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
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.
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.
Did Sourceforge always suck balls?
It did suck balls, but we were grateful to have it in a time where it was possibly the best option.
maybe we should make more p2p kademilia software to combat the social media giants
That's another trip down memory lane...
Here’s the bare archive on IA:
https://web.archive.org/web/20090203182724/http:/freshmeat.n...
Or protected names like mozzarella or parmigiano cheese.
Better not to name your next project after them.
I'm almost certain someone got paid off and pulled some stings. 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.
i.e. money
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.
I still use it, on linux using wine. There is a lot of random stuff you usually don't find via Torrenting.
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
Already happens in Germany: https://www.economist.com/europe/2025/04/16/the-threat-to-fr...
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
The linked article doesn't make any mention of arrest, jail, or threats thereof.
I've previously posted a rebuttal about this "thousands arrested for social media" claim: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41488099
what did they go to her home for ? sipping champagne , taking care of the old woman and having oxford like debates ???
Please…
The article says clearly “last night”, what you think happened doesn’t change what was said by the woman who explicitly stated what happened to her and had to live through it that night.
(on rechecking yes i’m wrong about daytime vs nighttime indeed they visited at morning)
but even with that you think its acceptable if it’s daytime for police to knock on doors due to facebook posts about not liking current ruling councillor stuck in a scandal ???
if this gets politically acceptable get ready for china like atmosphere in future around politics (without china like infrastructure or growth) forced disappearances , thoughtcrimes & thought police…
> At around 1.30pm last Tuesday ... a detective sergeant and another officer knocked at her door
You've made some edits to your post since I replied, so...
> but even with that you think its acceptable if it’s daytime for police to knock on doors due to facebook posts
It's handled on a case by case basis. The police will generally notify someone if they're the subject of a harrassment complaint, and it's not uncommon for them to visit either to give a verbal warning or to advise them on the law. That's... just how the system works in the UK and has done for a long time. Police in the UK are often in and around the community, working with it and giving out advice where it may help to prevent crimes.
Perhaps the police were too keen to visit in person this time. Perhaps they felt pressured to demonstrate a response by the fact that the complainant was linked to the council. That's another issue entirely. But this single incident is not the sign of a steep decline into authoritarianism that you want it to be.
Also note it doesn't say who is making this accusation about the detectives, the article is not designed to inform you but to provoke a reaction.
Also consider that they will be carefully selecting what posts of hers to quote rather than telling you everything she wrote that lead to the complaint.
Do you actually know what she wrote?
When such laws were introduced, they basically only applied to mainstream media organizations and actual political agitators; debating politics at the family table was (and still is) allowed. However, the way they're worded, they also apply to any user sharing / liking political posts on social media.
Looks like webworm has covered them
its unfortunate left wing bias in mainstream media has atrophied the ability for any reliable news media to exist with extensive coverage and neutral reporting. (not unique to the left, right wing actors can do just the same it’s just right now left leaning political actors control most of legacy mainstream media)
Foreign actors are definitely taking advantage of that to fuel tensions as much as they can. Doesnt change reality tho.
That UK has a severe free speech issue and two tier policing, one for native brits(the lower tier) and one for politicians and favoured religious vote banks.
Are all UK opposition politicians right wing tabloid dummies too ? They are all clearly saying this is happening. Reform UK party that is right now slated in polls to be the next winner if elections were to happen have publicly acknowledged this is happening.
Why make everything into a left vs right match ? if free speech dies here right now by people you support (people who call daily mail a tabloid “right wing” rag) when they go out of power and people you oppose win, they’ll use the same instruments to suppress people you do support.
Basic freedoms are deserved by all citizens, police shouldn’t go around arresting 12,000 citizens for facebook posts or grandmas for voicing their worries not even violent posts or jibes, just criticism and concerns.
While the same country has struggled across years to arrest and prosecute violent offenders targetting british orphanages and harming children. police did nothing about it despite knowing it, and continues to resist protecting children.
You think everything is normal ? Not everything is a football match, the score wont reset after “the game” round is over. Once these freedoms are lost they will be far more harder to bring back. people will be even more defenseless. Nothing good comes out of making everything expendable in a left vs right match.
Common citizens lose everything from it, while politicians on top from both aisles win with more power to do anything and everything they want when they rule.
Like the Haitian immigrants eating neighbor's pets?
The US VP is a highly untrustworthy individual.
Might help you when reading some of your news sources.
You’ll need them, much more than I will To realise where things went wrong.
you’ll need it for consoling if most people dont wake up and realise that the masses are slowly losing all of their freedoms from both the extreme left and extreme right in democracies globally.
Democratic backsliding is a fact that’s happening in all major countries. No media literacy course will save us all from it, if we don’t call out these issues and make it unpopular to do these things by governments.
Ah yes, because the couch fucker sure is known to be trustworthy. Good god, do you also believe everything you read on Facebook and see on Fox news?
I don’t even vote for the republicans and since when has couches been equated to real things reported widely by media, politicians, citizens, watchdog groups become completely irrelevant because a politician you hate/dislike agreed with those things.
This is not a football match or he said she said, it’s happening and if you have to resort to calling a sitting vice president as “couch**” to deny reality instead of being able to clearly state no one innocent is being jailed for simple disagreements on facebook. then no you probably subconsciously know it’s happening too and need to depend on slander to deny reality.
it is especially ironic considering there are uk citizens getting police visits for saying things far less rude than what you said about US vice president.
You can disagree with ones politics but if you want to defend your ability to have that freedom (to disagree with ruling parties) it does require you to defend the freedoms and rights of people you disagree with politically too…
In a word, yes. More nuanced would say that anyone in power is willing to lie and make a politically coordinated event to lie about reality if it helps their agenda. More specifically, I would have you look at current US Administration as the greatest example. They are not the first nor only ones to do this, but they are the most brazen in their use of it
Just because he's a "couch fucker", doesn't mean he's wrong in that case. Some EU countries do have genuine issues with free speech. He's right about that one.
People should use critical thinking and judge WHAT is being said independent of WHO is saying it.
Unfortunately people do not use critical thinking anymore to judge topics in a nonpartisan way, because of fear of being attacked/ostracized by the colective groupthink mob based solely on adherence to a political ideology.
That's exactly what not using critical thinking means, when you just blindly agree or disagree with information based on the source alone.
That's what I'm advocating for, but people I was replying to didn't even want to do that and were dismissing anything out of the box just because they don't like the source, which is detrimental to any honest and useful debate.
>He's a known liar. He lies for political gain. He is disgusting.
I never said he doesn't lie, of course he does, he's a politician, all of them lie, but even a broken clock is right twice a day.
I said some of the things he says are bang on the money and shouldn't be discarded on the basis that the information comes from a mouth you don't like, as that's just closed minded partisan zealotry and not using critical thinking.
Maybe we can take what he says seriously if he comes clean about his past dangerous lies. Until then, he should at the very least be shunned if not ignored entirely.
I rest my case. There's no point in arguing with zealots who don't want to even listen to reason let alone critically analyze information shared with them, but choose to automatically believe and disbelieve it based on their favorite or hated source.
>There are better sources and better people sharing opinions
Your "better sources" might be someone else's "worst sources". Where is that universal ground truth located at? Isn't that discovered though conversation, argumentation and debate like in university campuses, instead of blindly trusting your favorite partisan source? That's no different than religious zealotry that burned Galileo at the stake for saying thins considered "untrue" at the time.
> Even the US Vice President alluded to this happening
gives zero additional weight to the credibility of the claim. He's someone who has openly acknowledged about lying for political gain.
"If I have to create stories...then that's what I'm going to do."
He directly says he will lie to you and make up stories to drive his political agenda. He's not even trying to suggest he's representing reality; he's making up stories, telling fiction.
If any news organization openly admits they're going to continue to just write blatant lies to push their agenda, would you continue trusting that source?
I do agree, free speech is far less protected in many European countries than it is in the US. I don't doubt there are plenty of crazy stories of someone getting arrested for their speech in some places in Europe. But JD Vance telling me any specific story about it and I don't see much else making the same claims, my default is to assume it's probably untrue, because he told me he will lie to me. Why would I trust his statements?
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.
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.
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.
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.
https://www.amazon.it/s/ref=nav_bb_sb?field-keywords=anberni...
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
It's been more than 30 years since the games creation, let's revoke them now.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
Rent-seeking is not really something that governments should encourage.
The chinese are selling things that nintendo isn't, that people want. Beautiful capitalism.
That the current PM's party, FdI, is a neo-fascist political party should also help add some context.
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).
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.
I also remember a PS1 warez group that was of Italian origin.
It's not "like that" unless Lega Calcio is involved. Lots of mafia and lots of profit to be hurt.
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.
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.
> 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
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.
I totally agree that the AI companies should be accountable for their intellectual property leaching.
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.
Now LLMs are stealing everyone's data, claiming be "fair use", getting away scot free, while irrelevant YouTubers are facing threats to be jailed over nothing whatsoever.
Make it make sense.
This is easy: law is about power and money. LLM training companies represent an even bigger concentration of money than the IP enforcers, so they can pirate all the books in the world without consequence, while the most onerous consequences are reserved for the most trivial guys.
The rule of law is one of the greatest achievements of western society and a major reason for the west's global dominance.
True, it was always imperfect due to the realpolitik of power. But that doesn't change the fact that the very idea of rule of law is in opposition to rule of power.
Positive Law -- the laws set down by kings and legislatures -- is much less fair, but sometimes, however rarely, it tries to embody a codification of the Natural Law.
The way the Positive Law is enforced and prosecuted is an utter disaster. In civil courts, justice is bought and sold as a rule; fairness (and even adjudication itself!) is an exception. It's so bad, so transparently twisted, that I think it's fair to say that humans in general have shown that they cannot be trusted with the administration of things such as civil laws. Too corruptible.
There is no such thing.
Why is slavery wrong? Does human life have no innate (non-relative, not bestowed) dignity, in your view?
When judges refer (as they frequently do) to uncodified notions of "fair play" or "good faith and fair dealing," what are they basing those notions on? Is it not a continuation of the ancient Natural Law inclination towards promise-keeping, reflected in many human societies as the oath-breaking taboo?
- Raping woman on the street - wrong
- Giving starving person some food - good
- Stealing from your employer - wrong (unless you are not paid or cheated)
- Killing random person - wrong
- Caring for your spause and children - good
and the list goes on
And the general rule, written down by 'that sect' in their book is 'love your neighbor as you love yourself', you should prefer to live among people who really apply this in their life, whenever you share their beliefs or not, because it's so much easier to live among such people than to live among selfish people who will not hesitate to harm you if only their actions go unpunished.
This is just communism. If everyone did this, you would have a community-based economy and society. Communism.
The sheer idea of competition is antithetical to this world view. Because you would never compete against yourself - but you MUST compete against your neighbors. You would never advocate against yourself, either.
Look, it's a nice idea, everyone hold hands and sing Kumbaya. But it's not a Christian thing, Marx figured this out much more concretely. Like, he thought about the actual economic and political consequences of it.
And, I don't know, maybe it could work. But I think it's important we're all on the same page about what we're asking for.
Nobody would ever advocate against themselves - that's self-destructive. So, following the golden rule, competition is immoral. You shouldn't advocate against others, because you wouldn't do it to yourself.
More concretely, when you compete you are trying to take money away from other people and give it to yourself. Right? Because a customer could go to them - but you want the customer to go to you. So you get 5 bucks your competitor wouldn't have.
What we're noticing here is one of two things: either the golden rule is not at all a rule, and we have to make exceptions, or capitalism at a conceptual level is immoral.
One of these two has to be true, no way around it. Personally, I suspect Jesus would never allow capitalism. He would say everyone should share, so everyone can be prosperous.
Again... sounds like communism to me.
The Bible explicitly states that judgment is immoral, and is the sole duty of God. If someone is committing a sin, it is not your job to fix them of that sin - and actually by doing so, you yourself are sinning.
If your competitor is lazy, the moral choice is to do nothing, and let God handle it. You do not know what is or is not a sin, because you are not the arbiter of morality - God is. Casting judgement on your competitor is sinful.
Really, no matter how you cut it, I think it's obvious Jesus Christ was a communist. He would absolutely not be happy with capitalism. Are we helping other's out of the goodness of our heart? No. Are we giving to the community? No.
In an ideal world where everyone follows the golden rule, the only outcome could possibly be communism. And, there would never be any problems, ever. Because nobody would be greedy - there would be no grounds for capitalism to even form. A revolution could not occur.
There's no contradiction between an American court finding that using legally acquired copies of copyrighted material for AI training constitutes fair use, and Italian police launching an investigation because they suspect someone might be selling illegal copies of copyrighted material.
How is it legal to generate the content of that YouTube with genAI but not to actually tape it with real people. Why does an AI have more rights than this YouTuber.
If the law were truly consistent, surgeons would go to jail for cutting people with knives.
As soon as you recognize that context should matter in law, consistency is no longer possible.
I’m not defending big companies pirating books or saying YouTubers should go to jail, I’m just saying there are material differences in context that make it juvenile to demand perfect consistency.
I’d like to point out that for decades the argument pro-piracy folks made was that you can’t “steal” software since it still remains. It’s only fair to apply that same standard to AI companies who are simply scraping data...
So the problem regarding AI is more nuanced and complicated than the plain copyright-question of piracy. It's more akin to cases of plagiarism, which go case by case.
There at least two documented cases of the major AI companies downloading millions of books of torrents. Anthropic is in litigation about it right now, meta was in the news about it. I would be surprised if it's not all of them.
Very few people download(ed?) movies or music with the intent to distribute it. They downloaded it because they wanted to consume the media.
Come again? Deepseek and numerous other smaller models can be run locally, for free.
I think what’s really behind this attitude is that “information wants to be free” when I’m pirating IP from a big, faceless corporation. But when it’s _my_ IP being pirated, it’s theft.
In some developed nations, we're almost comically unaware of power dynamics, sometimes to the point of inverting power dynamics.
Consider a McDonald's employee versus a Police Officer. The McDonald's employee can make almost any mistake and it's not a big deal. Pickles on your burger when you didn't want pickles? Eh, you'll get over it.
When Police Officers make mistakes, innocent people die. Taxpayers pay out sometimes millions of dollars.
Based on that, you would expect the standard of behavior for Police Officers to be much higher than a McDonald's cashier. But no, we've inverted it.
If the Police Officer accidentally kills someone they shouldn't, they'll likely keep their job. If a McDonald's cashier's drawer comes up 1 dollar short, they're terminated immediately.
Oops. Messed that up, didn't we?
Copyright laws have quite strict rules on what constitutes a copy, and this was tested in courts many times. This rules also apply to works produced by LLMs.
Obviously that was a bridge too far for people, and they stopped supporting even the sensible reforms the party was advocating for.
He used as an example of how the law was bad, that if you witnessed someone doing the act, and filmed it to hand over as evidence to the police, you would end in jail too, something that is obviously unfair.
Well, the Ministry of Truth is working on it, at least.
It's clear they view old games as competition for new releases, so they want to make those old games as inaccessible as possible. But we the people just want to be able to replay old games from our childhood that we already bought.
I know that people saying "stealing from artists" who are against AI scraping mean, my poor friend who posts on deviantart and not Disney, Sony or Nintendo, but in the sense that intellectual property is a law and the mechanism for enforcement is ultimately something like this, I don't get why it's such a popular argument.
Ultimately I hope AI will force us to decide on an updated paradigm of who owns ideas and it won't be a case of me receiving a cease and desist letter if I type a ChatGPT prompt that includes Mickey Mouse or "Miyazaki".
Separate from the level of consequences for an AI company or this guy- for example if he was forced to simply take the video down or pay a small fine relevant to the level of piracy he was encouraging.
Maybe the laws should be changed, maybe not, but the fact is that they haven't been.
RIP Aaron Swartz.
I guess it's a function of the legal system at all levels that money buys you more access to justice- not sure if that's a copyright issue specifically.
Companies shield the executives and workers breaking the law (and profiting from it!) and barely get fined, if at all. Often they're just told to cease & desist.
The principle of copyright is fine for artists. AI and ChatGPT aren't fundamentally changing the underlying logic: artists should have their intellectual property protected and be able to receive compensation for their work free from getting ripped off. The problem is stretching copyright to absurd timelines when the underlying logic also recognizes that novel ideas emerge out of the public commons and ultimately return to them after a certain amount of time. 7 or 8 years is reasonable. 10 tops. Decades or even hundreds of years is absurd.
I've been thinking a lot about this lately since I've had some ... questionable images generated by Gemini. If it outputs infringing material is that on me, them, both of us? Does it depend on my prompt/context, what I do with the output, etc.? My instinct (in opposition to your comment about C&Ds) says it's on them because they're charging money for the service and it's _clearly_ been trained on copyrighted material. I think this question and related ones are going to be answered fairly quickly, especially because of how egregious some of the output I've seen is.
I don't want to get into specifics right now because, IMHO, this particular "trick" is an exploit, as it's reproducible and systemic. Google has a bug bounty for Gemini but this scenario (i.e. output containing copyrighted material) is "out of scope" and they request that you submit individual tickets for every infringing instance. It's not clear to me if end users are supposed to do that or copyright holders but that's not a scalable or practical solution to a systemic problem. I would prefer to be responsible and be compensated for my trouble but I may wind up writing a blog post or something about this if I can't get their attention.
Generative AI mostly works by copying fuzzy styles instead of specific texts or images. There are some exceptions where models actually memorize specific material, but these seem to be relatively rare and probably require that the piece in question occurs frequently in the training data.
So in general, training on copyrighted material is probably legal as long as the model is not able to exactly reproduce the training data, while copying video game ROMs is clearly always illegal.
Of course, whether these things are morally okay or not is a different question...
Edit: Of course, to train on copyrighted material, you have to download it first. If you don't pay for the copies, this is arguably still illegal, even if the resulting model doesn't distribute any copies! (An exception might be content that is directly embedded in websites, because copying websites into the browser cache is allowed, even if they are under copyright protection.)
What about songwriting? Or even music performance- me performing a song doesn't produce a more or less exact copy.
Is a cover a copy? For music, it's not like I'm selling you sheet music- I'm still outputting something you listen to that won't be the same as the original.
What I want people to take away from this is that governments in the so-called "developed" world act at the behest of corporations. In this case it's to criminalize something that should, at best, be a civil matter. But suing people is expensive and often they have no assets to claim so let's just make it a criminal offense and let the government pay for it and threaten them with violence (ie putting them in prison).
There's a not particularly well-known case of this in the US that I wish more people knew about: the case of Steven Donziger.
Chevron extracted oil in Ecuador and because of lax legislation and oversight, polluted everywhere. Farmers and indigenous people sued (in Ecuador). Donziger handled the case and an Ecuadorian court brought down a $9.5 billion judgement against Chevron.
Chevron filed a RICO suit against Donziger in NYC. A US Federal district court decided the judgement was unenforceable because (in the court's opionion) it had been obtained through fraud with fairly scant evidence of such. Donziger was disbarred. But it doesn't edn there.
In subsequent legal proceedings, Donziger refused to hand over electronic devices to Chevron's experts arguing--rightly--that it was a violation of attorney-client privilege.
In subsequent legal proceedings, Donziger refused to hand over electronic devices to Chevron's experts arguing--rightly--that it was a violation of attorney-client privilege.
A criminal complaint was made but the DOJ declined to prosecute. In an extraordinary move, a judge appointed lawyers at Chevron's law firm to criminally prosecute Donziger for contempt. He was on house arrest for years with an $800,000 bond... for contempt of court.
Criminal prosecution being available to private companies should scare everyone. The government and even the judicial system has been subverted to do the bidding of companies.
So, sadly, a criminal proseuction for revealing a gaming handheld doesn't surprise me at all.
To me it seems excessive to call specifically on them - regular police would suffice, if at all - this guy is nothing like the people this formation usually deals with.
Don't mistake the IP cartel's backroom lobbying for the will of the people.
So lobbyism is just a manifestation of this function, the attempt of a corporation to communicate with society in order to influence decisions that impact their profits.
Corporations are not the only types of machines that have interest in making connections to other machines in the capitalist universe. Humans are also embedded in this universe, but for other interests.
Therefore it's reasonable to think that capitalism working as intended will in time start producing corporations that work against the interests of the common good.
You've used terms in the past like "autocracy", "cascading failure", "plastic", "human capital", "optical media", and "infotainment". Is that what precision looks like? Was that CD, CD-ROM, CD-RW, DVD-RAM, BluRay, etc, made of polyethylene or polypropylene, or maybe polyvinyl chloride?
[0]https://www.videogameseurope.eu/news/statement-on-stop-killi...
Unfortunately, in Italy, we have a long tradition of situation like this one: in the early 90s, a police operation against software piracy (https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Italian_Crackdown) destroyed the whole BBS ecosystem, but at the end no guilty sentence.
I am betting an euro that the YouTuber will not get any penal consequence.
There are huge YouTube channels such as Linus Tech Tips reviewing $100 devices that contain copyrighted games that would have retailed for over a million dollars. This is not normal and is very different from an individual downloading some ROMs.
And to clarify the story, this guy is being investigated because it was suspected he was selling these devices, not just reviewing them.
Being able to play a full catalog of retro games these days is just not possible without piracy and emulation. Sure some games are still available like with what Nintendo is doing with NES games or MSFT is doing with original Xbox games. But go outside of that narrow catalog and finding the other games legally is impossible outside of going into retro game stores and hoping they have a copy.
I'll use the Need for Speed franchise here as an example. You point blank cannot find legit ways of playing the original underground games, they aren't sold in stores, and not sold via any digital avenue. I would have loved to pay for both underground games but I was forced to pirate them since there was literally no other option.
textbook bs of putting other people action under microscope, no one is this precise in making decisions related to day to day stuff.
Like, they can write the best and most entertaining video game of all time, one that makes you pass out if not almost die from joy, and they have the right to sell only a single copy for $10 quadrillion and sue the shit out of anyone who plays it without their permission.
And there is no right, or need, to play a video game as far as I'm aware.
That has little to do with the fact that it does not contain any moral downsides to doing that.
IMO they shouldn't - not for intellectual property.
Look, IP laws like Copyright make a lot of sense when we're encouraging innovative and rewarding companies for putting something unique and desirable on the market.
But if it's not on the market, there's nothing to incentivize or protect. Then it just becomes hoarding, or, more often - using IP as leverage to artificially inflate the value of it. Basically, you can not sell things, thereby making the thing more scarce on purpose, so later on you can maybe scrape more cash.
This sucks. It's bad for consumers, it's bad for markets. So, maybe we should consider disincentivizing this.
Proposal: if you do not sell copyrighted material, you forfeit the copyright. You keep all the protections and incentives of copyright. But! You essentially legalize pirating old shit or you force companies to put their money where their mouth is and distribute said old shit.
If this old shit is truly a harm to someone's bottom line, then uh, you need to be selling it. Otherwise there's no bottom line to harm.
Just because it's against the rules doesn't mean it's hurting anyone.
...why?
Did you mean to type "You point blank cannot find legit ways of playing the original underground games without paying $20"?
Need for Speed Underground sells for between $15 and $24 on the used market: https://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_nkw=Need+For+Speed+Undergro...
Every single version listed on Wikipedia, except for the arcade version, is available.
edit: the arcade is £4095, including VAT with free delivery (presumably in the UK).
https://www.libertygames.co.uk/store/video_arcade_machines/d...
1. The people who made-- er, own the rights to the game get no financial benefit. Functionally, what is the difference to EA if I download a copy of NFS: Underground, or if I buy a copy from some rando on eBay? Yes, the courts care, but it's not exactly like I'm supporting the artists.
2. You are not guaranteed a legitimate copy. eBay sellers will ship duplicated discs all the time, whether contemporary copies or ones made recently to meet the demands of retro gaming. Can you claim you got duped and offload your moral responsibility to the seller? Maybe. But you could still be a pirate.
3. Copyright law is complicated, and you might still be pirating if you do get a legitimate copy. The arcade cabinet is a great example. Did the seller own it outright, or was it on a lease that got abandoned when the game was no longer profitable? In the latter case, your purchase would not be covered by the US first-sale doctrine. So you could spend £4095 and then may as well hoist the jolly roger.
4. The used game market is a long-standing problem currently being solved by games publishers. It will not be long before there are no old CDs of retro games available because they never existed in the first place.
I've just always been weirded out when people hold up gray market purchases of used media as some paradigm of moral responsibility. It's like a financial transaction with the transfer of physical media is some magical incantation that erases all questions of ownership.
Additionally, the market is also seeing used games as collectibles like cars and are inflating their prices that make it out of reach to actual buyers in favor of collectors. (cf. WATA Games)
The alternative is to play a different game, which is what the media rights holders want you to do. Or buy it at a second hand shop or off a collector. People aren't mandated to sell you something in the form you want, and you aren't entitled to buy it.
Like I have a growing collection of scifi books that are out of print. I don't complain that I can't pirate the ebooks in order to read them, I look for them where they can be found.
Even today, nobody gets their panties in a knot if you sell a copy of the Mona Lisa. Everyone accepts that the copyright has long expired. In other situations (as in retro games) the only question is how long, and under what circumstances, copyright should persist. Reasonable people can disagree. Making it a moral issue is a bit tiring.
Do you have another source for that? I don’t see it in the article. It says the exact charges aren’t known due to the way their legal system works.
They seized 30 consoles of different types, which is not consistent with someone selling a lot of one.
Sure, everyone should know that this is technically illegal, but not following these laws isn't "incomprehensible".
i can do this without the snark: it's infringement, it's not theft, and changing the word to theft doesn't strengthen your argument at all. copyright inherently immoral in my opinion, and even outside my extreme opinion, it's current implementation in the US objectively doesn't align with what most people would call "good".
i doesn't make sense to respect the draconian copyright laws to the extent of not distributing 40 year old video games, that are easily obtained after 5 seconds of online searching, and whose theoretical potential purchase has zero impact on the actual working class people and families that originally made them. you are, at best, allowing Nintendo to maybe make a few bucks, if Nintendo even had the option to still buy these games in any way (they usually dont, i think)
Just go to archive.org and type something like 'romset' in the search box to see what 'normal' looks like these days, for better or for worse.
The YouTuber should have used an LLM for laundering copyright.
Going through customs does not make something legal to buy or possess.
Customs is a spot-check that doesn’t catch everything and Customs cannot possibly verify every single product’s legality.
Many people buy illegal drugs internationally and just hope they get through customs, for example. That doesn’t make it legal.
But besides that, if they consider that aliexpress is selling illegal stuff, they can easily block access to ali express in the country, decline all credit card transactions to ali express, block in customs any package coming from ali express... since is basically a criminal organization. I mean, they are selling the product in amazon.it and you put in jail a reviewer?
https://www.amazon.it/portatile-illuminazione-Joystick-integ...
I don't think putting in jail a customer that is just reviewing what he bought is the way to go.
Rules for thee, not for me.
Blind people use audio description to watch television and movies. And yet, none of the streaming services have Doctor Who with audio description, for example, in the US. So even if I paid to watch it, I'd have to pirate the audio description track.
And yet, companies can pirate all the books, videos, art and music they want, and have the best lawyers on staff to remind the courts who are really in charge. May the rich be brought low, or the poor be lifted up.
That makes a whole lot of difference.
He’s clearly a dangerous maniac and a threat to the society.
That’s why the only option was to lock him up.
(yes, whataboutism, but I feel the need to point it out)
Incredible.
If you wonder why I say that, please watch this video: https://youtube.com/watch?v=d-7o9xYp7eE
Which means no copyright, or copyright owned by the state. And the state to be in charge to collect royalties from foreign countries.
Wokeness and the hammer and sickle covered in blood are symbols that often appears concurrently true left parades (at least in Europe, though actually occasionally in the right too)
So I think he connected the two concepts by association.