Two members of videogame piracy group “Team Xecuter” in custody
justice.gov
justice.gov
If they did something else to facilitate copyright infringement the hardware should not be part of the issue.
It seems as though the way they operated had simply made them party to the ‘crimes’ of the end users. Ignore the grandiose language of the DOJ. An indictment is essentially a prosecutors wish list, it presents the ‘facts’ in the way the prosecutor wants them to be presented, and represents the law in the way the prosecutor wants it to be represented. When the DOJ say “this person committed this act”, or “this act is illegal”, it’s just an accusation. Those accusations aren’t “proven” until they’ve been tried in court. Only pay attention to the core details of the allegation and ignore the rest of it.
Software is constitutionally protected speech. But if your software contains copyrighted material, or is accompanied by copyrighted material (as is the case alleged here, with their ROM library), then it can still break the law. I’m also pretty sure the way that you market it can influence this too. I imagine marketing software as “to help you play pirated games” would be the same as marketing a gun as “to help you commit armed robberies”.
Also the fact that they sold their software seems to have made things worse.
To be clear, I don't appreciate the law as written and support its repeal, but I think legislatures need to do that, not courts.
[1] https://www.eff.org/document/green-v-doj-memorandum-opinion
Trafficking however is understandably punishable.
Edit: there are almost certainly many such immoral laws. Sorry protectionists but humanity has a moral obligation to reverse engineer everything, it's called science.
> No person shall … traffic in any … device … that (A) is primarily designed or produced for the purpose of circumventing a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title; (B) has only limited commercially significant purpose or use other than to circumvent a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title; or (C) is marketed by that person … for use in circumventing a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title.
But I think that even when it comes to Apple devices, the battle is far from over. Just this year, Apple had a lawsuit against the company Corellium, which specialices in iOS virtualization. This company is also working on Project Sandcastle, which lets one run Android on Apple devices.
whoops yeah that sounds indictable
> sold illegal devices that hacked popular videogame consoles so they could be used to play unauthorized, or pirated, copies of videogames
this does not sound indictable, but it depends on what those illegal devices contained
They were probably first to market, but then the community found the RCM bug and now Xecutor is pretty irrelevant.
Side note: “So long Gary Bowser“
Well, irrelevant for people who own a Switch that's vulnerable to the RCM bug. Nintendo fixed that in a hardware revision around two years ago so there's a lot of Switches out there which cannot be hacked by the open source methods, but can with Team Xecuters hardware mod. RCM was patched before the launch of the "Switch 2.0" and Switch Lite, so the only way to get homebrew along with the improved battery life of the 2.0 or greater portability of the Lite is via that hardware mod.
Edit: XenoGC!
IIRC the XenoGC was originally proprietary too, but open sourced by the designer after a few years.
I think they changed it for Super Mario 3D All Stars.
That version added rumble support and fixed some bugs, but being intended for Japan where Bowser is called King Koopa they used a different voice line.
That's a reach...technically they charged a license fee to use SXOS which allowed homebrew. It can also be used for playing stolen games, but it is not marketed as such.
This is probably more of a smoking gun.
That seems to suggest they facilitated online marketplaces where these are sold -- and I don't believe they've ever sold pre-loaded games in these.
At most they advertise possibility of using homebrew. If you can run unsigned code, you can write unsigned code to dump retail games. But Team Xecutor doesn't explicitly encourage those specific actions nor distribute them online (only to cover their asses, of course that's what people buying them buy them for)
In college I dated a girl in her first year of law school. This technique was something they are taught as a 1L (first year). I remember she would have assignments to write the arguments for both sides using the same set of facts. Made me realize that a good lawyer can convince a jury of anything.
When I was an 1L, some classmates were very good at arguing one side (usually the good-guy side) and then they would fall to pieces if professors asked them to advocate for the other side. Even to the point of saying there was no feasible argument for the other side.
Trial lawyers work with evidence and law. Deciding what the facts are is the business of judges or juries.
I pity people that can be so easily swayed towards binary perceptions. It is safe, I can tell you that much.
If you want legitimate console hacking software and tools not aimed at piracy, you'll find them in the open source space (part of it, as there is of course a subset of that community also just focused on piracy), not in larger commercial ventures, with extremely few exceptions.
(This is one reason why I stopped hacking consoles; most of the userbase ends up being pirates and the most lauded and successful developers are those who cater to them and us who wanted to stay away from that instead got verbal abuse; meanwhile others were making money off the whole thing.)
However, America's focus in free trade negotiations over the past decade and perhaps longer have been protecting their intellectual property. For example, due to America's pressure and as a part of the New NAFTA negotiations, Canada agreed to increase its copyright term from life + 50 to life + 70 years. I wouldn't be surprised if what was once legal in France has become illegal since.
Decades ago, US decided it wanted banks everywhere to follow American regulations. It was a resounding success. That's why US can now block Iran from trading with the rest of the world through national legislation rather than international sanctions, or make Canada hand over a Chinese national to be prosecuted in the US for alleged crimes done in Hong Kong. Now that banking is done, the new frontier is intellectual property. I expect national laws everywhere to one by one become like US laws.
While backing up your games is a legitimate use case, it's not terribly useful with cartridge-based consoles like the Switch (cartridges don't get scratched), and it's much harder to argue for that usage. The reality is that the vast, vast majority of people claiming they're "backing up games" are just pirating games. I've seen this first hand as a major public face in the Wii homebrew community, trying to steer the community away from piracy.
Game modding is often brought up as another use case, but straight piracy often requires additional effort over just modding games for technical reasons (you need to bypass game authentication and/or redirect all file access, not just the modded bits), so I don't buy that argument. Typical piracy tools are very obviously targeted at such, not at modding, and legitimate modding teams who do not support piracy have in the past developed approaches that are a lot less intrusive to doing so (see: Project M).
So it's going to be a lot harder to argue before a court for mechanisms that allow you to copy games, because legitimate uses are much fewer and far in between, and the tools are all, realistically, aimed at piracy, whether they drape a thin veil over it or not. The courts are not stupid, they can see through thin veils.
Yet once you disable signature checks in your OS, it could be used by the user for any purpose, no? Isn't that the main point of rooting your device, having ability to do whatever.
Then it comes to where you draw a line. If you allow me to run any program w/o checks, I can install RetroArch for emulation, or a save manager to save me from NSO tax, so I can backup my saves without paying a monthly fee. If you allow me to run kernel extensions, I can do stuff like overclocking or use my xbox gamepad with nintendo console, and if you unlock the bootloader, I can boot into Android.
Once you unlock all those capabilities to a point where I can boot any OS, you'd essentially turn a purpose-built device to a general-purpose computer, and building general purpose computers is not a crime (yet? :). I don't see PC makers or Microsoft being accused of enabling piracy, yet their platforms have the same freedoms.
Eventually we opened up the security CPU for other reasons (mostly a recovery/low level bootloader tool we built), but even then, piracy requires specific software, namely hacks that translate game disc access APIs to either DVD-Video access APIs or a USB storage stack. So sure, you have a general purpose computer, but you still need specific software.
Xecuter aren't just selling hardware and software that turn your Switch into a general purpose computer. They are selling hardware and software that has specific features for pirating games that are not useful in any other context. And therein lies the difference.
How long until that turns into "sold illegal devices that hacked popular smartphones so they could be used to run unauthorized, or pirated, copies of apps"?
How long for PCs?
https://nostarch.com/blog/thoughts-indictment-ryan-harris-ha...
In order to mod an xbox game, you needed to mod an xbox (through either installing a physical modchip or installing a software hack, which each had their pros and cons) so you could edit the game's files. Modding an xbox let you run unsigned software, including launchers which let you start homebrew software, homebrew games, and ripped retail games directly from the hard drive instead of the game disk. Many people would rip retail games they owned off of the game disk onto their hard drive so they could conveniently launch the game without putting the disk into the console or so they could make the game's files editable on the hard drive, but it is true that some people would borrow game disks to rip or just pirate games from the internet to their console's hard drive. It's true that the features for running homebrew software or ripping or modding your own games were useful to pirates, but to my knowledge, none of the software associated with the Xecuter chip I had or the popular launchers had any features that exclusively catered to pirates any more than Android's sideloading functionality caters to pirates.
If it's true that they continued to create tools for running homebrew software, adding convenience features, and modifying your own purchased software, then I find this news distressing. But if they did directly cater to and profit from being directly involved in piracy (like if they sold consoles preloaded with pirated games, or provided software preloaded with easy-install links to pirated games), then I'm a lot less sympathetic. I don't find it clear which case it is from the article. The article alleges it's the second case, but I'm suspicious they may be spinning the first category as the second.
I've been involved in the console hacking scene since the PS2 times and a major developer for one generation, and I won't shed a single tear for these guys.
Legitimate console homebrew these days is pretty much all done in the open and not for profit now, usually via software exploits. Where hardware is necessary, which is rare, it is usually open hardware. The companies trying to do things for profit are pretty much all catering to the piracy crowd.
It has an SNES emulator with hundreds of games, a lot of music from the 90's, and about a dozen Xbox games on the internal HDD.
Will never get rid of it, I'm pretty sure there aren't many left in existence.
After all theres a copy of topless-modded DOA Beach Volleyball on the hard drive to greet me once I get around to it
EDIT: Some people work for a living...others have a suspect board on their wall with pictures of people that modify video game console, thinking that they're doing good in the world by putting these people in prison. If someone on this case walked by my house, I'd lock the door. You have to be a straight up psychopath to want to throw these people in prison.
- You have morals, grow up and shift into a related career (infosec whitehat or some other computer engineering thing), and optionally stay part of the community, staying well away from piracy stuff.
- You end up as a government-side black hat, i.e. NSA, NSO, and its ilk. Whether this is moral, that's for you to decide.
- You have no morals, embrace piracy, see the money in the business (especially if you also don't care for your users and just want to extract as money from them as possible), and join or start a commercial piracy-focused operation, i.e. modchips and such. This is the Xecuter guys (re not caring for their users, they wrote bricking code for people who tried to mess with their devices, and it had false positives).
The Xecuter guys aren't the good guys. Look for the open not for profit homebrew communities if you want legitimate effort to have control over your own hardware. Xecuter just caters to pirates.
There you can be exploited labour to produce a $100m budget game which makes a 50% profit margin in its first weekend and then 5 years later still ask children for $70 per copy. Or, if they're feeling charitable, they can pay you $150 to get a virtual horse or hat with the game.
If you don't like how they play with the toy. You can just steal it right back out of their hands by banning them from playing it with their friends remotely.
You can use your profits to lobby for laws which imprison anyone who takes the tiniest dent out of your profits and have them thrown in to prison next to terrorists and serious criminals.
Or you can use it to just sue children who are curious about computers. Hi sony!
I never said the games industry are the good guys. Certainly not Sony.
Though, for comparison, Microsoft hired some of the Xbox 360 hackers, and now the Xbox One has the best security of all the consoles. Food for thought.
Homebrew is why I was a part of the GCN scene back in the day :)
It’s only the UWP platform, so it’s not full access, but it’s good fun for my homebrew fiddling :)
Then it turned out all the "amazing security" of the Cell architecture boiled down to a bunch of things thrown at a wall with no sense nor reason. And Sony botched the crypto so badly they became the textbook example of how to screw up ECDSA and allow anyone to derive your private keys.
They are _easier_ targets for criminal pursuit in this context. Portraying them as no-moral types is shallow thinking.
Apart from this, I just couldn't help but notice the overall negativity in the comments. It's thinly veiled in excuses, like opportunity cost for law enforcement or whatever, but it's there.
Maybe the real concern here is that we simply don't agree with the law. DMCA was enacted 10 years before Spotify started business. If I hazard a guess many of the people here in HN, and out there in your neighbourhood were downloading mp3's back then. These laws were not made by popular support. They weren't made by the people, or for the people. It seems to me, majority of the people here and outside haven't really internalized IP laws, and would rather live in a world without them if they could.
I think it's fine if our moral compasses don't align with the law. It's one thing to obey the law, and another thing to actually agree with it. No amount of pressure from anti-piracy groups can turn a law into a holy commandment. So we don't have to beat around the bush. If you can't symphatize with the massively profitable huge gaming company and if your symphaties lie elsewhere, maybe it's time to discuss why reality, laws and government don't reflect your will.
If you have a problem with the rules, place the blame where the blame is due: the rule makers.
You are, of course, right that if a law can lead to bad outcomes of justice we mustn't rely on prosecutorial discretion.
It's not a fallacy,it's the whole point of rule of law.
Arguing in favour of the virtues of a corrupt system just because you believe it benefits you personally is not only naive but also very dangerous, because as we see on a daily basis rules are bent to harm you, not to benefit you.
If you care anything about a free and just society, you don't argue fora corrupt system that arbitrarily picks which rules applies to you. It's this simple.
Furthermore your definition of a more free society is one where more citizens are in jail because prosecutors throw everyone in jail rather than being "arbitrary". Just noting the basic irony here. Freedom= jail em all without discretion.
Didn't do that. Pointing out something exists isn't the same as arguing in its favor.
> just because you believe it benefits you personally
I don't believe that either. As I already said, I have no particular opinion about this case.
> we see on a daily basis rules are bent to harm you, not to benefit you.
What?
That said this is big news for people who do play the game properly as it could set precedent and strike some fear.
“This conduct doesn’t just harm billion dollar companies, it hijacks the hard work of individuals working to advance in the video-game industry.”
Uh, harming billion dollar companies doesn’t seem to be like stamping on a poor and miserable kitten, they’ve made a billion FFS.
As to who exploits the work of individuals in the videogame industries, we all know what kind of sweatshops they are, and the shit moves they pull like firing all staff the day before release date, thus voiding vesting clauses...
It’s like these monsters didn’t really do too much harm except stepping on some other gremlin’s toes
When you do things that violated someone's arbitrary TOS - this should be NON EVENT.
Edit: This is getting downvoted by people that are mad their version of agar.io hasn't made them rich yet. Oh please. I've made a couple games myself that didn't do good. You can't wish someone in prison for not buying your game...I'm sure if they had the money they would pay. It's not like you lose money. You simply didn't earn any off that one person.
It certainly doesn't seem to be commensurate (or cost-effective) to send someone to jail (much less prison) for stealing $20 worth of merchandise (or passing a counterfeit $20 bill for that matter.)
Not to mention that piracy (or illegal copying) isn't theft - it's copyright infringement. (Though that might actually be worse since the penalty could be $150K in statutory damages.)
It's tricky to quantify the financial harm (such as lost sales, higher prices, reduced production, cost of anti-piracy enforcement, etc.) caused by or associated with piracy, as well as the effect on the economy as a whole.
Overall, it seems likely to be a small redistribution of wealth from companies to pirates, where the benefit to pirates is likely greater than the loss to companies, since each pirate copy is not necessarily a lost sale. This overall benefit (mainly accruing to pirates) is probably offset somewhat by slightly reduced sales and production as well as the cost of anti-piracy enforcement.
I also don't think the discussion should stop at what effect it has on the economy but also include the effect of piracy on culture and preservation thereof.
Excessive copyright and copyright enforcement can easily do more harm to society than the people disregarding such laws.