Former Bungie, Pokémon lawyer explains how they caught leakers
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
Quote from the article: "Which was fantastic. Absolutely baked my legend in at Pokémon for like five years."
Don McGowan is a legend though, a legendary asshole for being proud of bullying a curious kid that was poking around in legally obtained game-files.
If the corporations don't want stuff like this to be found, they should try not putting it into the game in the first place. I guess copyright monopolists who are delusional enough to believe they can publish information world wide and control what happens to it do not have this sort of common sense.
For the record, there's an entire website full of people dedicated to doing what that child did:
This was my first thought too. While the entire DMCA is misguided draconian bullshit, I'm having trouble figuring out by what tortured logic dumping an image from a game file would trigger it.
[0]: https://www.theverge.com/2021/10/14/22726866/missouri-govern...
b) With the way politics is going in USA I am not optimistic about DMCA reform until the heat-death of the universe.
In December 1996, the World Intellectual Property Organization adopted the WIPO Copyright Treaty which is principally aimed at adapting the legal paradigm of copyrights to new technology. Article 11 of the WCT obligates “contracting parties to provide adequate legal protection and effective legal remedies against the circumvention of effective technological measures that are used by authors in connection with the exercise of their rights under this Treaty or the Berne Convention and that restrict acts, in respect of their works, which are not authorized by the authors concerned or permitted by law.”
Yes. But not all countries interpret the restrictions on fair-use as aggressively as DMCA/1201 does.
>So I called his mom and said, ‘Listen, I wanted to tell you some things that Andrew is doing on the computer.’ She says, ‘So you’re saying he hacked your game.’ And I hear in the background: ‘I didn’t hack anything!’ I start describing it more technically. She says, ‘Is this a problem?’ I say, ‘Hacking software, that’s a federal crime, but I don’t want that to be the conversation. Why don’t we make it a conversation about the good and bad things he can do with a computer?’
>The kid was live-tweeting it. The tweets were this:
>1.Pokémon just called my house. >2.What the hell is a general counsel? >3.I now know what I did was wrong, and I’ll never do it again.
>Which was fantastic. Absolutely baked my legend in at Pokémon for like five years.
Yeah, the DMCA is bullshittery, but it's a legal weapon that the GC is expect to wield for his company.
He did his job, in a way that had no legal consequences for the kid, and still got the result his company needed.
That seems like the correct way of handling it. Is it ideal from a societal perspective? No, the DMCA should be gutted. But from a practical perspective, this was a win all around.
And the kid was hopefully pushed away from trouble, at least until they were old enough to cover their tracks better.
Why do you assume there weren't knock-on effects/consequences to his actions? Or that they were positive (set him on the right track) vs deleterious?
No.
This kid did nothing wrong.
Yet he still felt the need to say these words:
> I now know what I did was wrong, and I’ll never do it again.
He lost some of his dignity that day. He was made to submit. To some rich corporation's will. Despite probably having zero obligation to do so.
I couldn't care less what your job is or what "results" your employer wants out of you. If you do what this guy did, you suck.
A company made a mistake. A kid found out. So the company sicks the lawyers on the kid? Teaches the kid to not be curious? Does he really believe kids should only sit down and mindlessly consume content,only when a bigcorp dictates it, never walking a millimeter from the path? And then the bastard lawyer brags about it?
My blood boils just reading this. I hope that corporate creep never has any kids of his own.
Complete lie by the way. The highest revelation is that the found out that some streamer leaked something, because they noticed the leaked photos had the same icons as he did. Besides bullying a kid, this is just irrelevant.
[1] info about Vanguard: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40242692
> So I called his mom and said, ‘Listen, I wanted to tell you some things that Andrew is doing on the computer.’ She says, ‘So you’re saying he hacked your game.’ And I hear in the background: ‘I didn’t hack anything!’ I start describing it more technically. She says, ‘Is this a problem?’ I say, ‘Hacking software, that’s a federal crime, but I don’t want that to be the conversation. Why don’t we make it a conversation about the good and bad things he can do with a computer?’
When you boast about threatening kids, that says a lot about what kind of person you are
If you’re a lawyer going after children who take the screws out of the backs of alarm clocks then I’m afraid you’re the bad guy. People like that ought to be held accountable by their regional bar association.
With an electricution mechanism perhaps?
Talk about an absolute terrible way to approach someone who went public about a sexual harassment claim. From just this article I don't think I'd feel comfortable talking with this dude about anything serious going on.
"Obviously, my job is to protect the organization, but ‘protect the organization’ takes on different meanings to different people. To me, ‘protect the organization’ has always meant: protect your people from bad things."
I have no words to express how far from the truth this is. The only lawyer who protects you is the one you hire. The company lawyer protects the company from you.
Edit:autocorrect typo
Fuck this guy and this company.
Requesting the parent to share their likely painful memories or else they’ve committed some sin against hn leaves a bit of a bad taste in my mouth.
I believe that his job was to protect the company.
Knowing the truth of the situation might be one of the first things they want, but that's not the only thing on their mind and influencing their actions.
What a complete piece of shit. Threatening a child and his parent because the child dumped some memory and found some file. He also knows that there is exactly zero chance for any legal actions towards that kid (and of course it is not his decision in any case), nevertheless he, the super helpful lawyer, gets to make threats however he wants.
Genuinely disgusting. How do these people live with themselves? "Honey, today I made a kid afraid he was going to jail, because he copied some file of something we sold to him, how was your day?".
Sounds like a great success that many would kill for.
/Sarcasm, but still. Meh.
Boycotts work quite well, but you have to have a sufficient base of customers to participate — and it helps to avoid spurring counter-boycotts: Chick-Fil-A's business increased after some chose to boycott them. It also helps when the company's product is commodity swill that's easy enough to rotate out (Bud Light) vs. a generally positive customer experience (CFA).
No, its generally not. Every legal demand letter is a threat of legal action intended to produce a desired behavioral outcome in the target. Needless to say, issuing a demand letter is not generally itself illegal.
> Especially if you are trying to stop someone from doing something well within their rights
Threats of either actions which are themselves illegal (prohibited violence) or threats with illegal purposes (suppression of protected rights) are often illegal,but that's a lot narrower than “Threatening people to make them behave a certain way is actually illegal”.
> I might have a talk with David. I might say, ‘Listen, I’ve figured out it was you. Do I not seem approachable? > Why are you and I not having a conversation about this?’ Obviously, my job is to protect the organization, but > ‘protect the organization’ takes on different meanings to different people. To me, ‘protect the organization’ > has always meant: protect your people from bad things.
Good grief - do not fall for this shit.
The reason someone like him tries to figure out the identity of a person claiming sexual harassment is estimating and minimizing the liability. How credible are you (to the public, press, investigators, a potential jury), how big a platform do you have, etc. An unlikable, not-stereotypically-attractive loner who has no little social media connections? Not a threat. A person who has a thousand followers, is likable/attractive, etc? Big threat.
The only reason they care about the identity of the harasser is to figure out how big a deal this might be. Manager of some QA testing group? Not a problem. C-suite or Vice President, etc? Big problem, that both legal and PR will be quickly roped in on.
Just like with HR, nobody that works for your employer ever has your best interests even remotely on their priority list beyond getting you to trust them so they can pump you for as much information as possible to sabotage your claims by doing things like creating alibis, destroying evidence, and searching out reasons to accuse you of being a poorly performing / combative employee who is simply a malcontent.
If you've been or are being sexually harassed, your first stop should be an attorney (and in case it's obvious, not one you find via your company's EAP.)
The Pokémon company, in their own incompetence, leaked information by literally shipping it out to everyone on the internet who cared to download a copy of their game.
A child with computer skills found the data, got all enthusiastic about it and told the world via social media.
This fucking guy called the kid's house and bullied and threatened his family with legal repercussions that would likely not ever materialize.
He threatened a kid whose only crime was loving his employer's shitty game too much with a federal crime. An empty threat at that. "Hacking software, that’s a federal crime". What hacking software? Your own incompetence led to this. Try not sending people data you don't want them to have.
This piece of shit is actually so proud of what he did he brags about it in public instead of keeping it to himself.
This fucking asshole actually got a kick out of watching the kid's live reactions to his nonsense on Twitter.
A child's curiosity was destroyed for the sake of a corporation's profit and control. Using his skills to analyze files? He will never do it again.
Bullying a child and his family somehow made this guy a legend in the Pokémon company.
Nintendo and all related corporations willingly employ people like this guy.
At those firms, shitting all over your customers and their families makes you a legend.
Did I understand all the facts correctly? I need to double check because what I just read made me doubt my sanity.
I refuse to believe this guy is stupid to the point he actually thinks the kid "hacked" the game. I must conclude that this was just a power play from the rich corporation he represents. The real threat was to bankrupt his family with a nonsense court case which would no doubt drain their time and money. Even if they won in court, it would be a pyrrhic victory due to the costs involved. Therefore despite likely having no leg to stand on this asshole leveraged the legal system to bully a child and his family into obedience to their corporate overlord.
I've always suspected this was the real intention behind all the "threats" coming from these corporations. Never thought I'd actually see them not only confirm it but also brag about it in public. What a wortless piece of shit.
Revealing tricks of the trade might be... leaking.
As general counsel he happily admitted to making false accusations of a federal crime against a minor.
This level of comfort and pride in unethical behavior raises the question of what else has Don McGowan done that is improper?
https://www.pokemon.com/us/pokemon-video-games/pokemon-tradi...
Almost makes me wonder if there's a market for some kind of "Leaking Agency" where we can help people leak information safely in exchange for a cut of any media buys or other income they might get from it.