Hacker News Reader

Comment by sosborn | Hacker News Reader

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.

View on HN

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

> 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!

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

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.

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.

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com