Gary Bowser and gaming's most infamous piracy case
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
If he is reincident, then the court should have ordered compulsory psychological treatment - this feels like outright cruelty.
Hasn't Canada signed modern Human Rights treaties?
And - can't he just declare bankruptcy (nevertheless still implies paying a few years of personal income) and reset his debt?
The story brings this to mind: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debtors%27_prison
Where did you get this from? The article says he served 14 months and was released. Maybe 14 months is too much, but its not a life sentence.
Pure gold
- They are realistically never going to get all the money, only a fraction of it before he passes away.
- Even if they did get all the money, for a company the size of Nintendo it's not going to make a material difference.
- They would likely get a ton of press coverage for a move like this, and if they consider it a marketing campaign, could even turn a profit from forgiving him.
He's a citizen of what country? Toronto is mentioned.
He was living in the Dominican Republic when he was arrested? By the US government?
He went on the run in 2008 after he got arrested by Toronto police for peddling fake DVDs through his computer repair shop and ended up in the Dominican Republic.
Relatedly, the reason he left Canada (something conveniently glossed over) is not because he got in trouble with the housing crisis (which he has stated in other interviews) but rather because he got arrested peddling fake DVDs through his PC repair shop[1].
More recently, he got caught being involved with the new Switch flashcard; a reverse DNS lookup (that is, running the IP through a database of known web addresses and seeing what else is hosted there) revealed that the site is hosted on the same IP as his personal blog. (Bowser blamed a DNS poisoning attack, which strikes me as unlikely from what I know about DNS poisoning - that's basically alledging a conspiracy.)
He's likely just a patsy/fall guy though - the big cheese here is Max Louarn (also Canadian), who last I heard is hiding out in France (he has a French girlfriend) after he managed to slip out of the arrest made by the Dominican Republics authorities.
I get life sucks for him (and I do hope it gets better for him eventually). Just don't fall for the "innocent small criminal being preyed on by the big evil company" - Gary Bowser had a key part in an international piracy hardware manufacturing operation.
[0]: https://pdf.textfiles.com/zines/MICROPENDIUM/mp9501.max.pdf
[1]: https://www.toronto.com/life/pair-charged-over-counterfeit-d...
Unless you like piracy, there's very little to like about anything made by Xecuter or their previous name, GATEWAY. They just are the piracy option; anything they say about homebrew is just lip service to not get banned from the relevant internet forums.
All their modchips have always as their main focus had piracy. That recent flashcard that debranded TX has made literally can only be used for piracy, not homebrew.
Hell, these are the guys that DRMed their piracy software to password lock the Switch NAND if you tried to reverse engineer it (twice! They did the same thing on 3DS.)
Ah, so because you have a grudge you think corporate servitude is good and showing people the story that lead to it (which could lead to them drawing different conclusions) is "whitewashing".
Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.
There's no reason to think the guy who's calling out this person's shenanigans is in favor of corporate servitude. Probably they just don't like how the article frames this guy as an agreeable martyr; it seems more nuanced than that.
The purpose of criminal restitution is to punish you. You shouldn't be able to discharge a punishment.
Are you gonna cite this part or just the no-big-deal-really parts?
They moved millions in terms of sold products over the years and had deals with Chinese factories to make that stuff "at scale" and had exchanges on how to get their devices past border controls; all this stuff is in the legal complaint he got jailed for.
It also embedded a massive chunk of the free CFW Atmosphere (which is GPL2.0-Only, with some modifications), and they obviously never open sourced it.
So yes, they were effectively selling their customers (modified) copies of Nintendo's software.
I don't buy that. Piracy operation has some semi-retired guy just "help out" with their website because he's more of a people person than they are, but other than that he had no idea what was really going on?
> peddling fake DVDs
> caught being involved with the new Switch flashcard
I'm OK with this. Literal non-crimes as far as I'm concerned. Literally nothing.
> His old computer repair shop had a bad reputation among computer enthusiasts in the 80s for not shipping parts
So he's guilty of running a shitty store.
It took time to arrange the bits in such a way that you desired to copy them.
Copying bits is not stealing. It's worse than stealing, it's counterfeiting.
When you steal a car, the car manufacturer can still sell cars at that value. When you counterfeit software (or anything digital), the original work is devalued over time, because as the counterfeit becomes more widespread, the value approaches $0.
Correct. It's that labor which is valuable. The labor of creation, of finding that interesting unique number in the sea of infinity. That's valuable.
Well at least it used to be anyway. AI is proving itself quite adept at finding interesting numbers.
> it's counterfeiting
No, it's copyright infringement. That's what they call it anyway. I don't consider it worse than literally anything. I consider it natural. People do it without even realizing that they're doing it. Every single day. At massive scales.
> the original work is devalued over time, because as the counterfeit becomes more widespread, the value approaches $0.
It doesn't approach zero, it is zero. It always was zero. Once created, information is infinitely copyable, it is infinitely abundant, supply is infinite.
That's the reason why they had to create an artificial scarcity system on top of it. Because it's not actually real.
It's this copyright nonsense that allowed people to delude themselves into thinking numbers could bought and sold. Maybe that was true once in the age of the printing press. It's not true in the 21st century, the age of information and globally networked pocket supercomputers. Copyright was over the second computers were invented.
It's time to let go. Creators need to find alternative business models where they get paid before the act of creating for the act of creating. Because it's that labor which is scarce and valuable. The end result is not.
The point is mostly that he's always been a sleazy car salesman kinda guy instead of some small hero standing up for the masses.
"Sleazy car salesman" is not an indictment worthy of 1-3 years in prison and 50 years' worth of the profits. Not unless we apply the same for any sleazy company. Are we? Then what is the case you're trying to make?
There's a huge difference between sending an executive to jail for actions of subordinates (which is ludicrous, in my opinion), versus jailing the subordinates for the actual crimes, which apparently happens more than you know.
There's not much I know everything about so I guess everything happens more than I know... You're right and it's exactly my point: laws are for the plebes. Anyone making the argument "criminal = any punishment is fair" even for relatively small time sleazy criminals chooses to do so selectively.
Regarding the fairness of sending a CEO to jail, CEO remuneration is literally hundreds of times that of the average employee. So they are treated as disproportionately responsible for the company's success. Why not its failures? Is failure all on the one employee? Was the company built so fragile that one employee is able to lead it astray? Disproportionate benefits vs. accountability for executives is again exactly what I'm flagging here as being almost the opposite of how a regular "sleazy small time criminal" gets.
What if the decision leading to the company breaking the law came explicitly from the executives? In all the cases Big Tech was fined by the EU in the past decades no executive was punished for what were explicit business decisions. The (still mostly unpaid) fines weren't 50 years' worth of the benefit. Elon Musk actually is a "sleazy car salesman" in every sense of the words. His decisions lead to laws being broken and losses for others, but no jail time, and barely any monetary punishment.
"Oh it was just a couple bad employees doing things that aligned with our strategic executives, how could that have happened" and then the company keeps doing the same stuff after a few shmucks go to prison? Is that good?
One does not preclude the other.
Whether companies do or don't get prosecuted sufficiently doesn't really matter here.
What makes him "small" and the company "evil"? The guy has been involved with and profiting from piracy for a long time, including multiple arrests.
And then with this, the spin is "oh, I wasn't involved in anything, I just helped them update a website from time to time because they're not social people" really doesn't pass the smell test (and nor did it to anyone else).
One piece of pirated music, movie, or software does not equate to a lost sale.
"The trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of one's time defending scoundrels. For it is against scoundrels that oppressive laws are first aimed, and oppression must be stopped at the beginning if it is to be stopped at all."
So what? Why should that get him a $14 million fine? There's nothing morally wrong with what he did and it should not be illegal.
The way you have typed your rant makes it seem you only want to throw a contrarian comment at the expense of a ruined life, which is pathetic.
If you see this as the judgement of a fair and independent court I have no words for you. But the whole world is aware of the American judiciary's reputation of being a glorified bullying arm for megacorps and the rich.
Nominative determinism!
He doesn't have that long to live and it'd take forever to get caught again. No doubt he has learned how to better cover his tracks.
What evidence is out there?
As another commenter mentioned, Bowser probably led to many sales of the consoles themselves. Nintendo's game pricing is very high, even for very old games, and they have a captive market with no other choice.
It's all in Nintendo's lawyers head.
Piracy is one of the rare cases where you can be convicted on imaginary damages which aren't required to be proven.
Piracy is a bit special, nobody could ever prove that the damages exist and no research has successfully demonstrated that they even exist at all.
There is a huge difference between a genuine product and a counterfeit. There is no difference at all between the original data and copies of it, they are exactly the same. In fact, there is no such thing as an "original" piece of data, they are indistinguishable from one another. You can literally check the authenticity of data via cryptography. Doesn't matter if it came from an "official" source or some "counterfeit" website.
Their use of the word "counterfeiting" to describe copyright infringement is just like their constant attempts to equal it to "piracy". It's part of their propaganda. It's intended to give such "counterfeits" the connotation of being lower quality products.
Ironically, it's the corporations who peddle lower quality goods to paying customers while "pirates" get the high quality products. A 6 MB video game gets blown up into a 100 MB obfuscated mess due to SecuROM, then the "pirates" write an unpacker and release the small and optimized version without any DRM whatsoever. Streaming services send you shitty compressed video with artifacts everywhere, meanwhile "pirates" get uncensored blu-ray remuxes.
Sometimes there is a difference. Sometimes the copy is better than the original (in that the copy frequently has had anti-consumer garbage like DRM removed).
Seriously, draconian travesties of the "justice system" like this are one of the main reasons why I feel it's actively immoral to give money to the imaginary property industry. The other being their pushing of technological totalitarianism (ie digital restrictions management) that is directly opposed to personal computing and communications freedom. If the playing field were level I could perhaps support something like a 10 year term copyright with violations limited to being misdemeanors. But as things stand, we've got to starve this corrupt regulatory capture cancer.
If you could get a car by downloading it off the internet, you would. More importantly, if anyone could get access to a car simply by downloading one, it would be so fucking unethical to punish people for doing that simply to prop up the profits of some business somewhere.
You SHOULD download a car!
Will you clowns mind explaining what guidelines were violated by posts such as:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39215568
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39215304
Or have we progressed from “a downvote can equal disagreement” to a “a flag can equal diagreement”?