Submitted 1 day ago by iamthetot@piefed.ca to games@lemmy.world
https://torrentfreak.com/nintendo-wins-4-5-million-judgment-against-r-switchpirates-mod-archbox/
A Washington federal court has ordered r/SwitchPirates moderator James ‘Archbox’ Williams to pay Nintendo $4.5 million in damages.
So what could Archbox have don’t differentlu to avoid being brought to court? I feel like a lot of pirates online seem to do just fine circumventing the law.
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.
Thanks for the clarification. That makes sense how these guys get caught. Sounds like not having streets smarts
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.
Selling the pirated stuff, I guess? I don’t really follow it, but whenever I hear a judgement like this it’s usually from someone actually making money from selling pirated games rather than just cracking or distributing.
what is opsec? who knows.
It’s in the name stupid make a second original post
take a nap
dhork@lemmy.world 1 day ago
According to the article, he didn’t respond to the complaint at all (even though there is evidence he hired a lawyer at one point) so this is a default judgement. I doubt a single penny gets paid out. He may not even be in the country anymore (if he ever was).