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Comment by zamadatix | Hacker News Reader

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.

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> 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.

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