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Comment by user_7832 | Hacker News Reader

> Authorities believe Once Were Nerd's activities may still run afoul of Article 171 in Italy's copyright law, which allows for up to three years imprisonment for violations. (Emphasis mine)

That seems... very excessive? Who's actually being hurt here? No one is buying 20 year old consoles and games that probably aren't even sold by the original company anymore. Seems pretty much like a classic victimless crime IMO.

> Agents accused the creator of promoting pirated copyrighted materials stemming from his coverage of Anbernic handheld game consoles.

Seems hardly something worthy of arresting, let alone jailing someone.

> Italy has a history of heavy-handed copyright enforcement—the country's Internet regulator recently demanded that Google poison DNS to block illegal streams of soccer. So it's not hard to believe investigators would pursue a case against someone who posts videos featuring pirated games on YouTube.

Oh well... didn't realize Italy was like that

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>didn't realize Italy was like that

Italy doesn't really care about copyright violations, unless it's soccer or if it's for profit.

Normal people pirating movies, songs, etc. for their private use are not usually prosecuted (there's no need to use protections such as VPNs in Italy). There are some big piracy communities, they use both torrents and an old file-sharing software called eMule.

But if you try to earn money or if you pirate soccer, then it's super risky.

> and an old file-sharing software called eMule.

Dangit, the fact that you had to explain it like that makes me feel old. There was a time when that software was found on everyone's PC and held the top spot on sourceforge's most downloaded list.

> Sourceforge

That's another trip down memory lane...

For the real trip see this: https://webarchive.di.uminho.pt/web.archive.org/web/20090203...

I’m not sure what the first part of that URL does, but I didn’t click on it because it’s suspicious to prepend something to an Internet Archive link. I don’t recognize that domain but perhaps you can explain what it is and what it does?

Here’s the bare archive on IA:

https://web.archive.org/web/20090203182724/http:/freshmeat.n...

eMule is doing fine and well tho

maybe we should make more p2p kademilia software to combat the social media giants

Soulseek is doing even better.

Maybe you can tell me, since I only noticed around 2007-2008.

Did Sourceforge always suck balls?

It was never a great user experience but as the dotcom boom died out and the money went away, they got worse and worse as they got sold a few times.

Sourceforge used to be a primary location for getting software.

It did suck balls, but we were grateful to have it in a time where it was possibly the best option.

Imo it wasn't that bad, but maybe that was just because code-centric sites like github didn't exist yet. It tried to provide you with a simple landing page for your open source project that can offer you a download button, centered around releasing compiled, versioned software. Their offering of a VCS (svn and CVS IIRC) was more of an added bonus. But once github was there you started wondering how sourceforge ever seemed good.

I downloaded episodes of South Park using eMule over dial up internet.

Holyshit emule is still alive and kicking? Man. I remember using that, Kazaa and Morpheus almost daily back in the aughts.

It really is alive and kicking, and now there's a smarter way to find things compared to the integrated file search (which can lead to fake content, viruses or... worse).

There are some forums (yes, old-school web forums) with neatly organized content. You just copy-paste the e2dk link into the client, and voilà.

Some forums are even publicly accessible, so it's clear that nobody is seriously persecuting people for piracy in Italy.

Nobody cares about copyright unless for profit. Sometimes it's just a lawyer that wants fees

devil's advocate says that lawyer is just doing the job hired to do by the copyright owner. if a copyright owner didn't care, they wouldn't hire these lawyers. if a lawyer is somehow the copyright owner, well, they obviously care

Patent trolls and the like are often lawyers who decided it wasn't enough working hard to do evil/represent evil - they want to be evil without really working either.

>Italy doesn't really care about copyright violations, unless it's soccer or if it's for profit.

I'm almost certain someone got paid off and pulled some stings. They don't do anything unless money is involved.

I don't think that's the only possibility, but I am wondering why Once Were Nerd was targeted. Is he famous enough to serve as a good example for a new policy? Did he cut someone powerful off in traffic? Did his videos threaten someone's business? Cui bono?

> They don't do anything unless money is involved.

I disagree. They could have done it to be under the spotlight and progress their career.

>progress their career

i.e. money

someone was bribed != people are motivated by financial gain

That is a self-contradictory statement. If people were not motivated by financial gain, then bribery would not exist. You could say people might be motivated by power and influence, but even those things boil down to one singular thing, and that is accumulating wealth.

> Italy doesn't really care about copyright violations, unless it's soccer or if it's for profit.

Or protected names like mozzarella or parmigiano cheese.

Better not to name your next project after them.

> an old file-sharing software called eMule.

I still use it, on linux using wine. There is a lot of random stuff you usually don't find via Torrenting.

I was also using eMule through Wine, but I randomly discovered that all my files were shared on the network, not only the ones in folders that I specifically chose. So pay a lot of attention in order not to share sensitive data.

There's also a native client for Linux, it's called aMule. Give it a try instead of the official client.

> didn't realize Italy was like that

Seems aligned with the idea of "perpetual copyright" Italy has been pushing: https://www.aippi.org/news/italy-cultural-heritage-protectio...

And these "quirckiness" isn't exclusive to Italy, many countries in Europe have much tougher views on individual freedoms, regulate speech much stronger than crowd in HN is used to.

Granted you may rarely get jail time, just the fact that you should worry about your criminal record is enough to prevent people to even voice ideas

>just the fact that you should worry about your criminal record is enough to prevent people to even voice ideas

Already happens in Germany: https://www.economist.com/europe/2025/04/16/the-threat-to-fr...

On the other hand, your criminal record matters far less in Germany than it does in the US. Most employers never ask for your record, especially in white collar jobs, and the ones that do usually only look for relevant offenses. If you are convicted for fraud that will make it harder to get a job as accountant, but an conviction for insulting an official or for drug possession years ago is unlikely to have a major impact.

Obviously you shouldn't be charged for stuff like that (and there was backlash for that incident), but the are less than it might appear to the American reader. Being convicted does not turn you into the scum of society in Germany

Can't unmake the fact that you are convicted criminal forever though.

> Who's actually being hurt here?

I would hope that is made clear in the court filings. I don't know if Italy has something akin to the right to face your accuser, but surely there is still an expectation that a lawsuit, especially criminal, requires clearly defining who the victim was and how they were harmed.

> Who's actually being hurt here? No one is buying 20 year old consoles and games that probably aren't even sold by the original company anymore.

Actually, they do, and even significant older games. Retro-games are regularly updated and newly released. Sometimes they are even remastered into new games. Old Consoles are also sometimes resold as special time limited offers, and kinda popular.

It's not a multi-billion-dollar-business, but official retro-gaming is still thriving.

>> Agents accused the creator of promoting pirated copyrighted materials stemming from his coverage of Anbernic handheld game consoles. > Seems hardly something worthy of arresting, let alone jailing someone.

Those handheld-consoles are kinda infamous for being sold with thousands and ten of thousands copies of old games from all kind of consoles and countries. Maybe he advertised such deals. The joke here is that in my country, you can even buy them directly on Amazon, and there never seem to be a problem with it. Not sure if it's the same in Italy, but I would think the same EU-regulations apply there.

> Actually, they do, and even significant older games. Retro-games are regularly updated and newly released. Sometimes they are even remastered into new games. Old Consoles are also sometimes resold as special time limited offers, and kinda popular.

No, they re-release a couple of them, as it conveniences them, often with unasked for changes.

And the handheld consoles aren't competing with nintendo for people interested in playing retro games. Someone that picks up a miyoo to play SNES games on the go has no official nintendo option for this, the switch doesn't have all the SNES games and isn't the same formfactor.

> No, they re-release a couple of them, as it conveniences them,

It's significant more than a couple these days. But the number doesn't really matter, it's an ongoing process, and nobody knows which are released at which point. So nobody can claim any more that it's dead content.

> And the handheld consoles aren't competing with nintendo for people interested in playing retro games.

That doesn't matter, it's still not legal. If people want to play old games, OK, then do it, but let it stay with the fans, uncommercial. Don't the f** make money with it, and the h** don't make public advertisement for it. It's illegal, and owners are going after you for it if it's too obvious, because they have the right.

Is this too obvious?

https://www.amazon.it/s/ref=nav_bb_sb?field-keywords=anberni...

I'm more interested in ethics than I am in law. Sit down in a court room for a day if you want to see how the infallible law fucks person after person who committed a vitcimless crime of ignorance, or being too poor to get a good lawyer. Or don't, if you don't want to lose faith in "due process."

So, ethically, I don't think it's ok for companies to dangle a 30 year old videogame around saying "you can't play this because we might want to sell it to you again someday. And by the way the version we sell to you may not be the version you treasured from your childhood, we might fuck up the aspect ratio, or cut content, just because we don't give a shit. Neener neener."

Foolish nonsense. I want to play old videogames. If they sold it to me, I'd buy it off them. I'm not ok that I need to re buy the same game ten times. You used to be able to play old games on new systems by just sticking the disk in. Now you don't even get a disk.

The games industry is rotting. I don't care if companies lose money from emulation (they're not, because they aren't selling what we're buying). Enshittify away, I will continue to rip roms and play them on the device I please, and if that device is sold to me with a garbage SD card full of 10,000 bunk roms, so be it.

> Someone that picks up a miyoo to play SNES games on the go has no official nintendo option for this, the switch doesn't have all the SNES games and isn't the same formfactor.

Arguably this is a flaw in copyright laws. If a copyright owner refuses to make their copyrighted work available to the public, there should be some kind of "use it or lose it" exception - after all, this is all supposed to be in the public interest, in the end. (Haha yeah I know.)

But, that raises the issue of a company's older work competing with their newer work. They use copyright as a tool to withhold their own work, to increase the market for newer works. And companies like Disney use a "vault" model to artificially create demand for older works.

The question is, should companies be allowed to do this?

I don't think they should, and just because I'm a filthy commie. I disagree that older works are competing in a meaningful way - the market has demonstrated it's happy to pay again and again for the same game on new platforms, especially if it comes with upgrades or QOL improvements. Nintendo could easily make money selling a new version of Mario 2 with new levels by og Nintendo level designers. I'd buy it and I have that game on like five different systems.

Not to mention, it's not like I'm not gonna buy tears of the kingdom even though I like to occasionally replay ocarina of time or whatever.

> official retro-gaming is still thriving

The vast majority of decades-old games will never see the light of sun again. The companies are either dead, or the license is fucked to hell and back and split between too many parties.

And, even if you think it might be re-released, you could end up waiting forever. Not to mention a remaster is not the same game, it's not the same experience. A lot of people play retro games specifically because they like the retro experience.

A very small percentage do. Nearly 90% of games from before 2010 can no longer be legally purchased.

> That seems... very excessive?

Yes, but also - people very rarely get the maximum penalty unless they were real dicks about it and provably knew they were breaking the law.

Scrolled way to far down for this. Yep, like most laws infact.

Technical forums assume that law is code, and everything is processed as if/then statements.

> Who's actually being hurt here? No one is buying 20 year old consoles and games that probably aren't even sold by the original company anymore.

People are buying them, they just pay the Chinese, and not Nintendo/SONY.

"Who's actually being hurt" and " aren't even sold by the original company" is not a good argument. Nintendo clearly can sell those games for a sum anytime it wants to. They are just manufacturing a scarcity right now, or at least they are trying. They are the ones "being hurt", in the standard sense.

Access to NES, SNES and N64 games is a perk of Nintendo's paid online subscription so pirate copies do compete with that to some extent.

Not the entire library, though. Games that aren't offered in any form anywhere, and also games that weren't localized (like Mother 3) shouldn't have copyright enforceable. It's either you give up production of the game or you produce it forever, no other sane way to go about it

I hate overzealous copyright prosecution as much as anyone, but I’m very wary of a model where you have to use something you own to maintain ownership.

There are things that work that way (RF spectrum), but in general I think it would cut against the purpose of copyright. I do think there’s value in giving creators exclusive rights to their own work, and making it contingent on distribution would hurt small companies more than big.

The only thing you own is the right to a time-limited monopoly of commercialization.

Nintendo can sell them only because we grant them mo monopoly rights to do so.

It's been more than 30 years since the games creation, let's revoke them now.

I mean, yes, but it is how IP works.

You can either grant IP for everyone equally, or point at some companies that they are rich and consumer hostile anyway so they don't get no IP, or abolish IP altogether.

What Nintendo is doing is no different than what everyone is doing, except that you hate them.

The person you are responding to is pretty clearly of the opinion that "30 years is too long a term for copyright" not "they just hate Nintendo".

IMO the problem isn't that copyright lasts too long, although that matters too, but rather that you don't need to provide copyrighted material.

So basically Nintendo, and others, just hold their copyright material hostage to artificially inflate it's value. The scarcity around Nintendo games is intentional and purely artificial. This shouldn't be allowed.

If you want to maintain copyright on old ass shit, then fine, but you actually have to still sell that old ass shit. Otherwise what are you claiming copyright on? A product that doesn't exist? Why would you do that? Only for nefarious reasons.

This is actually a problem that spans far beyond the vault-like behavior that HBO and Nintendo have been exhibiting.

There's this notion of something called the copyright cliff where works that are quite old but remain under copyright are almost completely unavailable. And in the cases of books, this is not due to artificial scarcity at all, but rather that it's not economically viable to try to extract value from them. And so they just remain unpublished. Yet to get an unauthorized copy is still copyright infringement. It's good example of how copyright doesn't work very well in achieving its stated purpose.

"we grant them monopoly rights to do so"

Who is we? the combined world's governing bodies? the US corporate legal protections systems? japanese corruption?

Regardless, that is not how IP works and I do not think you think this is a proper resolution.

"just because we want it" or "it's been x years" does not pass legal scrutiny and would be dismissed in any legal venue on improper cause. You are free to not purchase the product whe navailable, where made no promises at time of orignal purchase, and are in no way harmed from the decision making of the firms.

is 30 years too long for copyrighting/trademarks? Maybe...but can't really argue that if for those 30 years they have actively defended the IP and proliferation of it from other vendors/firms. And even then.....the world is not the US.

The solution is to never purchase from the IP holder as a matte or protest. But with global scales, good luck affecting any corporations decision making.

We is, in the US, the federal government as directed by congress and the president. (In Canada where I actually live, s/congress/parliament/g and s/president/governor general (but only theoretically)/g).

> Regardless, that is not how IP works

This is exactly how IP laws work. More than that, in the US it's how they're constitutionally required to work - IP is defined as a time limited monopoly in the constitution and the federal government has no right to grant more than that. The current, "so long that it might as well be forever" copyright is spitting in the face of the US constitution.

> but can't really argue that if for those 30 years they have actively defended the IP and proliferation of it from other vendors/firms

I absolutely can. The purpose of IP is to encourage more things to eventually fall into the public domain by being published publicly. At some point, and I think 30 years is well past that point, it does more harm by preventing things from falling into the public domain than it does good by encouraging publishing.

Just because a company found a way to extract money from society, and are still doing so, doesn't mean we should allow them to do so forever.

When originally passed copyright (Statute of Anne in 1710) the term was 14 to 28 years, notably less than 30. As the world has only begun to change more rapidly since then, it's clear that it should have gotten shorter, not longer.

>They are just manufacturing a scarcity right now, or at least they are trying

Rent-seeking is not really something that governments should encourage.

Rent-seeking brings lots of money to lots of politicians, so they encourage it. Those same politicians also have the power to legally murder people, or lock them up for life. "Should" is irrelevant - focus on the "is".

Deciding on how society should run is a matter of should, unless you're a sociopath who doesn't care about improving the world.

If you can show me where I can buy a gameboy formfactor method to play SNES games sold by Nintendo, I will buy two right now and mail you one.

The chinese are selling things that nintendo isn't, that people want. Beautiful capitalism.

Seems hardly something worthy of arresting, let alone jailing someone.

That the current PM's party, FdI, is a neo-fascist political party should also help add some context.

Nintendo contiounsly retail older titles. Snes mini, their e-shops, re-releases. Most games originally released for the PS1 are not owned directly by Sony and many of them retail on Steam.

Well that's the maximum punishment. Even petty crimes like shoplifting has the same limit. If it's a first time offense he'll likely get much less than that.

My observation is that usually such scenario precedes someone trying to start selling something. So if 'A' is considered abandoned, the owner of copyrights to 'A' (or the new owner, who just bought it) will start making legal actions, then once it's been settled and illegal copies removed from the public space, they would go to the market selling 'A'.

That's a maximum. It's extremely unlikely that they would actually get jail time. Maybe a suspended sentence at worst.

I don't think it's that surprising they are basically promoting pirated content. If they had a video about how a cracked version of game is great and where to download it they would probably also get hit

it's "up to 3 years" but also "down to" a €50 fine.

> That seems... very excessive?

This is the theoretical maximum, but usually you will not be sentenced with this amount of prisons. Especially if you don't have a criminal records, you can convert the prison period in a fine or other situation (i.e. social services).

> didn't realize Italy was like that

Italians have always loved piracy and the government has always been rather strict enforcing the copyright. There's a huge number of piracy websites blocked in Italy and it's been the case for what feels like 20 years.

Related reading: A swashbuckling tale of Italian software piracy – 1983-1993 (2022) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42611818

I also remember a PS1 warez group that was of Italian origin.

France too: https://torrentfreak.com/opendns-suspends-service-in-france-...

My guess is that someone tipped the authorities about the crime. So, someone must of been offended about something this streamer did (maybe not the alleged crime).

> Oh well... didn't realize Italy was like that

It's not "like that" unless Lega Calcio is involved. Lots of mafia and lots of profit to be hurt.

> No one is buying 20 year old consoles and games that probably aren't even sold by the original company anymore. Seems pretty much like a classic victimless crime IMO.

Hokay, so preface this with that personally I think so what? let people be free... but here's the (an?) argument:

Unlike other markets, media and entertainment is zero-sum. Ultimately revenue is derived from how many person-hours of attention you can acquire, while people have a finite amount of time to be entertained. Media holders have always preferred to keep media access at a trickle (see: Disney's treatment of their "vault" in the early VHS era) so they don't lose your attention on their current products. It's the same with retro games - each hour someone plays a ROM they can't buy anymore is an hour that could have been spent in a new game that they would have to pay for. They would also argue the existence of retro-gaming secondary markets cannibalizes the growth opportunity for remakes with current gen platforms.

Basically, secondhand/reusable markets are detrimental to businesses that depend on new releases because over time the secondary markets' share of the total grows larger than the primary.

Welcome to the modern world.

Kill someone in traffic? A few months, maybe a year.

A company breaks copyright on a massive, premeditated, scale? Totally fine, don't worry about it.

A individual imports a device that might be used for copyright infringement? Prepare to get your life ruined.

But the issue here is not that it "might be used"

> While emulation software is not illegal, a surprising number of these devices ship chock-full of pre-loaded ROMs—the channel showed multiple Sony and Nintendo games running on the device

Honestly I feel that in the US this would have possibly been risky as well

If we still feel like individuals must be punished for such things let's start by dismantling all the bigcorps that downloaded e.g. anna's archive (openai, meta, for starters).

It would be easier to take the suggestion seriously if there was some proportionality. People aren’t being executed for copyright infringement, and presumably there should be remedies for corporate misbehavior that sponsors of destroying the company.

Fine, jail the company for 3 years. Or at least the executives.

Given that the piracy charges can be fined as low as €50, it can be discussed proportionately.

I totally agree that the AI companies should be accountable for their intellectual property leaching.

Anna's archive contains 52,875,045 books, 98,598,895 papers.

So that's be, at the least, a 7.5B fine. But I'd argue the scope of pirating over 150 million items for commercial use warrants a harsher sentence than the minimum.

Companies aren't living things and therefore cannot be killed. "Destroying" a company is a much more morally sound outcome then someone dying.

Also, we do not literally need to "destroy" a company. If we think those jobs or IP is valuable, just nationalize it. Everyone keeps their jobs, the IP lives on, and for a lot of companies they now enjoy competent leadership. When ready, the company can be resold to the private sector.

In fairness society is appallingly blind to traffic violence and has been for a century thanks to campaigning by car companies to normalise killing people with cars. If you could use a car for copyright infringement it would probably be allowed

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