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
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.
There are things that work that way (RF spectrum), but in general I think it would cut against the purpose of copyright. I do think there’s value in giving creators exclusive rights to their own work, and making it contingent on distribution would hurt small companies more than big.
It's been more than 30 years since the games creation, let's revoke them now.
You can either grant IP for everyone equally, or point at some companies that they are rich and consumer hostile anyway so they don't get no IP, or abolish IP altogether.
What Nintendo is doing is no different than what everyone is doing, except that you hate them.
Rent-seeking is not really something that governments should encourage.
The chinese are selling things that nintendo isn't, that people want. Beautiful capitalism.
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.
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.
Dangit, the fact that you had to explain it like that makes me feel old. There was a time when that software was found on everyone's PC and held the top spot on sourceforge's most downloaded list.
That's another trip down memory lane...
maybe we should make more p2p kademilia software to combat the social media giants
There are some forums (yes, old-school web forums) with neatly organized content. You just copy-paste the e2dk link into the client, and voilà.
Some forums are even publicly accessible, so it's clear that nobody is seriously persecuting people for piracy in Italy.
I'm almost certain someone got paid off and pulled some stings. They don't do anything unless money is involved.
Or protected names like mozzarella or parmigiano cheese.
Better not to name your next project after them.
Kill someone in traffic? A few months, maybe a year.
A company breaks copyright on a massive, premeditated, scale? Totally fine, don't worry about it.
A individual imports a device that might be used for copyright infringement? Prepare to get your life ruined.
> While emulation software is not illegal, a surprising number of these devices ship chock-full of pre-loaded ROMs—the channel showed multiple Sony and Nintendo games running on the device
Honestly I feel that in the US this would have possibly been risky as well
I totally agree that the AI companies should be accountable for their intellectual property leaching.
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.
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
For now, uk is starting to arrest and jail or threaten to jail old grandmothers for liking facebook posts the gov doesn’t like
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-14424959/Knock-knoc...
even “3rd world” countries don’t do this
> The Times highlighted the case of Maxie Allen and Rosalind Levine, who were arrested on January 29 after raising concerns in a private parents’ WhatsApp group about the hiring process of their daughter’s school. Six uniformed officers arrived at their home, detained them in front of their youngest child, and took them to a police station.
The couple was questioned on suspicion of harassment, malicious communications, and causing a nuisance on school property after the school alleged they had “cast aspersions” about the chair of governors. They were fingerprinted, searched, and locked in a cell for eight hours.
https://dailytelegraph.co.nz/world/12000-brits-arrested-per-...
(No point downvoting me, this trend is rising and true)
When such laws were introduced, they basically only applied to mainstream media organizations and actual political agitators; debating politics at the family table was (and still is) allowed. However, the way they're worded, they also apply to any user sharing / liking political posts on social media.
Are all UK opposition politicians right wing tabloid dummies too ? They are all clearly saying this is happening. Reform UK party that is right now slated in polls to be the next winner if elections were to happen have publicly acknowledged this is happening.
Why make everything into a left vs right match ? if free speech dies here right now by people you support (people who call daily mail a tabloid “right wing” rag) when they go out of power and people you oppose win, they’ll use the same instruments to suppress people you do support.
Basic freedoms are deserved by all citizens, police shouldn’t go around arresting 12,000 citizens for facebook posts or grandmas for voicing their worries not even violent posts or jibes, just criticism and concerns.
While the same country has struggled across years to arrest and prosecute violent offenders targetting british orphanages and harming children. police did nothing about it despite knowing it, and continues to resist protecting children.
You think everything is normal ? Not everything is a football match, the score wont reset after “the game” round is over. Once these freedoms are lost they will be far more harder to bring back. people will be even more defenseless. Nothing good comes out of making everything expendable in a left vs right match.
Common citizens lose everything from it, while politicians on top from both aisles win with more power to do anything and everything they want when they rule.
Ah yes, because the couch fucker sure is known to be trustworthy. Good god, do you also believe everything you read on Facebook and see on Fox news?
Just because he's a "couch fucker", doesn't mean he's wrong in that case. Some EU countries do have genuine issues with free speech.
People should use critical thinking and judge WHAT is being said independent of WHO is saying it.
Unfortunately people do not use critical thinking anymore to judge topics in a nonpartisan way, because of fear of being attacked/ostracized by the colective groupthink mob based solely on adherence to a political ideology.
I don’t even vote for the republicans and since when has couches been equated to real things reported widely by media, politicians, citizens, watchdog groups become completely irrelevant because a politician you hate/dislike agreed with those things.
This is not a football match or he said she said, it’s happening and if you have to resort to calling a sitting vice president as “couch**” to deny reality instead of being able to clearly state no one innocent is being jailed for simple disagreements on facebook. then no you probably subconsciously know it’s happening too and need to depend on slander to deny reality.
it is especially ironic considering there are uk citizens getting police visits for saying things far less rude than what you said about US vice president.
You can disagree with ones politics but if you want to defend your ability to have that freedom (to disagree with ruling parties) it does require you to defend the freedoms and rights of people you disagree with politically too…
The linked article doesn't make any mention of arrest, jail, or threats thereof.
I've previously posted a rebuttal about this "thousands arrested for social media" claim: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41488099
what did they go to her home for ? sipping champagne , taking care of the old woman and having oxford like debates ???
Please…
The article says clearly “last night”, what you think happened doesn’t change what was said by the woman who explicitly stated what happened to her and had to live through it that night.
(on rechecking yes i’m wrong about daytime vs nighttime indeed they visited at morning)
but even with that you think its acceptable if it’s daytime for police to knock on doors due to facebook posts about not liking current ruling councillor stuck in a scandal ???
if this gets politically acceptable get ready for china like atmosphere in future around politics (without china like infrastructure or growth) forced disappearances , thoughtcrimes & thought police…
Also note it doesn't say who is making this accusation about the detectives, the article is not designed to inform you but to provoke a reaction.
Also consider that they will be carefully selecting what posts of hers to quote rather than telling you everything she wrote that lead to the complaint.
Do you actually know what she wrote?
> At around 1.30pm last Tuesday ... a detective sergeant and another officer knocked at her door
You've made some edits to your post since I replied, so...
> but even with that you think its acceptable if it’s daytime for police to knock on doors due to facebook posts
It's handled on a case by case basis. The police will generally notify someone if they're the subject of a harrassment complaint, and it's not uncommon for them to visit either to give a verbal warning or to advise them on the law. That's... just how the system works in the UK and has done for a long time. Police in the UK are often in and around the community, working with it and giving out advice where it may help to prevent crimes.
Perhaps the police were too keen to visit in person this time. Perhaps they felt pressured to demonstrate a response by the fact that the complainant was linked to the council. That's another issue entirely. But this single incident is not the sign of a steep decline into authoritarianism that you want it to be.
Looks like webworm has covered them
Already happens in Germany: https://www.economist.com/europe/2025/04/16/the-threat-to-fr...
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.
No, they re-release a couple of them, as it conveniences them, often with unasked for changes.
And the handheld consoles aren't competing with nintendo for people interested in playing retro games. Someone that picks up a miyoo to play SNES games on the go has no official nintendo option for this, the switch doesn't have all the SNES games and isn't the same formfactor.
That the current PM's party, FdI, is a neo-fascist political party should also help add some context.
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.
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.
There's no contradiction between an American court finding that using legally acquired copies of copyrighted material for AI training constitutes fair use, and Italian police launching an investigation because they suspect someone might be selling illegal copies of copyrighted material.
How is it legal to generate the content of that YouTube with genAI but not to actually tape it with real people. Why does an AI have more rights than this YouTuber.
If the law were truly consistent, surgeons would go to jail for cutting people with knives.
As soon as you recognize that context should matter in law, consistency is no longer possible.
I’m not defending big companies pirating books or saying YouTubers should go to jail, I’m just saying there are material differences in context that make it juvenile to demand perfect consistency.
This is easy: law is about power and money. LLM training companies represent an even bigger concentration of money than the IP enforcers, so they can pirate all the books in the world without consequence, while the most onerous consequences are reserved for the most trivial guys.
Positive Law -- the laws set down by kings and legislatures -- is much less fair, but sometimes, however rarely, it tries to embody a codification of the Natural Law.
The way the Positive Law is enforced and prosecuted is an utter disaster. In civil courts, justice is bought and sold as a rule; fairness (and even adjudication itself!) is an exception. It's so bad, so transparently twisted, that I think it's fair to say that humans in general have shown that they cannot be trusted with the administration of things such as civil laws. Too corruptible.
There is no such thing.
Obviously that was a bridge too far for people, and they stopped supporting even the sensible reforms the party was advocating for.
He used as an example of how the law was bad, that if you witnessed someone doing the act, and filmed it to hand over as evidence to the police, you would end in jail too, something that is obviously unfair.
I’d like to point out that for decades the argument pro-piracy folks made was that you can’t “steal” software since it still remains. It’s only fair to apply that same standard to AI companies who are simply scraping data...
Very few people download(ed?) movies or music with the intent to distribute it. They downloaded it because they wanted to consume the media.
Come again? Deepseek and numerous other smaller models can be run locally, for free.
I think what’s really behind this attitude is that “information wants to be free” when I’m pirating IP from a big, faceless corporation. But when it’s _my_ IP being pirated, it’s theft.
So the problem regarding AI is more nuanced and complicated than the plain copyright-question of piracy. It's more akin to cases of plagiarism, which go case by case.
Copyright laws have quite strict rules on what constitutes a copy, and this was tested in courts many times. This rules also apply to works produced by LLMs.
Well, the Ministry of Truth is working on it, at least.
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".
Separate from the level of consequences for an AI company or this guy- for example if he was forced to simply take the video down or pay a small fine relevant to the level of piracy he was encouraging.
Maybe the laws should be changed, maybe not, but the fact is that they haven't been.
RIP Aaron Swartz.
The principle of copyright is fine for artists. AI and ChatGPT aren't fundamentally changing the underlying logic: artists should have their intellectual property protected and be able to receive compensation for their work free from getting ripped off. The problem is stretching copyright to absurd timelines when the underlying logic also recognizes that novel ideas emerge out of the public commons and ultimately return to them after a certain amount of time. 7 or 8 years is reasonable. 10 tops. Decades or even hundreds of years is absurd.
I've been thinking a lot about this lately since I've had some ... questionable images generated by Gemini. If it outputs infringing material is that on me, them, both of us? Does it depend on my prompt/context, what I do with the output, etc.? My instinct (in opposition to your comment about C&Ds) says it's on them because they're charging money for the service and it's _clearly_ been trained on copyrighted material. I think this question and related ones are going to be answered fairly quickly, especially because of how egregious some of the output I've seen is.
I don't want to get into specifics right now because, IMHO, this particular "trick" is an exploit, as it's reproducible and systemic. Google has a bug bounty for Gemini but this scenario (i.e. output containing copyrighted material) is "out of scope" and they request that you submit individual tickets for every infringing instance. It's not clear to me if end users are supposed to do that or copyright holders but that's not a scalable or practical solution to a systemic problem. I would prefer to be responsible and be compensated for my trouble but I may wind up writing a blog post or something about this if I can't get their attention.
Generative AI mostly works by copying fuzzy styles instead of specific texts or images. There are some exceptions where models actually memorize specific material, but these seem to be relatively rare and probably require that the piece in question occurs frequently in the training data.
So in general, training on copyrighted material is probably legal as long as the model is not able to exactly reproduce the training data, while copying video game ROMs is clearly always illegal.
Of course, whether these things are morally okay or not is a different question...
Edit: Of course, to train on copyrighted material, you have to download it first. If you don't pay for the copies, this is arguably still illegal, even if the resulting model doesn't distribute any copies! (An exception might be content that is directly embedded in websites, because copying websites into the browser cache is allowed, even if they are under copyright protection.)
Rules for thee, not for me.
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.
Which means no copyright, or copyright owned by the state. And the state to be in charge to collect royalties from foreign countries.
Wokeness and the hammer and sickle covered in blood are symbols that often appears concurrently true left parades (at least in Europe, though actually occasionally in the right too)
So I think he connected the two concepts by association.
(yes, whataboutism, but I feel the need to point it out)
He’s clearly a dangerous maniac and a threat to the society.
That’s why the only option was to lock him up.
Going through customs does not make something legal to buy or possess.
Customs is a spot-check that doesn’t catch everything and Customs cannot possibly verify every single product’s legality.
Many people buy illegal drugs internationally and just hope they get through customs, for example. That doesn’t make it legal.
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.
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.
Sure, everyone should know that this is technically illegal, but not following these laws isn't "incomprehensible".
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.
They seized 30 consoles of different types, which is not consistent with someone selling a lot of one.
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.
textbook bs of putting other people action under microscope, no one is this precise in making decisions related to day to day stuff.
Did you mean to type "You point blank cannot find legit ways of playing the original underground games without paying $20"?
Need for Speed Underground sells for between $15 and $24 on the used market: https://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_nkw=Need+For+Speed+Undergro...
this is, sorry, ....what?
In which universe do people spend a million dollars for a collection of video games? At retail?
He didn't say that people actually spend that much money on retail games, but that they would have cost as much if people didn't pirate them (in the thousands) instead. Reading comprehension...
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.
That makes a whole lot of difference.
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.
The YouTuber should have used an LLM for laundering copyright.
logicchains•3h ago
gchamonlive•3h ago
HPsquared•2h ago
44520297•2h ago
Arch-TK•1h ago
HPsquared•20m ago
gchamonlive•2h ago
So lobbyism is just a manifestation of this function, the attempt of a corporation to communicate with society in order to influence decisions that impact their profits.
Corporations are not the only types of machines that have interest in making connections to other machines in the capitalist universe. Humans are also embedded in this universe, but for other interests.
Therefore it's reasonable to think that capitalism working as intended will in time start producing corporations that work against the interests of the common good.
like_any_other•3h ago
Don't mistake the IP cartel's backroom lobbying for the will of the people.
izacus•2h ago