Japanese police arrest man for tampering with Pokémon Violet save data | Hacker News Reader

Japanese police arrest man for tampering with Pokémon Violet save data

ign.com

200 pointsjosephcsible236 comments

The first sentence puts it into a little bit of perspective:

"Police in Japan have arrested a 36-year-old man on suspicion of selling illegally modified Pokémon save data to customers online — a practice which is banned under the country’s 2019 Unfair Competition Prevention Act."

Now, it's still a ridiculous story, but it's a little easier to see how this happened.

Does that sentence actually change the perspective? It still implies that the modification itself was illegal.

The law may seem silly/not worthwhile but at least it gives perspective there is a law saying selling modified things in a way that might make competition unfair is explicitly illegal instead of someone just deciding save edits are bad and something worth arresting for in a vacuum.

But the law is about business competition. So how is that competition becoming unfair? Just naming this law without a lot more explanation does pretty much nothing for perspective.

> But the law is about business competition.

That law is basically Japanese version of DMCA.

"Unfair Competition Prevention Act" is an antiqued piece of law first enacted in 1930s. Its original scope was trade malpractice such as corporate spying.

In 1990s, Japanese gov (somehow) decided to implement DRM protection in the framework of this law. So it ended up governing both trade secrets AND DRM.

Thank you very much!

Fair competition: you sell a game or other diversion that's better than mine and people like it so much I'm forced to go back to the drawing board

Unfair competition: you make money out of sabotaging the perfectly good game I wrote, reducing the enjoyment for players who don't cheat

Unless I do both of those at the same time, I don't see how the latter involves "competition".

The competition is mostly from the "make money by" part. That's money from what used to be a sole company's asset now going to 2 places rather than 1. E.g. before I could leverage the rarity aspect of the gameplay & IP however I desired (including keeping it as part of making a time investment into the product if I thought that was more valuable in the long run) but now you're selling an alternative version of the experience to people and I have to compete with getting any pokemon and stats instantly from someone else for $x when it comes to extracting the value from the IP asset with the protected saves.

I'm not saying this is a great stance, just showing how it is seen as competition in the second scenario alone.

That sounds like bullshit. You still have to buy the original product (game) to use this other thing (modified save). I guess unless the original vendor also sells something to that effect, like pay to win.

I hope modifying the save file for yourself is not illegal still.

Also less than a year ago age of consent in Japan was 13 years, talk about priorities.

> Also less than a year ago age of consent in Japan was 13 years, talk about priorities.

If you read past the clickbait title, however, you’ll find that the individual prefectures have had stricter age of consent laws for many years. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ages_of_consent_in_Asia

Did you know that the United States still has NO age of consent law at all? It’s true, there is no federal law that addresses the subject. (Each state has its own law.) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ages_of_consent_in_the_Unite...

> Also less than a year ago age of consent in Japan was 13 years, talk about priorities.

That's a lot like saying the united states has no age of consent. It was higher in every prefecture, with some variations.

You still have to buy the game, but other people may choose not to if they become aware that the player base is infested with cheaters. If it was a single-player game this would likely never have been an issue.

All businesses are in competition for revenue.

The perspective is seeing the law explicitly says said activity is unfair and illegal independent of whether one's ideology agrees said law is reasonable or should exist.

E.g. if there was a 2022 law calling for arrest of those holding ice cream cones upside down because of risk to the sidewalk cleanliness then knowing that gives perspective to why someone was arrested for holding an ice cream cone upside down beyond just a random arrest decision for something one thinks everyone would consider harmless. That doesn't mean it convinces you personally that the law is reasonable and, just that it was indeed an explicitly illegal activity.

> The perspective is seeing the law explicitly says said activity is unfair and illegal independent of whether one's ideology agrees said law is reasonable or should exist.

It still needs an explanation because at a surface level the crime and the name of the law have nothing to do with each other.

Until that explanation exists of how the law says it's illegal, I don't have the perspective of seeing the law explicitly say that!

I am not even in the realm of talking about whether the law makes sense.

The name of the law is neither here nor there in the end (most laws have useless names really) and you don't have to possess an explanation of why it's covered under that law to be given the perspective that it is. On that front though, and following the link to the body of the law, a shortened version might be: The saves are encrypted and proprietary. As a result modifying them to get rare items runs afoul into the "trade secrets" verbiage. Selling work based on such trade secrets then falls under the unfair competition definition and is what results in said penalties.

My stab at the likely background reasoning for having these rules (i.e. not explicitly written into the law but rather why the law might have been made) is something along the lines that the guy made money off of devaluing the rarity of IP the company was supposed to have control of distributing through their proprietary means.

It's still pretty important to me to understand some of the mechanism. What it takes to not break the law. Some potential reasonings are much more sensible than others, and the overall consequences differ.

I kind of wanted an explanation too so I looked up the law, but to be honest it’s dense and beyond me. [1]

It reads like an anti-circumvention law to me, but I’m not clear on what specifically in there would make it applicable to modified video game save data unless you can argue that modifying save data is a wrongful way to acquire to a particular game state.

[1] https://www.japaneselawtranslation.go.jp/en/laws/view/3629

This is a conclusory argument since it doesn't explain why this particular alleged act of selling video game saves is illegal.

https://law.stackexchange.com/questions/85973/how-to-address...

I'd like to know whether this Japanese law explicitly says "selling video game save data is illegal" (seems less likely) or if there is an interpretation of the Unfair Competition Act that the alleged facts constitute counterfeiting or something.

https://www.japaneselawtranslation.go.jp/en/laws/view/2803/e...

I'm not a lawyer so I'm not an expert on the Japanese legal system but merely asserting that the law bans a specific act isn't helpful because it doesn't explain how.

As outlined in Article 3(1) of the Unfair Competition Prevention Act, the unauthorized modification of Pokémon data can potentially diminish the enjoyment derived from the game, leading to detrimental consequences for game sales.

It's certainly not an applicable argument to a lawyer/judge but that's wholly different than being helpful for joe schmoe reading a news article summary of the situation on the web. You don't need to replace the understanding and process of the Japanese court system with personal understanding and investigation to start understanding a news article. Same as you don't need to spend decades studying maths to get a useful takeaway from a news article talking about Andrew Wile's proof of Fermat's Last Theorem.

I'm not saying nobody can ask further questions if they want , just that arguing you can have no new understanding of the situation without an explanation to the level of a Japanese lawyer arguing the text of the law in a way you personally understand and can follow is silly. You also don't need to personally and independently validate the dude's sales transactions to be able to get the takeaway that yeah, the article is probably right that he made sales of this service and didn't just modify personal files.

I got a reasonable level of understanding from "Japanese police arrest man for tampering with Pokémon Violet save data".

Expanding that by mentioning the Unfair Competition Prevention Act gave me no additional understanding.

It's not that I can't comprehend the situation just fine as a layman, it's that the quote above did not give me any perspective I didn't already have from the headline. It was not helpful as an addition to the headline. It only introduces a new mystery.

It also comes with a message explaining the exact act of selling the modifications is explicitly covered under said law rather than some assumed problem with generic copyright law or thing that might be easily defendable against. It could be declared as being against part of the "chips and cheese law" and the lack of personally being able to tie the title of the law to how it's related would still leave that extra context beyond what the title gives.

Concluding there must be no possibility to see new information to see out of something in the face of others doing just that is not something others can help you with. Either you're interested in extracting the extra information on your own or you won't accept someone telling you it's there. Either way: yes, it's still really additional perspective to most others regardless of you see how.

Competes with devs selling you their own save edits ("cash shop" purchases)?

You're probably right. It makes me angry and bums me out.

For me, grinding 98% of the time is not enjoyable. Game are definitely better than what they once were, but let me cheat on single player games. I get it game developers, the play time will be shorter I'm fine with that.

And game devs if you don't want to add cheats then add a bunch of accessibility controls because those things are just as good as cheats.

Also just let me temporarily turn off encounters. Sometimes I don't want to fight. I just want to walk around and enjoy the world you made. But no I get an encounter every minute and I'm stuck listening to that same battle song again. Looking at you Yakuza franchise.

The selling part is more important than the modification part because the law he broke specifically references selling or renting.

Yes. It changes it entirely. Obviously? Selling or otherwise distributing was illegal, or using hacked data with an on-line service, not merely hacking your own property.

It does not. Selling your cheat mod is fundamentally different from playing around with it on your own workbench.

Seems like fraud would be a more likely charge.

I don't think its reasonable though. I have a hard time believing that its a good use of public resources. He wasn't pirating software, he was selling a savegame file. That it was 'tampered with' doesn't really matter except when the letter of the law is used to punish people doing nothing wrong.

This same law also makes console modding services illegal.

One particular company, Cyber Gadget, even used to sell commercial save game editor apps, and they had to pull them after this law was introduced.

Something similar happened in the late 1990's when a PlayStation memory card was being sold with pre-loaded save data for a dating sim game (Tokimeki Memorial). Konami claimed it violated the integrity of the work because selling a hacked save with all stats maxed tampered with the game's natural progression. (And they won twice, the original case and the appeal.)

https://ja.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E3%81%A8%E3%81%8D%E3%82%81%...

http://gaming.moe/?p=2938

That's such a weird theory of harm. They still had to buy a copy of the game, right? So the harm is that the consumer would experience the story in the way they chose instead of the way the author intended? Death of the audience I suppose?

No, this theory of harm is a direct consequence of the weird "moral rights" thing that is a part of Japanese copyright law.

That's a good clarification, but it does lead us back to where we started. What's the harm of violating "integrity?" That the author doesn't get to present the story in the manner they chose.

It only makes sense with the context of Japanese copyright law. Here's the actual text:

> (Right to Integrity)

> Article 20 (1) The author of a work has the right to preserve the integrity of that work and its title, and is not to be made to suffer any alteration, cut, or other modification thereto that is contrary to the author's intention.

If you distribute hacked save files, you are "cutting out" parts of the original game story, and thus violate this article.

Yes, it is ludicrous, but it's consistent, at least.

Czechia also has this clause in the copyright law. It sucks, because you can be sued for modifying FLOSS to do something that does not sit well with the original author(s).

Last time I've seen it used was for an architect to prevent us from using garbage bags of a different color. I am not kidding you. Their interior design was very specific (and good) and this was an attempt to save costs and it looked weird, but still

So, in that case, I wonder what would happen if someone just flooded the internet with modified save files for free. Remove the money incentive and just publish thousands of uploads around the web from outside Japan.

If the sites are hosted in Japan, then they could be taken down by Japanese courts. If the sites are hosted outside Japan, it's very likely nothing will happen.

The internet is already flooded with modified save files for every game.

Trying to profit off someone else's IP is the problematic part(as with any fake brand products). They don't go after every ad-supported save file repositories of curious interest.

The most capitalist translation for this "integrity" is sales + customer loyalty, although it's slightly more than just direct financial income. Spoiled media content sells worse shorter term, and drags down related products longer term.

I guess, "there's effectively a game in the market with our same branding and IP, allowing people to access only the scenes in our dating sim they want to, turning it into a different kind of application with deleterious associations to our brand" is a theory of harm I can grok. I don't think it would hurt short term sales in this particular case, but that could hurt the brand and thus long term sales. I have trouble parsing the rationale because it seems very anti-consumer, at least with this being my only exposure to Japanese law, but that probably wouldn't have flown in the US either.

People pointing out that this is some weird quirk of Japanese law: if there's an argument that reverse engineering the software to determine how this works is circumvention of a technical control, this would potentially be a violation of 17 U.S. Code § 1201 - https://dair-community.social/@kendraserra/11167540121678898... discusses case law around a separate kind of case, but one that could be argued here. Let's not criticise Japanese law without acknowledging that US law is also fucked up.

While I agree that the US law on the matter is also fucked up, 17 U.S. Code § 1201 seems to be a civil violation not a criminal one. The police wouldn't arrest you and the punishment is financial and an injunction from further activities.

US vs Elcom was based on 1201 violations?

Every 1201 violation in the indictment is paired with a Title 18 violation, which is the section on Federal crimes. See https://www.eff.org/node/55475

At least from my reading of section 1201 alone, I don't see criminal charges mentioned, though I'm just a laymen. They seem to be able to use it in combination to charge you though, so not any better than Japan.

Those aren't the only two options. Shall we make sure to criticize the law of all 192 remaining member states of the United Nations every time one country's legal system comes into focus? Wouldn't want to leave anyone out.

>Let's not criticise Japanese law without acknowledging that US law is also fucked up.

This doesn’t need done at all. This is just whataboutism. This story does not involve the USA and the discussion about other countries does not need to be derailed every time with discussion about and comparison to the USA.

Not surprising from a country that will arrest you for other non crimes such as being in possession of lockpicks (also fun fact - their police are extremely skeptical that Americans watch lockpickers on YouTube as a hobby even if said lockpicks are straight from said YouTuber's company)

I think possession of lockpicks is illegal in NYC as well. Though I doubt they're enforcing that rn

It's enforced here in Illinois if they catch you doing something with them. They add it on as an extra charge.

That's how it is in most States. You can own/carry lockpicks, and even carry them past TSA, but if you're caught somewhere you're not supposed to be, you're now hit with possession of burglary tools.

This is also why urbex communities reccomend not bringing picks while exploring places, as they'll bring more trouble than its worth if you're caught.

I recall that being an extremely hard and fast rule on my brief foray into urban exploration.

Never ever have anything that could be construed as a weapon or burglary tool. Even if all you did was walk through an open door it makes it far too easy to build a case for breaking and entering, instead of much milder trespassing.

Right. A lot of these statutes swing on "intent." And if you have something suspicious on your person it is easier to get the trier of fact to see it.

This applies as well to a wide variety of otherwise innocent objects. I’ve known people who’ve gotten the same for screwdrivers. Basically if you have any tool with you while doing something that the police could construe (or attempt to construe) as a burglary, then those tools are burglary tools.

I'd be curious what someone's doing that police even have any idea they've got a lock picking set or tools on their person.

In this hypothetical case, they were discovered at Haneda airport flying to another city in Japan via explorer pass

I’ll bite. This slippery slope is what led people in the US rooting for pro guns laws

Why shouldn’t someone be free to modify their purchased, owned product to their hearts content, including paying others for modifications?

Replace “owned product” with “movie” and you see the problem that would require a total copyright restructuring.

But, didn't the guy sell the save data? That's not the game itself.

Huh? If I own a video, I can edit it if I want. Selling the modified version would be the difficulty? But I could still hire someone to make a modification for me I think.

Not in the US. There was a company that tried selling modified (I.e. censored) versions of Hollywood films. They lost. Copyright infringement.

There was also a second attempt where people would mail in their disks, and receive an edited version back. Again, lost.

So, whether we like it or not, nope. That’s not how things work, because any editing creates a “derivative work” in the eyes of the law, and only the copyright owner is allowed to make such derivative works.

Even if you edit the film yourself, you’re making a derivative work. The only reason you won’t be sued is because the harm is $0.

Actually you’re wrong on this, or painting an incomplete picture.

CleanFlix was sued because they were editing and distributing movies without studio permission, but a competing product called ClearPlay, which was a specialized DVD player that you would plug a flash drive into, and censorship was then overlayed. It was allowed to continue existing because the end user was technically the one making the edits on their copy of the movie, and the movie itself was not being redistributed.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ClearPlay

I was talking about several different lawsuits, like the CleanFlicks and VidAngel lawsuits from 2002 and 2007ish. There’s also VidAngel v Disney as recent as 2019.

Edit for below (“too many responses”):

Irrelevant; as ClearPlay does not properly speaking edit the video; but messes with the playback timeline.

Editing the video is illegal. Messing with the timeline as the unedited film is playing? Completely permitted for accessibility, organization, and other reasons. In particular, that amazing thing called an ad blocker. Skipping 30 seconds ahead to avoid an ad is legal, but editing the ad out is not.

Sure, but the continued existence of ClearPlay indicates that your claim was incorrect. End users are allowed to make modifications to their own media, they just cannot redistribute that media in any way directly.

ETA: Clearplay doesn’t just muck with the timeline. It would overlay clothes over nudity, replace naughty words, etc. It’s actually a kind of neat bit of technology.

Clearplay has a whole law designated for it called the The Family Entertainment and Copyright Act

I think without this act it might be considered a deriative work and illegal actually

Ripping a page out of a book you own or slathering it in white out is not illegal, so I don't see why cutting a scene or overlaying a black bar or, for that matter, any other forms of editing would be illegal. The copy is yours. You own it.

Selling a modified copy for a profit? Yes, that would be a violation of copyright. That's the distinction being made.

I've bought lots of modified second-hand books (highlights, cross-outs, corrections). Are you saying that's illegal?

its illegal when its considered a derivative work (substantially altering or adding content)

those little modifications made from a consumer prob dont count. the first sale doctrine covers minor wear and tear type stuff

Your telling me it's illegal to pay someone to illustrate my copy of a book? It's illegal to commission a translation of a book for personal use? Is it illegal to pay someone to read a book to me?

yeah all three are copyright infringement

you cant make audio books, illustrations, or translations of a book without the authors permission

note that text to speech isnt considered derivative work. its considered a tool rather than creating content. so its legal for a kindle to read it to you

I think you're confused, or at least talking past GP. It's not copyright infringement to create a derivative work - e.g. by adding illustrations to a book. What's infringement is if you copy and distribute the derivative work without a license to the original. GP was asking about the former, not the latter.

There's a case where a Japanese venue commissioned an art piece, wrapped it, artists sued the venue, and the court ordered the art be restored to the original state on the ground of copyright. I think it was a couple feet tall cat statue or something.

It's somewhat of a case by case basis matter and it's rarely brought to the court, but just because you own a piece doesn't always make it all to your discretion to modify it.

us code 106 gives the copyright holder exclusive rights of derivative works

so yes even at home, making art for a book you dont have permission for, and isnt seen by anyone but you, is still copyright infringement

Yes, but that doesn't mean it's "illegal" to create a derivative work. It just means that the original author has rights they can exert over what you make.

I dont know everything i read online says its copyright infringement to create derivative works, outside of stuff like parodies, fair use and getting permission.

> outside of stuff like .. fair use

That's the important bit - the things you called illegal a few comments back were obvious examples of (presumptive) fair use.

More generally, whether something is copyright infringement can be vague and subjective - so the bar for going around saying "yes, that is infringement" is not "does it meet a description I read online?". The bar is: "have courts previously ruled that a very similar case was infringement?".

I have no idea if that's true, but you can't seriously expect anyone to actually abide by that, it's absurd.

> its legal for a kindle to read it to you

It seems to me that computers programs have more rights than humans.

Mailing in a DVD and receiving an edited copy back is clearly a process that involves the creation and distribution of an unauthorised copy. There's the philosophical justification that you're only "editing" a copy the customer has given you but it's not surprising that a judge is uninterested in that, you're writing the movie to a DVD and distributing it and nothing before that matters. Not a good argument against.

It would be interesting if they had 1) distributed a program that automatically edits the user's copy, or 2) edited VHS tapes that customers sent in by physically splicing them. I'm pretty sure the first should be legal, but I'm curious what they'd make of the second.

That’s not completely different than how Clearplay worked. It was a specialized DVD player that you plugged in a flash drive, which contained data to automatically censor the movie on the fly, e.g. putting a bra on Kate Winslet in Titanic during the painting scene.

It appears that it’s still around and does stuff on top of streaming applications.

I don’t think you read what they wrote. They aren’t talking about selling anything

Even if you were to give away your modified version, you could still be sued for harming the market for the original product.

You can’t legally make derivative works. Even in the privacy of your own home. It’s only that there’s nothing to be legally won from if you only did it at home. That’s a pragmatic distinction, not a legal one.

Remember the guy who raised a bunch of money in order to professionally remove the rat at the end of The Departed?

(In the end he couldn’t legally do it in any fashion)

Interestingly, you can sell a program that edits the file in a specific manner as long as the user provides the original file.

>total copyright restructuring

Yes, please. Hell, throw patents in too while you're at it.

Heck, no. Not right now.

The copyright owners are begging for a restructuring. One that would greatly increase their authority on two issues: AI use, and Internet website blocking.

Ask for a restructuring right now, and you’ll bring Japanese-style copyright to America (“fair use” doesn’t exist over there) with European-style judicial site blocking (and mass blocking of suspected piracy outlets).

This.

If you want to see a world without fair use, check out the Japanese Wikipedia pages -- it's noticeably lacking in pictures and images than the English counterpart, likely because the latter was written by those in the U.S. It's especially ironic when there's more photos and images on the English language article for topics about Japan!

> Ask for a restructuring right now, and you’ll bring Japanese-style copyright to America (“fair use” doesn’t exist over there) with European-style judicial site blocking (and mass blocking of suspected piracy outlets).

And with a German-style enforcement procedure (i.e. all copyright infringement is criminal, but personal non-commercial use is civil) and Mexican-style copyright term (120+ years after death).

> patents

How would you incentivize companies to spend years and millions in R&D, if anyone can benefit from their inventions immediately after they're done?

Patent trolls are a problem, patents themselves aren't

I’ll bite… let’s start by removing any software patents, they are just stupid. Then, let’s start having a look at over broad patents that don’t help anyone but megacorps to block innovation and competition. Then finally, the whole RD sob story is brought up a lot, which has a point in the original definition, but it’s used by megacorps to justify stupid high prices (see medication industry in the US for example) and block affordable medications that save lives. So I say, screw that, let the actual market speak for itself.

> let’s start by removing any software patents, they are just stupid.

100% agree and I'm primary author on 2 software patents taken out by a former employer. Software is maths. Patenting a software process makes as little sense as allowing patents on any other mathematical function.

I also think business method patents in general are crazy, because pretty much all business processes have some sense of inevitability to them that in my view should fail the "obviousness" test for patentability. It seems the tide has turned against them officially too which I think is positive overall for society.[1]

[1] http://www.kilpatricktownsend.com/~/media/Files/articles/201...

> I'll bite

Please refrain from implying that the question you're answering to was asked in bad faith. You're not "biting", you're answering a valid question.

I was certain I’d find an April 1st publication date but holy cow that’s real. What a waste of public resources.

Japan takes theft seriously; you can go to prison for stealing small change, or lose your job for cheating at self-service coffee.

https://sg.news.yahoo.com/japan-man-jailed-10-yen-theft-1159...

https://www.straitstimes.com/asia/east-asia/school-principal...

It's severe, but I don't know what degree it's a waste of public resources. People like the rock-bottom crime rate. On the other hand, word is that Japanese police are not great at investigating more well-planned crime. A trend has emerged in recent years of professional criminals basing themselves abroad and using social media to recruit naïve/disaffected people for the manual labor part.

You can be very strict at punishing theft without having a very expansive definition of theft.

This isn't defined as theft; my comment is to point out that Japan throws resources at policing/prosecuting violations on principle rather than scale of the injury. They are deontologists rather than utilitarians.

Selling cheat devices/services is treated as a kind of unlawful commerce, because Ruining It For Everybody is socially unacceptable there.

Or just police is bored because crime rate is low? They may have quota to fill to justify their job?!

anyone else get a weird feeling reading the article? there is some jank in there, for example:

>Its worth noting that the raw last for Pokemon — ...

there's also some duplicated lines (the headline makes an appearance without a space after a period, for instance) and some repetition.

Not sure if AI or a hastily written article by someone unfamiliar with words. Not sure what the TCG has to do with save files, either.

Might have been hastily written by AI not families with words

> Ctrl-F "raw last"

Yeah, I'm still not sure what is meant in that sentence

I don't know whether I find it more crazy that editing a save file is a criminal offence in Japan, or that people will pay $30-$85 for the service.

The crime was selling - not editing. Not defending the arrest but it's a pretty big difference.

Sure, but editing is probably still illegal as the save files are encrypted (sections 17-18 of Article 2): https://www.japaneselawtranslation.go.jp/en/laws/view/3629

Don't agree. If you look at the opening of each section, there's prohibitions against 'the act of transferring, delivering, displaying for the purpose of transfer or delivery, exporting, or importing, a device [which allows subversion of some kind][...]' and similarly for transmission of software or the like.

All these verbs relate to some sort of commercial transaction, rather than the modification per se. My read is that you could modify it freely, or even write an article documenting the save file format and how to mess with it. It's the act of commercializing the process that makes the difference between a server ban and an arrest warrant.

This is the country that brought you

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fate/Grand_Order

Yes, some video games are made in Japan.

What is significant about this one?

Perhaps that it is a very lucrative gacha game. This sort of game is distributed for free and makes its money through microtransactions that amount to power boosts. Save editing would sidestep the business model. Another example of felony contempt of business model?

FGO is an online game though, editing saves isn't a thing because the data you'd need to edit is all on their servers.

I think the asset packs are local so I think you could get images, character models, and stuff like that by hacking on a game.

>microtransactions that amount to power boosts.

Tell me you know nothing about FGO without saying you know nothing about FGO.

Microtransactions in FGO are for purchasing new characters from the gacha. "Power boosting" only comes from just playing the game like everyone else.

Source: Been playing FGO Japan since 2016, and yes I'm a whale and yes I'm happy.

I am into the other Fate games and anime related culture (got Tamamo JK and Archer figurines) I’ve had the damndest time getting FGO to play on anything other than a high end smartphone. With most mobile games you can play on a tablet or side load into a NVIDIA shield or play on an emulator that runs a PC but not that. I have a box full of various bottom tier Android phones (often Android Go) but these don’t have sufficient memory.

I remember getting it to run on one of my devices once for a while but I was shocked at how bad the english translation was, worse than the average live action Chinese TV series.

To be fair Fate games are all about developing a strong emotional connection to the characters so I can definitely see somebody rolling a huge number of times if they want a character that they moe really hard for.

Currently I'm playing FGO on my Samsung Galaxy S4 Tablet, though it's definitely showing its age now. I'll probably have to upgrade it in a few more years. I could alternatively move over to playing on my Sony Xperia 5 IV, but I like playing on a big screen.

Real question, what's the harm here?

Are the modified Pokemon being used in competitions? What is the harm, really?

> Are the modified Pokemon being used in competitions?

Even if they were, the penalty should be limited to being banned from future competitions, not prison.

I agree but the Japanese legal system is very weird. It seems like pokemon is very a lucrative business and a tough sentencing is probably only as an example to deter future violations.

The legal system sounds pretty normal. Elected officials are in their 80s. Some corporation comes to them with a bunch of mumbo jumbo not involving fax machines and a stack of money. Law enacted.

I also think that east Asia thinks that esports are as important as normal sports, at least in the sense of exporting their culture. Everyone wants to be Hollywood or the NFL, and esports are their route to that kind of international renowned, or so they think. Thus, they have a bunch of laws to make sure nothing crops up that could impact that. Pokemon isn't an esport, but if you're 80, you don't know that.

That's an absurd caricature; just checking in on TV news would have informed you that Japan's legislature has a fairly broad age distribution. Video games have been huge in Japan since the 1970s, and mechanical gambling games like pachinko well before that. I suspect most legislators have had household exposure to videogames, and any under 60 probably played growing up. Likewise Japan went wild for digital cellphones well before smartphones; there's a whole genre of literature called 'text message novels' that started in the early 2000s.

As for this case, the prohibition on selling mod tools/services is certainly to protect the game manufacturers; if there's a perception that it's easy and safe to cheat in the game then players' incentive to spend (whether via microtransactions or future releases) goes way down, and so does the publisher's revenue, and so do tax receipts. I can't help noting that Japan's game industry isn't engaging in mass layoffs over the last few years, suggesting that maybe they know what they're doing.

https://www.japantimes.co.jp/business/2024/04/02/japan-no-ga...

No manufacturer wants their product utility diluted. After market modifications that add a benefit to the user don't make the product any worse for people without the modification. but in a product which is used by people to compete for social entertainment, modifications absolutely hurt the product because wins and losses are no longer a function of skill.

> As for this case, the prohibition on selling mod tools/services is certainly to protect the game manufacturers; if there's a perception that it's easy and safe to cheat in the game then players' incentive to spend (whether via microtransactions or future releases) goes way down, and so does the publisher's revenue, and so do tax receipts. I can't help noting that Japan's game industry isn't engaging in mass layoffs over the last few years, suggesting that maybe they know what they're doing.

There is 0 chance whatever prohibition on selling mods had any impact on mass layoffs happening or not happening.

Of course, but maybe the ethos that makes the industry stable there (and presumably drives its lobbying efforts) is a good fit for the society in which it exists.

I mean, we have legislators in their 30s in the US and we regulate tech like it's 80 year olds.

Based on the law invoked it seems the idea might be that his versions of the games essentially piggy-back off the trademarks attached to Pokemon, while effectively rendering the vanilla, unmodified cartridges such that they may be perceived to be an inferior product in comparison, despite being the original product.

This seems like a stretch even under Japanese law, since the article gives the impression that he was not selling the cartridges themselves, but merely the service of taking cartridges and modifying them. But Japanese copyright law is kinda crazy. There's a reason that Japanese Wikipedia is almost totally bereft of images.

>Are the modified Pokemon being used in competitions?

Interestingly, it's pretty much standard for competitive Pokemon players to use hacked Pokemon because of the crazy time investment the game demands to train Pokemon with optimal stats and movesets legitimately. They use free methods to do this though.

Making an open source tool for easy hacking would be a good middle finger to the nintendo police.

I'd eat my shoe if the dude wasn't just using exactly that https://github.com/kwsch/PKHeX

There were game save websites back in 2000 where people could go and download saves for their Dreamcast straight to their memory cards. People would also make homebrew games and animations for the VMUs (virtual memory unit). The memory cards were like mini Gameboys. Fun times. I couldn't imagine getting arrested for that.

These websites still exist and are enjoyed by many! GameFAQs for example, hosts a large number of saves. Most recently I downloaded a complete save file for Micro Machines V3 for the PS2, so we didn't have to grind to unlock all cars for multiplayer :)

Cool! I had no idea. Kind of just forgot that they existed because it's been almost 20 years since I downloaded a game save

This feels like the Japanese equivalent of all the crazy laws that Disney’s gotten passed in the US.

Whenever you modify a game to sell items, that compete, even indirectly, with a currency/infer-currency of a company, you have deprived them.

This is actually pretty clear cut.

If he would let a LLM play the game to acquire desired save data then he could sell it under Japanese law?

you wouldn’t GameShark A CAR

In my country it's pretty common to remap and modify the ECU settings.

For €100 you can have someone remap the fuel injection system to give you more power for less fuel (VW are notorious for this, you can easily get 25% more power), or you can have environmental features disabled that will end up breaking such as EGR, DPF, AdBlue, etc.

Someone who does it is a friend of a friend, and he drives a Tesla, so I guess it's not a bad business to be in.

wouldn't an emissions inspection notice this or do they not do that there?

Probably it varies country by country, but I would guess that road safety rules have some common thresholds of parameters like emissions. And not enforce detoriation when compared to factory state. The latter is probably a natural phenomenon with wear.

I guess we need a licence for car ownership in addition to driving, and that should be a way of losing it.

On balance it's probably a good thing for people to be able to modify their cars. We wouldn't want to build a world where you're beholden to the whims of car companies on pain of having your ability to own a car revoked. That would be a recipe for abuse.

If people modify their cars in dangerous or illegal ways, that's presumably already a crime they could get their license revoked for.

Not just tampering but also selling and there’s a law against it in Japan. Nintendo usually draws the line where it counts.

Imagine being so mad about Palworld you hire secret police to arrest modders.

Title should be: 36 year old man gets his life ruined for making $84 in total profit from proceeds of "crime". If he's peddling "hacked consumer products" he's already on his last leg as a 36 year old. Even if he manages to get a job by some miracle he's going to get ijime'd hard by his co-workers who will view him as a convict.

this is up there with the case where they arrested a student for some javascript code she wrote that caused never ending alert dialog popups at the library?

Neo-confucianism is just glorified gerontocracy.

> The 36-year-old allegedly took custom orders for rare Pokémon, and sold the resulting tampered data between December 2022 to March 2023, for up to 13,000 yen ($84) a time on a website that served as a marketplace for video game assets and items. He also offered deals in which six Pokémon would be created for the equivalent of roughly $30 in yen.

Yet bunch of ojiisans steal $1.7 billion as executives of a flagship Japanese company and nobody goes to jail. Some gaijin CEO 20x your struggling car company and you send HIM to jail for taking a bit of bonus as compensation!

Unreal.

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