10mo ago

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

www.ign.com Japanese Police Arrest 36-Year-Old Man on Suspicion of Tampering With Pokémon Violet Save Data - IGN

Police in Japan have arrested a 36-year-old man on suspicion of selling illegally modified Pokémon save data to customers online — a practice which is banned under the country’s 2019 Unfair Competition Prevention Act.

Well today has been rich in boring dystopic news.....

Not The Onion @lemmy.world

lnxtx (xe/xem/xyr) @feddit.nl

10mo ago

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

www.ign.com /articles/japanese-police-arrest-36-year-old-man-on-suspicion-of-tampering-with-pokemon-violet-save-data

249 20

Games @sh.itjust.works

nanoUFO @sh.itjust.works

10mo ago

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

www.ign.com /articles/japanese-police-arrest-36-year-old-man-on-suspicion-of-tampering-with-pokemon-violet-save-data

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26 comments

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.
- 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.
- 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.
  
  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
  
  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.
- 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.
  
  What is the crime? That is the part that is disturbing.
  
  it's SAVE FILES. the base game has to use them. they can't do anything on their own.
  
  Even if we agree with copyright law as is, that's hardly a valid analogy. Save files alone are not a complete game.
  
  Unironically, yes. Copyright law should be completely removed. It was not created to protect artists. It was created to protect shareholder interests.
  
  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
  javascript
  
  { "rtc": 1713006754, "savestates": [ { "name": " Red", "xp": 1760, "pokemon": [ { "species": 115, "name": "Fluff", "hp": 24 }, { "species": 92, "name": "Bonk", "hp": 11 } ] } ] }
  (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.
- or you're damaging / debasing a company's brand
  Oh no
  Anyways

26 comments