Location, location, location. Be somewhere that has lax or absent laws enabling foreign entities to prosecute you for this sort of thing and has no extradition treaty with Japan and/or the US. And remain anonymous and avoid identification. This guy was a reddit mod and lived in friggin’ Arizona, both of which were bad moves on his part. So I imagine Nintendo or the courts subpoenaed reddit for everything they had on the guy and they eagerly complied.
If you lived in, say, Cambodia and only distributed your stuff through decentralized or anonymized channels and did not seek fame or fortune for yourself it’s pretty likely nobody would actually be able to bring the hammer down on you for it.
pory@lemmy.world 1 day ago
This headline is bad. It implies that moderating a piracy subreddit is why this dude got sued. This guy hosted direct HTTP downloads of Nintendo ROMs.
Bit of piracy history: for a long time on the 3DS, Nintendo’s shop system was bugfucked. If you had a valid key pair, you could download games directly from Nintendo’s servers and that keypair wasn’t tied in any way to your console or account. That means one buyer could “share pirated games” by posting a couple 32-digit codes they got.
This led to an on-3ds app called “freeShop” that handled a community database of valid keypairs and used them to download and install pirated games directly from Nintendo’s servers.
After Nintendo patched the system and disabled the freeShop, pirates had gotten used to the convenience of on-device downloads and installs. A very common type of piracy app, especially on the Switch, is “pirate shops”. The user would still be able to pirate on the console directly, but the backend is a traditional server sending actual dumped files (rather than fooling Nintendo into delivering the files directly).
These pirate shops are fundamentally the same thing as hosting/connecting to an open server full of roms. The guy in this lawsuit was operating multiple pirate shops. The whole thing with internet piracy is accountability: you’re not gonna get away with a google drive link to Avengers Endgame Dot MKV for long.
ieightpi@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Thanks for the clarification. That makes sense how these guys get caught. Sounds like not having streets smarts
ClipperDefiance@piefed.social 1 day ago
Additionally, most Switch pirate shops charge money for access.
ieightpi@lemmy.world 1 day ago
And there is it. pretty stupid…