrine in long time. I hope it
| doesn't become as prominent as it once was.
| Sander_Marechal wrote:
| 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.
| fulafel wrote:
| 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.
| pjc50 wrote:
| > 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.
| rvnx wrote:
| Law is not fair. The law is the reflection of power
| relations.
| anon191928 wrote:
| 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
| A_D_E_P_T wrote:
| 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.
| immibis wrote:
| Natural Law isn't real, and won't hurt you - it's just
| one particular sect's form of copium.
| ohman876 wrote:
| 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.
| const_cast wrote:
| > 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.
| ohman876 wrote:
| Treat others the way you want to be treated. Even when
| competing you should not cheat, lie, steal or otherwise
| commit wrong-doing.
| rvnx wrote:
| Doesn't sound like YCombinator's recipe for success
| const_cast wrote:
| 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.
| ykonstant wrote:
| >Natural Law is fair by definition. It is merely a
| reflection of ancient ethical norms.
|
| There is no such thing.
| atq2119 wrote:
| 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.
| Tadpole9181 wrote:
| Outside of mass violence against the political class or
| praying they suddenly start listening to us, what exactly
| is there to do?
| VWWHFSfQ wrote:
| 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.
| speeder wrote:
| 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.
| xienze wrote:
| > 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...
| elric wrote:
| 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.
| xienze wrote:
| > 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.
| const_cast wrote:
| 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?
| slightwinder wrote:
| 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.
| throwawayffffas wrote:
| > 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.
| slightwinder wrote:
| 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.
| 5ersi wrote:
| 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.
| raron wrote:
| Okay, but in that case humans should legally be able to
| pirate all the books, music and movies they can or are
| learning from.
| elric wrote:
| 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.
| cookiengineer wrote:
| Dead internet theory confirmed.
|
| Well, the Ministry of Truth is working on it, at least.
| awongh wrote:
| 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".
| snickerdoodle12 wrote:
| 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.
| awongh wrote:
| 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.
| snickerdoodle12 wrote:
| 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.
| awongh wrote:
| 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.
| snickerdoodle12 wrote:
| 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.
| gcau wrote:
| Which companies are violating copyright on a massive scale?
| And what impact? (a bigger, badder impact sounds implied by
| you)
| awongh wrote:
| 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?
| beezlebroxxxxxx wrote:
| One example is basically all of the major AI players have
| used Annas Archives/Libgen's database to unlawfully access
| millions of books.
| beezlebroxxxxxx wrote:
| > 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.
| ethagnawl wrote:
| > 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.
| cubefox wrote:
| 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.)
| awongh wrote:
| > 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.
| cubefox wrote:
| 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.
| awongh wrote:
| > 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.
| saubeidl wrote:
| Meanwhile, AI companies break copyright law at an industrialized
| scale.
|
| Rules for thee, not for me.
| CivBase wrote:
| 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.
| BLKNSLVR wrote:
| Does Youtube still show advertising for finance scams in Italy?
|
| (yes, whataboutism, but I feel the need to point it out)
| riffraff wrote:
| 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.
| renewiltord wrote:
| 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.
| amelius wrote:
| But when will we have jail time for CEOs who invade our privacy?
| rvnx wrote:
| I'm sure right after street criminality will be taken care of.
| marcofiset wrote:
| Jail for non-violent crimes? That needs to stop.
| aranelsurion wrote:
| 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.
| basfo wrote:
| 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.
| Aurornis wrote:
| > 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.
| basfo wrote:
| 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.
| jmyeet wrote:
| 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.
| Chronoyes wrote:
| 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.
| colechristensen wrote:
| 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".
| forinti wrote:
| They should be freed as soon as they aren't being sold by the
| creator.
| ziml77 wrote:
| 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.
| Aurornis wrote:
| > 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.
| yorwba wrote:
| 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.
| Aurornis wrote:
| 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.
| _fat_santa wrote:
| 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.
| brookst wrote:
| 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?
| emptyfile wrote:
| What are the moral downsides of pirating a game you can't
| buy anywhere?
| os2warpman wrote:
| 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.
| stale2002 wrote:
| 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.
| throaway5454 wrote:
| 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.
| const_cast wrote:
| > 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.
| CivBase wrote:
| > 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?
| dvrj101 wrote:
| >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.
| yesco wrote:
| 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?
| os2warpman wrote:
| >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+Fo
| r+Speed+Undergro...
|
| Every single version listed on Wikipedia, except for the
| arcade version, is available.
|
| edit: the arcade is PS4095, including VAT with free delivery
| (presumably in the UK).
|
| https://www.libertygames.co.uk/store/video_arcade_machines/d.
| ..
| gamerdonkey wrote:
| 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 PS4095 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.
| duped wrote:
| > 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.
| throaway5454 wrote:
| 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?
| wodenokoto wrote:
| Which ones sell with games?
| bluescrn wrote:
| Many AliExpress sellers are offering the devices bundled with
| a pre-loaded microSD card.
| immibis wrote:
| > 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?
| cubefox wrote:
| > In which universe do people spend a million dollars for a
| collection of video games? At retail?
|
| He didn't say that people _actually_ spend that much money on
| retail games, but that they _would have_ cost as much if
| people didn 't pirate them (in the thousands) instead.
| Reading comprehension...
| cubefox wrote:
| By the way: downvoting a comment is not a counterargument.
| abdulhaq wrote:
| Here in HN it's accepted practice to copy copyrighted newspaper
| articles
| bluescrn wrote:
| > 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.
| throwawayffffas wrote:
| Even if he was not selling them, reviewing can be construed as
| promoting which is illegal in Italy.
| ta8645 wrote:
| 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.
| tartoran wrote:
| 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.
| 93po wrote:
| 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)
| xg15 wrote:
| Do already have an LLM that trains on the ASM and resources of
| old game roms and can generate "new" ones? Easy fix there...
| mrep81 wrote:
| Fucking Vogons
| mrep81 wrote:
| F*cking Vogons
| DrNosferatu wrote:
| Did he post affiliate links to profit from the sale of said
| devices?
|
| That makes a whole lot of difference.
| npteljes wrote:
| 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.
| tomhow wrote:
| We changed the URL from
| https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/07/youtuber-faces-jail-...,
| which credits this URL as the original source.
| devinprater wrote:
| 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.
| bgwalter wrote:
| Meanwhile, Anthropic and others aren't raided and are not blocked
| in Italy.
|
| The YouTuber should have used an LLM for laundering copyright.
| nazgulsenpai wrote:
| 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...
| ThePowerOfFuet wrote:
| >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
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