The man who owes Nintendo $14m: Gary Bowser and gaming’s most infamous piracy case
The man who owes Nintendo $14m: Gary Bowser and gaming’s most infamous piracy case
The hacker whose involvement with anti-piracy software ended in a jail sentence has emerged from prison struggling to make rent as he starts paying his fine. ‘It could be worse,’ he says
Imagine owing someone 30% of your income for the rest of your life because you had the audacity to modify people's property that they owned with their consent. Nintendo will never see another red penny from me, entirely because of this case.
Let's not pretend Team Xecuter was in the CFW and modding scene for honest reasons. The only two things they did were sell a for-profit modchip that uses voltage glitching to enable arbitrary code executing during the pre-boot process, and sell their for-profit, tivoized operating system. Speaking of which, SxOS is a license-violating, reskinned, rebranded version of the GPLv2 open-source Atmosphère operating system, with piracy patches applied out of the box.
Nintendo sucks, but so does TX. Credit shouldn't be given to those greedy fucks, but instead to the people who worked hard to break open the Switch solely for the sake of making homebrew possible: ReSwitched, SwitchBrew, and the Atmosphère maintainers.
That's a lot of words that continue to not convince me that a 54 year old man with physical disabilities should be made to pay hundreds of dollars a month to a multi billion dollar corporation. I don't care if he personally broke into Nintendo's headquarters and stole games right out of their servers, it is fucked that this corporation can take 14 months of his life and 30% of the rest of his income forever. If he was a millionaire, maybe, but the guy is having trouble paying for physical therapy ffs.
Really glad the US government went out of their way to protect Nintendo’s right to profit off the work of their (likely US citizen) employees who probably don’t even work at the company anymore. And on the dime of the taxpayers! Feeling especially safe knowing this guy will have to struggle forever.
Actually since Nintendo is obviously japanese (brain jumped the gun), it’s even worse, protecting mostly foreign profits on taxpayer dime against a US citizen.
It's gross to arbitrarily destroy an individual's life to make an example of them when it's the state's failure to effectively stop the problem. They went overboard with their punishment, and nothing will change. A corporation was 'harmed' so they harmed an actual person.