> 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.
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 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
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.
> 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.
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'.
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
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.
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).
I was briefly hopeful that we'd see meaningful copyright reform in the EU back when the Pirate Party had its moment in the spotlight. But nothing happened.
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.
Game publishers are strangely aggressive about people playing pirated copies 20+ year old video games which haven't been available for purchase for over a decade. Meanwhile they are actively arguing for their right to destroy copies of games they have sold.
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.
It's interesting to me that for critiques of AI, one of the major arguments is "stealing from artists"- and I know that the argument is more nuanced than this- but a lot of the specific legal framework for intellectual property rights and enforcement- current lawsuits that are against AI companies- are based on the same ideas that allow this kind of prosecution.
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".
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.
Guardia di Finanza is the most militarized branch of Italian law enforcement and if they knock on your door (provided they bother knocking), you better comply.
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.
It's astounding how much authoritarianism people are willing to tolerate in the name of maximising the economic incentives for producing entertainment media.
No wonder the statement from Video Games Europe[0] in response to the Stop Killing Games initiative was laughed at from every corner of the internet. It didn't say anything unexpected but just underlined why these types of preservation initiatives are so important. Should Abernic ship devices loaded with illegal ROMs? Probably not. But to prosecute a customer who bought the product legally for it is a sad joke.
Italian here.
The title is a bit misleading: the raid was not ordered by the government but by justice system. They are two different entities.
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.
I have an opposing viewpoint here. Incompressible to me how normalised copyright theft has become in the commercial emulation space.
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.
It's not incomprehensible, it's actually quite understandable.
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.
For most of human history, it has been completely normal. It was fine to make your own cave painting look exactly like the one you saw on a visit to a neighbouring cave. It wasn't til the early 1700 that there was any formal idea of copyright, and almost 1900 before it became pervasive.
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.
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)
There is also another market for these games with platforms like Pico-8 and Tic-80 where games are open source and one can simply pull the curtain, read the code and learn how the saussage is made. Many of these modern retro games are way more fun than most of the older copyrighted content and the community is thriving too.
>The creator, assuming he didn’t do anything wrong, complied with demands, providing full transcripts of his conversations and chats with gaming handheld manufacturers.
To me, it's kind of strange that buying and showing something that is sold legally (like a console purchased from China, which I assume went through customs, or even sold on Amazon in some cases) can make someone a criminal.
I believe this should be protected under freedom of speech: he's legally buying a product and demonstrating what it does. Maybe posting a referral link and profiting from it could be considered questionable, but come on...
If you want to stop piracy, start by blocking these devices at customs and investigating the businesses that import and sell them to the public. Never put someone in jail for what is, after all, a form of journalism.
I play video games through emulation, mainly because if I were playing, for example, Dissidia Final Fantasy on a regular Playstation Portable, I wouldn't be able to scan the text with my screen reader, or get AI image descriptions. I tried to buy all the PSP games I wanted to play, but that store was shut down. So now I don't think I could pay Sony for these games even if I wanted to.
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.
[+] [-] user_7832|8 months ago|reply
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
[+] [-] reddalo|8 months ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] 627467|8 months ago|reply
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
[+] [-] _heimdall|8 months ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] slightwinder|8 months ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] viraptor|8 months ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] bmacho|8 months ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] dfxm12|8 months ago|reply
That the current PM's party, FdI, is a neo-fascist political party should also help add some context.
[+] [-] bubblebeard|8 months ago|reply
[+] [-] qoez|8 months ago|reply
[+] [-] p0w3n3d|8 months ago|reply
[+] [-] timhh|8 months ago|reply
[+] [-] yread|8 months ago|reply
[+] [-] riffraff|8 months ago|reply
[+] [-] lormayna|8 months ago|reply
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).
[+] [-] bapak|8 months ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] progval|8 months ago|reply
[+] [-] TriangleEdge|8 months ago|reply
[+] [-] thefz|8 months ago|reply
It's not "like that" unless Lega Calcio is involved. Lots of mafia and lots of profit to be hurt.
[+] [-] elric|8 months ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] CivBase|8 months ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] awongh|8 months ago|reply
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".
[+] [-] jmyeet|8 months ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] Tade0|8 months ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] logicchains|8 months ago|reply
[+] [-] amelius|8 months ago|reply
[+] [-] nazgulsenpai|8 months ago|reply
[0]https://www.videogameseurope.eu/news/statement-on-stop-killi...
[+] [-] lormayna|8 months ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] Chronoyes|8 months ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] _fat_santa|8 months ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] ta8645|8 months ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] Aurornis|8 months ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] colechristensen|8 months ago|reply
Sure, everyone should know that this is technically illegal, but not following these laws isn't "incomprehensible".
[+] [-] 93po|8 months ago|reply
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)
[+] [-] bluescrn|8 months ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] abdulhaq|8 months ago|reply
[+] [-] tartoran|8 months ago|reply
[+] [-] throwawayffffas|8 months ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|8 months ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] wodenokoto|8 months ago|reply
[+] [-] immibis|8 months ago|reply
this is, sorry, ....what?
In which universe do people spend a million dollars for a collection of video games? At retail?
[+] [-] ThePowerOfFuet|8 months ago|reply
Incredible.
If you wonder why I say that, please watch this video: https://youtube.com/watch?v=d-7o9xYp7eE
[+] [-] bgwalter|8 months ago|reply
The YouTuber should have used an LLM for laundering copyright.
[+] [-] viraptor|8 months ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|8 months ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] basfo|8 months ago|reply
[+] [-] saubeidl|8 months ago|reply
Rules for thee, not for me.
[+] [-] devinprater|8 months ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] xg15|8 months ago|reply
[+] [-] DrNosferatu|8 months ago|reply
That makes a whole lot of difference.