Police in Japan have arrested a 36-year-old man on suspicion of selling illegally modified Pokémon save data to customers online

uriel238 , 2 months ago

Today Japan has bested the US as the most extreme cyberpunk dystopia, but tomorrow is another day.

KomfortablesKissen , 2 months ago

“Endangering the brand” by using “specialized tools” to tamper with “company property”.

Reads like the patent bullshit combined with the copyright bullshit. Some laws about software are just idiotic.

This whole “selling licenses” needs to stop. What, my government runs Windows and now Microsoft can strongarm my government to decisions against the interest of the people? All with the power of letting the license expire if company policy isn’t met?

geography082 , 2 months ago

And like Sony stuff all totally overpriced . They should expect the billions we are in the world they will have a thought time fighting piracy .

p5yk0t1km1r4ge , 2 months ago

Say it with me now, fuck nintendo, fuck supporting nintendo and fuck everyone within nintendo. Do the right thing.

puts on pirate hat

theangryseal , 2 months ago

As sad as this makes the little kid in me who sat in awe of Super Metroid and Ocarina of Time, you’re right.

What a bummer.

Agent641 , 2 months ago

You take yours off?

Dud , 2 months ago

Briefly, as a sign of respect.

LadyAutumn , 2 months ago

Nintendo is seemingly able to write their own laws at this point, and both the Japanese and the American justice systems will give them anything they want. Throwback to the 80s and 90s when we legally determined that if you purchase a video game and a console, you are allowed to do anything you want with both of those things. Because you paid for them, so modifying or reverse engineering them was legally protected. We’ve just slowly been marching backward ever since then.

Flax_vert , 2 months ago

Basically Disney 2.0 lol

frezik , 2 months ago

Nintendo would likely lose most of their court cases against emulation in the US. They get away with it because places like github don’t want to fight cease and desist letters. The court system never gets directly involved.

Immersive_Matthew , 2 months ago

Seems like a gross misuse of law enforcement’s time. I do not even get how that Japanese law even really applies to this case exactly. Seems like a stretch. What am I missing? Why is this considered so serious that could land him in jail for 5 years and 10s of thousands in fines. Makes. I sense to me all. Can someone explain?

KomfortablesKissen , 2 months ago

Probably because he used “specialized tools” to edit the software, thus attacking the “trade secrets”. He tampered with company property, thus endangering the brand.

Stupid stuff, but at least they are only wasting tax payer money /s

uriel238 , 2 months ago (edited 2 months ago)

On the morning of January 18, 2012, as Wikipedia and many other websites went dark for the protest against SOPA and PIPA, squads of SWAT guys raided an estate in New Zealand belonging to Kim Dotcom. Local law enforcement was present, but the troopers belonged to US ICE.

Representatives from the MPAA and RIAA were there

In the US, the physical media hosting MEGAupload was seized, and the cloud storage service was shut down.

No crime had been committed. Grounds for extradition have yet to be established, despite over a decade of litigation. No suable offense has been established. Despite a lot of efforts, court battles, and even the rise of Dotcom’s new ME.GA enterprise, nothing has been proven to justify the initial raid.

Law enforcement isn’t about law. It’s not about protecting the public. It’s about preserving money and power for those who have it. And if Nintendo is butthurt about modded Pokémon, it’s about modded Pokémon.

riodoro1 , 2 months ago

Ah yes, one of the biggest problems of the Japanese society, edited game files.

Sonotsugipaa , 2 months ago

Not just edited files, edited save files if the headline is to be trusted

ExtremeDullard , 2 months ago (edited 2 months ago)

Forgive me if I’m saying something stupid, as I know nothing about Pokemon. But two minutes of searching turns up this repo that apparently lets you edit save files and more.

Which raises the disturbing question: do people really pay to get data they could make themselves for free?

Although I could be missing something obvious and perhaps this man was selling something this project or others like it couldn’t generate. Like I said, I don’t know the first thing about Pokemon.

As for this guy being arrested for selling fake stuff, is it really dystopic? It’s no different than selling fake Rolex watches or fake signed sports memorabilia: you’re either deceiving customers if they don’t know what they’re buying from you, or you’re damaging / debasing a company’s brand.

jo3rn , 2 months ago

OP possibly wanted to point out:

The 36-year-old has reportedly admitted to committing the crimes (…) while providing the justification that he did it to earn a living.

M0oP0o OP , 2 months ago

What is the crime? That is the part that is disturbing.

ExtremeDullard , 2 months ago

deleted_by_author

TheCheddarCheese , 2 months ago

it’s SAVE FILES. the base game has to use them. they can’t do anything on their own.

ExtremeDullard , 2 months ago

deleted_by_author

LadyAutumn , 2 months ago

Unironically, yes. Copyright law should be completely removed. It was not created to protect artists. It was created to protect shareholder interests.

frezik , 2 months ago

Even if we agree with copyright law as is, that’s hardly a valid analogy. Save files alone are not a complete game.

ChaoticNeutralCzech , 2 months ago (edited 2 months ago)

Suppose I’m playing an 80’s RPG on real legal hardware and I’m tired of grinding for XP. I use a cart reader to dump the save file, apply a patch I downloaded from the web and finish the game. I don’t even have to access any copyrighted data to do this!

Unless you think data that amounts to

<span style="color:#323232;">{
</span><span style="color:#323232;">  </span><span style="color:#183691;">"rtc"</span><span style="color:#323232;">: </span><span style="color:#0086b3;">1713006754</span><span style="color:#323232;">,
</span><span style="color:#323232;">  </span><span style="color:#183691;">"savestates"</span><span style="color:#323232;">: [
</span><span style="color:#323232;">    {
</span><span style="color:#323232;">      </span><span style="color:#183691;">"name"</span><span style="color:#323232;">: </span><span style="color:#183691;">" Red"</span><span style="color:#323232;">,
</span><span style="color:#323232;">      </span><span style="color:#183691;">"xp"</span><span style="color:#323232;">: </span><span style="color:#0086b3;">1760</span><span style="color:#323232;">,
</span><span style="color:#323232;">      </span><span style="color:#183691;">"pokemon"</span><span style="color:#323232;">: [
</span><span style="color:#323232;">        {
</span><span style="color:#323232;">          </span><span style="color:#183691;">"species"</span><span style="color:#323232;">: </span><span style="color:#0086b3;">115</span><span style="color:#323232;">,
</span><span style="color:#323232;">          </span><span style="color:#183691;">"name"</span><span style="color:#323232;">: </span><span style="color:#183691;">"Fluff"</span><span style="color:#323232;">,
</span><span style="color:#323232;">          </span><span style="color:#183691;">"hp"</span><span style="color:#323232;">: </span><span style="color:#0086b3;">24
</span><span style="color:#323232;">        },
</span><span style="color:#323232;">        {
</span><span style="color:#323232;">          </span><span style="color:#183691;">"species"</span><span style="color:#323232;">: </span><span style="color:#0086b3;">92</span><span style="color:#323232;">,
</span><span style="color:#323232;">          </span><span style="color:#183691;">"name"</span><span style="color:#323232;">: </span><span style="color:#183691;">"Bonk"</span><span style="color:#323232;">,
</span><span style="color:#323232;">          </span><span style="color:#183691;">"hp"</span><span style="color:#323232;">: </span><span style="color:#0086b3;">11
</span><span style="color:#323232;">        }
</span><span style="color:#323232;">      ]
</span><span style="color:#323232;">    }
</span><span style="color:#323232;">  ]
</span><span style="color:#323232;">}
</span>

(abriged example in JSON-y format) is copyright-protected, that is. And making a personal backup copy of software is legal (in the US) anyway.

hemko , 2 months ago

or you’re damaging / debasing a company’s brand

Oh no

Anyways

taanegl , 2 months ago

So contrary to our dispositions, most people are afraid of CLI, REPL and other acronyms that exclude the possibility of mousey clickie and box go swoosh.

This has lead to an industry of middle men, because people would rather pay someone to run a command line process than deal with the issue them selves.

CLI should be taught at schools, like the new form of handwriting… also: handwriting.

YourAvgMortal , 2 months ago

Not to disagree with you, but PKHex is not a CLI application. It relies heavily on a visual interface.

The problem is not (necessarily) using the program, but loading the save files to it.

Modding an OG switch is relatively simple but dangerous process if you do something wrong. Modding any modern switch is practically impossible to do as a normal individual.

But once you have that it’s a dead simple process to do it, and just a little bit time consuming to gen and trade the mons

taanegl , 2 months ago

I think you missed the point.

What I’m saying is there’s a crapton of middlemen and the only reason they have a job is because some people are afraid to make an attempt, do some experimenting and generally going exploring. There’s also tech anxiety, tech fatigue, etc.

But largely, if people weren’t so scared of learning new things, or conflating certain computer processes (i.e CLI) with something that’s overly complex (spoiler alert: it isn’t), and also not having learned basic computer sense (like copying data and working on the data), then a lot of people would lose their jobs.

Also, who tf thinks Arch Linux is hard?! nano -w /root/Install.txt, a couple cups of coffee and you’re off to the races. Yes, that was another aside.

my_hat_stinks , 2 months ago

As for this guy being arrested for selling fake stuff

Modified, not fake. They’re not selling a fake Rolex watch, they’re selling custom watch hands. The article does not suggest they misrepresented what they were selling at any point.