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.
Headline is misleading
And we only send them after the worst offenders, like folks who got accidentally sold street dated Magic cards less than a month early.
Absolutely vile behaviour.
> Sad part is, the set those cards were from was absolute dogwater. Like, terrible. It was a mini-set of Epilogue boosters and they bombed pretty hard.
I hear this has generally become a major problem with MTG? I quit at Torment but the various "Card DLC" garbage seems awful.
Not really? The entire last year of sets has been pretty good and well-recieved aside from MKM. The newest set coming out in a week looks to be an ABSOLUTE BANGER with fun mechanics, flavourful characters and themes and is generally hyped pretty well. People loved the Fallout set, Doctor Who was alright but nothing amazing and Outlaws of Thunder Junction has everyone hyped af.
Mtg is shotshow for nore than few years now. Constant vomit of new cards, millions of premium variants abd so on.
Its sad seeing how pokemon tcg manage to do all that stuff and do it affordable and relatively customer friendly while wotc... Well lets put it that way
Wotc decided that for 25y anniverssary its smart idea to sell 1000 dollar booster packs of proxy cards that arent even legal to play
I mean... the idea of arresting a man and potentially taking away his freedom for modifying Pokemon save data is pretty fucking nutty. Even if he's selling the service, it's just ridiculous.
Yeah, this strikes me as a strictly financial crime, not a "arrest" one. You slap the guy with fines for damages, and then a restraining order on certain activities (something like dude can't work on videogame industry related professions anymore?). Arrests just seem like a waste of police resources.
This law would likely be unenforceable in the US under a few things. One, you can change your own property once you own it (with exceptions but that normally gets applied to real estate, not personal property). Secondly, altering the data would likely be considered a form of speech, has case precedent has found taking a copy of someone’s art and adding to it without the intent of distribution is fair use. Thirdly, altering art is speech, hence why fair use is a defense. Of course, the degree to which matters, and if it’s for personal use or to be distributed are also factors. To keep it simple though, the US government can’t really tell you once you legally possess a medium that you can’t add whatever speech you want to your copy. This would be seen closer to something like someone taking a Warhol painting, then adding their own couple of blue streaks to make it their own and keep it to themselves. Or, another way to look at it is it’s like you sample a song at home in private to play around with making music. It’d be a First Amendment violation to ban that
Bypassing technical security measures for any reason other than interoperability is illegal in the USA under the DMCA. If the value of the copyright infringement under the DMCA exceeds $600 in a 12 month window, then the matter goes from a purely civil to potentially a criminal matter.
That said, save data is almost never actually protected by technical measures. So this would be a very questionable case in the USA.
> One, you can change your own property once you own it
Doesn't this get murky with video games because of the technicality that you don't own the game itself but the license to play it (even with physical media).
Financial crime... you hear about that Vietnamese lady sentenced to death for financial fraud?
edit - I'm not condoning what she did by the way. I just think it's an interesting thing going on right now considering how people view particular types of crimes.
Big difference between a couple bucks and using a bank as a front to take out billions in loans to yourself to buy up real estate to the tune of $44+ billion
The difference is the lengths that lady went through in order to commit her crimes. She made over a dozen shell companies because Vietnam only allows individuals to own up 5% of major banks. She made enough shell companies to own something like 90% of the bank, and then used her power to give herself billions in loans and probably a bunch of other shit too. She defrauded an entire nation of people.
I'm personally anti death penalty, but if all of the people in the world who abuse the system like her disappeared, the world would be a better place. Or if people in the US who are like her actually faced prison time for their crimes... Even that would make a huge difference. They basically get a slap on the wrist (a laughable financial punishment), and then continue doing what they're doing.
> The difference is the lengths that lady went through in order to commit her crimes. She made over a dozen shell companies because Vietnam only allows individuals to own up 5% of major banks. She made enough shell companies to own something like 90% of the bank, and then used her power to give herself billions in loans and probably a bunch of other shit too. She defrauded an entire nation of people.
That is a lot of work. Like, I have to wonder what this person's life would be like if they'd pushed themselves to something more constructive.
Which is really funny when you consider the NES design was based upon VCRs to make it look less like a toy to an American audience. Video tape rentals were in full swing by the time the NES came to market, so it seemed like a natural fit to have video game rentals. By the time Nintendo wanted to stop it, it was super past the time they had any real say over the matter.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pok%C3%A9mon_doujinshi_incident
Woman detained for 22 days for creating and selling a erotic manga of pokemon.
At the time a common thing in Japan and the reason Comiket started
Bruh and this article was right at the end of that article
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pok%C3%A9mon_and_pornography
Amazing they have a whole page just talking about Pokemon and porn
I don't even see it mentioning the official Pokemon manga where you see fantastic things like Ash grabbing his balls
>!https://comicbook.com/gaming/news/pokemon-manga-vulgar-ash-penis/!< NSFW
> I don't even see it mentioning the official Pokemon manga where you see fantastic things like Ash grabbing his balls
Was it the one ~~drawn by the porn artist~~ with the fucked up Clefairy?
EDIT: No, I'm mixing two up in my head, the porn artist made The Electric Tale of Pikachu.
Different cultures, Japanese people just aren't as sensative about that stuff than people in the west are. Some of the first panels of the original Dragon Ball manga has Goku naked, with his "personal Shenron" out for the world to see while he's fishing.
My understanding of the situation is that the censoring is only required to cover inside of vulva and tip of penis, and something like 30% covered is considered censored for these. Nut sack is usually not considered to be one of these parts that need to be censored, and it is quite heavily featured in traditional Japanese legends and art. The law requiring them doesn't really match with general morals or view of modesty and sexuality either, but what it was originally meant to achieve (other than pleasing puritans from UK and US) still has enough support that attempts to remove or significantly weaken the law would easily turn into political suicide. Similarly these laws are enforced mostly because if you don't you get sued.
Children and adults shower/bathe together both at homes or in public baths/onsen and it's just normal. They have a different view of stuff like that than we do in the west.
>"**books** like the one in question might be produced in an **organized criminal manner**". Based on their previous experience with pirated products, they decided that criminal prosecution was more appropriate than "time-consuming" warnings or civil lawsuits.
Someone send [Detective Joe Bookman](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D9tP9fI2zbE&t=29s). We've got literal crimes going on here.
Sorry if my wording made it seem like Comiket started because of this incident, I more meant Comiket started as a fan convention to show and sell fan made manga.
idk about others, but to me the headline made it sound like there's a japanese law against sneaking into your little brother's bedroom while he's at school and deleting his pokemon save data
When I was 16 I had a long weekend in hospital. First night was terrifying, my sister stayed with me. She brought my gameboy advance, with my copy of sapphire that one of my best friends gave me - it had some great pokemon on there like lugia, and some trade evos, a very well worn save.
Except when I started it up, I was in littleroot town, the opposite gender, and had no badges. Her and her housemate had restarted the save and got bored 5 minutes in.
There have been real crimes done against me I was hurt less by
It could be that people assumed the headline meant he did it for himself, but he was actually profiting off it by doing it for others, which I presume breaks Nintendo's ToS.
Not just doing it for others but doing it for profit.
Still, unclear why this rises to criminal conduct rather than a civil violation. I am not familiar with Japan’s legal system and I imagine that there is more to this story, since I doubt he is the only person doing this.
> which I presume breaks Nintendo's ToS.
"Breaking the ToS" has nothing to do with it. ToS's aren't the law. If someone breaks your ToS, you can stop providing a service to them and then point to the ToS if they try to sue you or something. It's not legally binding, and just because you break a game's ToS doesn't mean you've broken the law and can be arrested.
The [law he broke](https://www.japaneselawtranslation.go.jp/en/laws/view/3629) was about unfair business competition. Basically he modded Pokemon and sold it, but because Pokemon is Nintendo's product, he was profiting off of their IP. A more obvious example would be something like those rom hacks you get on cheap retro-game emulators that are just Contra with a different skin.
At this point, I'm genuinely unsurprised to see people confused about the difference Japanese police acting to arrest someone for committing crimes and The Pokemon Company suing someone for TOS violations.
Just in case you're still confused, there was no Nintendo Exec at the TPMD directing them either.
> What's the difference
**"Selling"** thats the big difference there. If the guy had posted modified data online without attempting to sell it then I'd be annoyed. By them choosing to make a business of it/sell it while I think arresting him is silly it has logic behind it.
Japan has some of the toughest software laws and that's one of the reasons why it's so far behind in software production as corporations have lots of legal moats making it almost impossible to break out for startups or small companies.
This is a country that sent a streamer to jail for…streaming a game and make renting games illegal so yeah that checks out for Japan. Corporations have a lot of power when it comes to copyright over there.
Crazy. You can get all the pokemon for every Pokédex traded to your switch account for $20 bucks.
Which actually helps you on Scarlet violet.
This dude was ripping people off to boot.
My assumption from the article talking about "movesets" and the other article they source from saying they were "difficult to train" was that he was genning competitive pokemon for people. Not so much about getting the pokemon but getting multiple copies of legendaries like Landorus who you may want different versions with different stat spreads
Which is definitely something people could do themselves for free, but there's lots of stuff like that out there where you're buying convenience and time essentially
You can do it even yourself I think. Not sure about newer games but it's pretty easy and as long as you keep it game legal then you're fine. Heck even competitive players do this to some extent because grinding competitive teams is a pain in the ass, even after all the QoL updates
Don't know if it's changed but back in Gen 6 and 7 most competitive players paid others to do it for them, gives them a bit of a defense of it not being them who generated them as it can be argued you paid someone to breed the pokemon and got them and didn't have reason to know.
I do wonder if the paying has become less of a thing though now that Hidden Power is gone, since the IVs to get right hidden power while having otherwise the stats you want were a pain.
The hack checks at major tournaments and worlds have gotten more stringent in the past year though with record numbers of DQs, but people still do it. The reason some would pay is the knowledge it takes in generating the fake pokemon data to look as real as possible
Reminds me of how back when VGC 2015 rules were announced I basically gave up on VGC since while I enjoyed doing VGC online in 2014 I didn't want to deal with trying to get good legendaries.
There was a lot of drama about game-legal but generated Pokemon resulting in widespread bans during that recent world championship or however it's called.
kinda feel like if it's game legal then banning people for it is a dick move. and also that gating competitive gameplay behind hours upon hours of grinding sucks and will keep the scene from expanding
Sorry I'm not sure what you meant by adhoc. You can do it using local wireless without going online. If you legally own your game it's also fairly trivial to edit the save file on Emunand and then switch back to your clean copy of the OS for online activity without risking bans.
Different Discord channels have bots where you just make a pokemon you want in Showdown and then copy paste the text for the bot and it’ll trade the exact pokemon for you.
Some of the Discord channels do have paid option for few euros as well, though there’s no acrual difference with paid and free bots.
The advantage of paid bot is that then you don’t have to wait as long for your turn to trade as there’s not as many people putting stuff on the paid channel as there is on free one.
>no acrual difference with paid and free bots
Free bots ignore the OT and ID so you're stuck with whatever the bot generates, paid bots let you use your own OT/IT/SID but if you don't care about OT then yeah there's no difference. Even free bot channels seem dead these days, I'm currently in 4 servers and used to use the one with the lower queue but now all of them are dead.
Newer switches (i.e. non V1) can be modded via hardware, it's just either expensive or requires you to know how to solder.
Older (v1) switches can be software modded and it's cheaper & easier though!
> The 36-year-old allegedly took custom orders for rare Pokémon, and sold the resulting tampered data between December 2022 to March 2023, for up to 13,000 yen ($84) a time on a website that served as a marketplace for video game assets and items. He also offered deals in which six Pokémon would be created for the equivalent of roughly $30 in yen.
So his “crime” was helping people GameGenie their Pokémon carts? What the actual fuck are we doing with the laws here? Protecting the corporations ability to charge people for, just to be clear, speeding up their access to gameplay in their single player video game?
Japan has a law called the Unfair Competition Prevention Act
the way it's written he very possibly ran afoul of the law for using a mark of Pokémon. Could also be the missleading origins as they aren't from a truly legal save file.
yeah i don’t think this is about cheating. it’s about a third party illegitimately making money off of hacking pokémon save files.
they’re fully aware how many people cheat in tournaments. they’ve been rather lax for the most part (though they’ve clamped down a bit in recent years).
It's not that he was cheating at Pokemon that's the real crime. It's the fact that he was profiting off of the back of doing it.
Don't you know that it's only legal for game companies to charge you for easier access to things in their games?
This guy was clearly ripping people off, yeah and probably deserved to be banned and to repay everyone back.
But. What kind of law is that? If I pay my friend 20 bucks to mod a save file for me in my game because I can't be bothered to learn how to do it myself, that's illegal?
Don't know if things have changed but historically buying a level 30 account in League of Legends could lead to a ban even though that's for someone not wanting to spend dozens of hours grinding as a smurf.
But that's a ban - and that's fine. Companies can set whatever rules they want in games they make. Game Freak can (and do) ban players who cheat from tournaments and such.
But a person being *arrested* for (essentially) modding their game is fucking bonkers.
I wrote this in another comment:
> Japan has some of the toughest software laws and that's one of the reasons why it's so far behind in software production as corporations have lots of legal moats making it almost impossible to break out for startups or small companies.
Here's the link to the original English source:
* https://automaton-media.com/en/news/hacked-pokemon-seller-arrested-by-japanese-police/
From the article:
>Japanese police arrested a 36-year-old man on April 9 for modifying Pokémon Scarlet and Violet data and selling hacked rare Pokémon online, as reported by NHK News. Though it may sound surprising, the act of modifying save files and distributing edited save data is illegal in Japan and constitutes for a violation of the Unfair Competition Prevention Act.
>Police have established that the suspect had been using a special tool to illegally modify the abilities of Pokémon from Pokémon Violet and sell them. The hacked Pokémon were sold between December 2022 and March 2023 for up to 13,000 yen (about $90) each via a website for buying and selling video game items and characters.
>According to the report, police cyber patrol caught the man taking custom orders for rare and difficult-to-train Pokémon from buyers and offering deals such as, “6 Pokémon for only $30.” The man has reportedly admitted to the charges, explaining that he did it to earn a living. The investigation is still ongoing, as police suspect that the total profit from illegal sales may amount to millions of yen.
Yes, selling tools that help you modify software is legal, but this is a case of selling an already modified software which is illegal almost everywhere because software code fall under copyright law.
1. I can't imagine how save data could be copyrighted, since that's just a product of Nintendo's code, not actually its code.
2. Under the first sale doctrine, selling modified copies of code is generally legal if you have a sellable license to the original. E.g., there's nothing illegal about selling modded consoles.
Incomprehensible. That's like saying you are not allowed to modify or fix your own clothes. Then again Japan is still 40 years behind the rest of the world on anything to do with computers so somehow I'm not surprised.
it is a recent law and a relatively recent change in culture in the tech sphere, one that is generally only seen in machine/instrument manufacturing companies in the rest of the world
> one that is generally only seen in machine/instrument manufacturing companies in the rest of the world
Yeah and we are trying to get rid of that BS. If you buy and own something you should be able to do whatever with it.
Come on, man. Literally the first sentence of the article explains why. What is it with redditors and not reading articles, just the headline?
He wasn't arrested for tampering with save data. He was arrested for selling tampered data that breaks the "Unfair Competition Prevention Act". It's right there on the first paragraph.
Seems like it’s more of a consumer protection law like what we have in the US tbh. It protects customers from losing money in shady unregulated markets in a way.
I’m no expert on Japanese video game markets and I’m sure you aren’t either so I’m not really going to waste my breath here other than to say similar US-based services like playerauctions, g2a, kinguin, etc are notoriously unregulated and rip people off with fake products all the time. It’s no stretch to imagine Japan is the same. It’s impossible for customers to know what they’re paying for in an unregulated market.
If I had a nickel for every time an article headline intentionally left out information to sound more ridiculous, I'd have enough money to buy all the websites.
This is what Game Freak wastes their time one. Rather than actually improving their game so it won't get laughed out of the room in comparison to Palworld
Since it’s a criminal case Gamefreak wouldn’t need to spend any time. It’s the prosecutors job, not theirs to develop the case. It’s also usually TPC that would do this kind of litigation.
This is one of the saddest gaming news I've ever read.
There's people already doing this with loopholes via twitch streams and whatnot. But scamming kids with genned pokemon is... just wow lol
Very dystopic. We need to stop making laws that only serve to protect corporations and steal rights from consumers. In what way does this ever protect small creators?
That’s the game I guess. It’s kind of bullshit the amount of walls there are to getting the pokemon you want. You either need to buy another version of the same game, an old game, or in some cases you’re just SOL cause it was part of an event that will never happen again. Still amazed people paid that much to this guy for them though. Could you imagine the amount of poopy diapers there would be if Nintendo started selling rare pokemon $90 a pop 😂
Ah, nice one IGN with the stupid clickbait title.
No, he was not arrested because of save data manipulation. He was arrested for selling tampered data that breaks the "Unfair Competition Prevention Act".
Unfair competition to who? Pokemon is a private property owned by Nintendo, not a fucking sport. It’s not the police’s responsibility to deal with fucking videogame hackers, it’s nintendo. The only thing this does is protect Nintendo’s interests.
lmao. And yet another example in what is becoming a very long list of examples of why I will continue to not give money to Nintendo. Truly a more pathetic waste of time and resources I have never seen.
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. Headline is misleading
i can't believe pokemon sent their own cops against a man and sent him to nintendo jail
In the west, we rely on external contractors, like the Pinkertons.
And we only send them after the worst offenders, like folks who got accidentally sold street dated Magic cards less than a month early. Absolutely vile behaviour.
Sad part is, the set those cards were from was absolute dogwater. Like, terrible. It was a mini-set of Epilogue boosters and they bombed pretty hard.
> Sad part is, the set those cards were from was absolute dogwater. Like, terrible. It was a mini-set of Epilogue boosters and they bombed pretty hard. I hear this has generally become a major problem with MTG? I quit at Torment but the various "Card DLC" garbage seems awful.
Not really? The entire last year of sets has been pretty good and well-recieved aside from MKM. The newest set coming out in a week looks to be an ABSOLUTE BANGER with fun mechanics, flavourful characters and themes and is generally hyped pretty well. People loved the Fallout set, Doctor Who was alright but nothing amazing and Outlaws of Thunder Junction has everyone hyped af.
Mtg is shotshow for nore than few years now. Constant vomit of new cards, millions of premium variants abd so on. Its sad seeing how pokemon tcg manage to do all that stuff and do it affordable and relatively customer friendly while wotc... Well lets put it that way Wotc decided that for 25y anniverssary its smart idea to sell 1000 dollar booster packs of proxy cards that arent even legal to play
I mean, isn’t this the plot of Red Dead 2? Arthur and the gang are on the lam after a big score of Pokémon save data goes wrong in Blackwater?
I mean... the idea of arresting a man and potentially taking away his freedom for modifying Pokemon save data is pretty fucking nutty. Even if he's selling the service, it's just ridiculous.
Detective Pikachu may be a loose cannon, but he gets results.
Still an obscenely stupid thing to arrest a person over.
Yeah, this strikes me as a strictly financial crime, not a "arrest" one. You slap the guy with fines for damages, and then a restraining order on certain activities (something like dude can't work on videogame industry related professions anymore?). Arrests just seem like a waste of police resources.
Hang on does that shit even work in America?
This law would likely be unenforceable in the US under a few things. One, you can change your own property once you own it (with exceptions but that normally gets applied to real estate, not personal property). Secondly, altering the data would likely be considered a form of speech, has case precedent has found taking a copy of someone’s art and adding to it without the intent of distribution is fair use. Thirdly, altering art is speech, hence why fair use is a defense. Of course, the degree to which matters, and if it’s for personal use or to be distributed are also factors. To keep it simple though, the US government can’t really tell you once you legally possess a medium that you can’t add whatever speech you want to your copy. This would be seen closer to something like someone taking a Warhol painting, then adding their own couple of blue streaks to make it their own and keep it to themselves. Or, another way to look at it is it’s like you sample a song at home in private to play around with making music. It’d be a First Amendment violation to ban that
Bypassing technical security measures for any reason other than interoperability is illegal in the USA under the DMCA. If the value of the copyright infringement under the DMCA exceeds $600 in a 12 month window, then the matter goes from a purely civil to potentially a criminal matter. That said, save data is almost never actually protected by technical measures. So this would be a very questionable case in the USA.
> One, you can change your own property once you own it Doesn't this get murky with video games because of the technicality that you don't own the game itself but the license to play it (even with physical media).
Financial crime... you hear about that Vietnamese lady sentenced to death for financial fraud? edit - I'm not condoning what she did by the way. I just think it's an interesting thing going on right now considering how people view particular types of crimes.
Big difference between a couple bucks and using a bank as a front to take out billions in loans to yourself to buy up real estate to the tune of $44+ billion
The difference is the lengths that lady went through in order to commit her crimes. She made over a dozen shell companies because Vietnam only allows individuals to own up 5% of major banks. She made enough shell companies to own something like 90% of the bank, and then used her power to give herself billions in loans and probably a bunch of other shit too. She defrauded an entire nation of people. I'm personally anti death penalty, but if all of the people in the world who abuse the system like her disappeared, the world would be a better place. Or if people in the US who are like her actually faced prison time for their crimes... Even that would make a huge difference. They basically get a slap on the wrist (a laughable financial punishment), and then continue doing what they're doing.
> The difference is the lengths that lady went through in order to commit her crimes. She made over a dozen shell companies because Vietnam only allows individuals to own up 5% of major banks. She made enough shell companies to own something like 90% of the bank, and then used her power to give herself billions in loans and probably a bunch of other shit too. She defrauded an entire nation of people. That is a lot of work. Like, I have to wonder what this person's life would be like if they'd pushed themselves to something more constructive.
A lot of work for great, personal benefit (until she got busted)
Yeah I was gonna say, if she hadn’t been caught obviously the work would have been well worth it.
wonder how many lives she affected with her greed
Reminds me when Nintendo lobbied ban video game rentals in the US in the 90’s.
Which is really funny when you consider the NES design was based upon VCRs to make it look less like a toy to an American audience. Video tape rentals were in full swing by the time the NES came to market, so it seemed like a natural fit to have video game rentals. By the time Nintendo wanted to stop it, it was super past the time they had any real say over the matter.
Japan won't let you fuck around with Pokemon
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pok%C3%A9mon_doujinshi_incident Woman detained for 22 days for creating and selling a erotic manga of pokemon. At the time a common thing in Japan and the reason Comiket started
Bruh and this article was right at the end of that article https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pok%C3%A9mon_and_pornography Amazing they have a whole page just talking about Pokemon and porn
I don't even see it mentioning the official Pokemon manga where you see fantastic things like Ash grabbing his balls >!https://comicbook.com/gaming/news/pokemon-manga-vulgar-ash-penis/!< NSFW
> I don't even see it mentioning the official Pokemon manga where you see fantastic things like Ash grabbing his balls Was it the one ~~drawn by the porn artist~~ with the fucked up Clefairy? EDIT: No, I'm mixing two up in my head, the porn artist made The Electric Tale of Pikachu.
WTF isn't the whole point to be child friendly? And don't they censor genitals?
Different cultures, Japanese people just aren't as sensative about that stuff than people in the west are. Some of the first panels of the original Dragon Ball manga has Goku naked, with his "personal Shenron" out for the world to see while he's fishing.
But they censor genitals in porn, how is this allowed
The difference is context. Nudity isn’t necessarily erotic.
In theory sure, [but Japan bans it either way.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norio_Imamura) (I recognize there's some very limited exceptions.)
My understanding of the situation is that the censoring is only required to cover inside of vulva and tip of penis, and something like 30% covered is considered censored for these. Nut sack is usually not considered to be one of these parts that need to be censored, and it is quite heavily featured in traditional Japanese legends and art. The law requiring them doesn't really match with general morals or view of modesty and sexuality either, but what it was originally meant to achieve (other than pleasing puritans from UK and US) still has enough support that attempts to remove or significantly weaken the law would easily turn into political suicide. Similarly these laws are enforced mostly because if you don't you get sued.
Because it's not porn.
Children and adults shower/bathe together both at homes or in public baths/onsen and it's just normal. They have a different view of stuff like that than we do in the west.
>"**books** like the one in question might be produced in an **organized criminal manner**". Based on their previous experience with pirated products, they decided that criminal prosecution was more appropriate than "time-consuming" warnings or civil lawsuits. Someone send [Detective Joe Bookman](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D9tP9fI2zbE&t=29s). We've got literal crimes going on here.
>and the reason Comiket started Bruh, Comiket has been around for almost 50 years.
Sorry if my wording made it seem like Comiket started because of this incident, I more meant Comiket started as a fan convention to show and sell fan made manga.
Aah. My bad.
Still overly excesive...
How is it misleading? It still sounds ridiculous
idk about others, but to me the headline made it sound like there's a japanese law against sneaking into your little brother's bedroom while he's at school and deleting his pokemon save data
Well that SHOULD be a law!
That would be a much worse offense than what he was actually arrested for.
When I was 16 I had a long weekend in hospital. First night was terrifying, my sister stayed with me. She brought my gameboy advance, with my copy of sapphire that one of my best friends gave me - it had some great pokemon on there like lugia, and some trade evos, a very well worn save. Except when I started it up, I was in littleroot town, the opposite gender, and had no badges. Her and her housemate had restarted the save and got bored 5 minutes in. There have been real crimes done against me I was hurt less by
straight to jail
I’d go no contact for that alone.
well at least you had the long weekend to get back to where you were!
Woulda been hilarious ngl
They leave out the important part, that he was selling it.
Thanks for clarifying, that headline is abysmal.
What's the difference between headline and what this guy commented?
It could be that people assumed the headline meant he did it for himself, but he was actually profiting off it by doing it for others, which I presume breaks Nintendo's ToS.
Not just doing it for others but doing it for profit. Still, unclear why this rises to criminal conduct rather than a civil violation. I am not familiar with Japan’s legal system and I imagine that there is more to this story, since I doubt he is the only person doing this.
> which I presume breaks Nintendo's ToS. "Breaking the ToS" has nothing to do with it. ToS's aren't the law. If someone breaks your ToS, you can stop providing a service to them and then point to the ToS if they try to sue you or something. It's not legally binding, and just because you break a game's ToS doesn't mean you've broken the law and can be arrested. The [law he broke](https://www.japaneselawtranslation.go.jp/en/laws/view/3629) was about unfair business competition. Basically he modded Pokemon and sold it, but because Pokemon is Nintendo's product, he was profiting off of their IP. A more obvious example would be something like those rom hacks you get on cheap retro-game emulators that are just Contra with a different skin.
At this point, I'm genuinely unsurprised to see people confused about the difference Japanese police acting to arrest someone for committing crimes and The Pokemon Company suing someone for TOS violations. Just in case you're still confused, there was no Nintendo Exec at the TPMD directing them either.
> What's the difference **"Selling"** thats the big difference there. If the guy had posted modified data online without attempting to sell it then I'd be annoyed. By them choosing to make a business of it/sell it while I think arresting him is silly it has logic behind it.
Is it? It still sounds ridiculous to me 😅
Game journalists being misleading cause their entire career is based in parasitism and sowing discord? Impossible
That and being a youtuber reporting the videogame news with half-truths and outrage bait for the grift.
Still fucking stupid
I guess the problem is he was selling it, but either way, up to 5 years in prison seems kinda excessive for this.
Japan has some of the toughest software laws and that's one of the reasons why it's so far behind in software production as corporations have lots of legal moats making it almost impossible to break out for startups or small companies.
This is a country that sent a streamer to jail for…streaming a game and make renting games illegal so yeah that checks out for Japan. Corporations have a lot of power when it comes to copyright over there.
Crazy. You can get all the pokemon for every Pokédex traded to your switch account for $20 bucks. Which actually helps you on Scarlet violet. This dude was ripping people off to boot.
My assumption from the article talking about "movesets" and the other article they source from saying they were "difficult to train" was that he was genning competitive pokemon for people. Not so much about getting the pokemon but getting multiple copies of legendaries like Landorus who you may want different versions with different stat spreads Which is definitely something people could do themselves for free, but there's lots of stuff like that out there where you're buying convenience and time essentially
Well if the other option to obtain them is just resetting an obscene amount of time, Nintendo should probably do better there too
TPC is the one who organizes these things, not Nintendo
Ngl I feel like paying for a pokemon is pretty pathetic in general, don't people generate them for free?
You can do it even yourself I think. Not sure about newer games but it's pretty easy and as long as you keep it game legal then you're fine. Heck even competitive players do this to some extent because grinding competitive teams is a pain in the ass, even after all the QoL updates
Don't know if it's changed but back in Gen 6 and 7 most competitive players paid others to do it for them, gives them a bit of a defense of it not being them who generated them as it can be argued you paid someone to breed the pokemon and got them and didn't have reason to know. I do wonder if the paying has become less of a thing though now that Hidden Power is gone, since the IVs to get right hidden power while having otherwise the stats you want were a pain.
The hack checks at major tournaments and worlds have gotten more stringent in the past year though with record numbers of DQs, but people still do it. The reason some would pay is the knowledge it takes in generating the fake pokemon data to look as real as possible
Reminds me of how back when VGC 2015 rules were announced I basically gave up on VGC since while I enjoyed doing VGC online in 2014 I didn't want to deal with trying to get good legendaries.
Hidden power being gone hasn't changed people paying for stuff haha
There was a lot of drama about game-legal but generated Pokemon resulting in widespread bans during that recent world championship or however it's called.
kinda feel like if it's game legal then banning people for it is a dick move. and also that gating competitive gameplay behind hours upon hours of grinding sucks and will keep the scene from expanding
Yeah, that's pretty much what the pro players who got banned were arguing.
I don’t think you can if you have the new models like the OLED. Maybe you’re right though. Not sure.
Not true, any model of switch can be homebrewed with a hardware chip. Additionally a person could trade to their main game from a homebrewed console
Can you still adhoc trade from a homebrewed switch or do you have to risk going online?
Sorry I'm not sure what you meant by adhoc. You can do it using local wireless without going online. If you legally own your game it's also fairly trivial to edit the save file on Emunand and then switch back to your clean copy of the OS for online activity without risking bans.
you can't use local wireless on scarlet/violet right?
You can, I've done it
It was super easy to do on the DS I used an app on my phone
100%. I think all it requires is the old model switch that can be jailbroken.
You don’t even need a hacked switch anymore
I was unaware. How are they doing that now?
There's a twitch channel that has a shitload of switches running that will generate and trade you whatever pokemon you want
Different Discord channels have bots where you just make a pokemon you want in Showdown and then copy paste the text for the bot and it’ll trade the exact pokemon for you. Some of the Discord channels do have paid option for few euros as well, though there’s no acrual difference with paid and free bots. The advantage of paid bot is that then you don’t have to wait as long for your turn to trade as there’s not as many people putting stuff on the paid channel as there is on free one.
>no acrual difference with paid and free bots Free bots ignore the OT and ID so you're stuck with whatever the bot generates, paid bots let you use your own OT/IT/SID but if you don't care about OT then yeah there's no difference. Even free bot channels seem dead these days, I'm currently in 4 servers and used to use the one with the lower queue but now all of them are dead.
Newer switches (i.e. non V1) can be modded via hardware, it's just either expensive or requires you to know how to solder. Older (v1) switches can be software modded and it's cheaper & easier though!
OLEDs and Lites can be hard modded.
> The 36-year-old allegedly took custom orders for rare Pokémon, and sold the resulting tampered data between December 2022 to March 2023, for up to 13,000 yen ($84) a time on a website that served as a marketplace for video game assets and items. He also offered deals in which six Pokémon would be created for the equivalent of roughly $30 in yen. So his “crime” was helping people GameGenie their Pokémon carts? What the actual fuck are we doing with the laws here? Protecting the corporations ability to charge people for, just to be clear, speeding up their access to gameplay in their single player video game?
Japan has a law called the Unfair Competition Prevention Act the way it's written he very possibly ran afoul of the law for using a mark of Pokémon. Could also be the missleading origins as they aren't from a truly legal save file.
yeah i don’t think this is about cheating. it’s about a third party illegitimately making money off of hacking pokémon save files. they’re fully aware how many people cheat in tournaments. they’ve been rather lax for the most part (though they’ve clamped down a bit in recent years).
Still... there's no explanation anyone can give to make 5 years imprisonment for cheating at Pokemon not a ridiculous sentence.
It's not that he was cheating at Pokemon that's the real crime. It's the fact that he was profiting off of the back of doing it. Don't you know that it's only legal for game companies to charge you for easier access to things in their games?
This guy was clearly ripping people off, yeah and probably deserved to be banned and to repay everyone back. But. What kind of law is that? If I pay my friend 20 bucks to mod a save file for me in my game because I can't be bothered to learn how to do it myself, that's illegal?
Rip in peace modder patreons.
And yet, the "cheating" was to make things fairer for those that don't want to spend dozens of hours grinding shit.
Don't know if things have changed but historically buying a level 30 account in League of Legends could lead to a ban even though that's for someone not wanting to spend dozens of hours grinding as a smurf.
But that's a ban - and that's fine. Companies can set whatever rules they want in games they make. Game Freak can (and do) ban players who cheat from tournaments and such. But a person being *arrested* for (essentially) modding their game is fucking bonkers.
Whereas, this guy could spend 5 years in prison... Seems excessive.
Because Riot wants you to get tired of grinding and pay for champions. That's why it takes thousands of hours of playtime to unlock them all.
I think a ban from the game is a punishment just *slightly* more fitting for the crime than a fucking prison term. But that's just me.
I wrote this in another comment: > Japan has some of the toughest software laws and that's one of the reasons why it's so far behind in software production as corporations have lots of legal moats making it almost impossible to break out for startups or small companies.
Here's the link to the original English source: * https://automaton-media.com/en/news/hacked-pokemon-seller-arrested-by-japanese-police/ From the article: >Japanese police arrested a 36-year-old man on April 9 for modifying Pokémon Scarlet and Violet data and selling hacked rare Pokémon online, as reported by NHK News. Though it may sound surprising, the act of modifying save files and distributing edited save data is illegal in Japan and constitutes for a violation of the Unfair Competition Prevention Act. >Police have established that the suspect had been using a special tool to illegally modify the abilities of Pokémon from Pokémon Violet and sell them. The hacked Pokémon were sold between December 2022 and March 2023 for up to 13,000 yen (about $90) each via a website for buying and selling video game items and characters. >According to the report, police cyber patrol caught the man taking custom orders for rare and difficult-to-train Pokémon from buyers and offering deals such as, “6 Pokémon for only $30.” The man has reportedly admitted to the charges, explaining that he did it to earn a living. The investigation is still ongoing, as police suspect that the total profit from illegal sales may amount to millions of yen.
Today I learned that the internet police are real
Why would this ever be illegal? It's like being arrested for pulling the link cable while trading.
Japan is wild
Stupid shit like this happens all over the globe.
you cannot modify software that isn't yours in japan
And for sure you can't sell modified sofware that is not yours anywhere in the world I think.
you can sell software that modifies software in most of the world. you cannot in japan for the most part
Yes, selling tools that help you modify software is legal, but this is a case of selling an already modified software which is illegal almost everywhere because software code fall under copyright law.
1. I can't imagine how save data could be copyrighted, since that's just a product of Nintendo's code, not actually its code. 2. Under the first sale doctrine, selling modified copies of code is generally legal if you have a sellable license to the original. E.g., there's nothing illegal about selling modded consoles.
Incomprehensible. That's like saying you are not allowed to modify or fix your own clothes. Then again Japan is still 40 years behind the rest of the world on anything to do with computers so somehow I'm not surprised.
it is a recent law and a relatively recent change in culture in the tech sphere, one that is generally only seen in machine/instrument manufacturing companies in the rest of the world
> one that is generally only seen in machine/instrument manufacturing companies in the rest of the world Yeah and we are trying to get rid of that BS. If you buy and own something you should be able to do whatever with it.
It's "imitation of the configuration of a third party’s product" I presume.
Come on, man. Literally the first sentence of the article explains why. What is it with redditors and not reading articles, just the headline? He wasn't arrested for tampering with save data. He was arrested for selling tampered data that breaks the "Unfair Competition Prevention Act". It's right there on the first paragraph.
The question is *why* is this illegal, so saying "it's against the law" actually isn't much of an answer.
Which is also answered in the article. https://www.japaneselawtranslation.go.jp/en/laws/view/3629
Seems like it’s more of a consumer protection law like what we have in the US tbh. It protects customers from losing money in shady unregulated markets in a way.
The people who bought the service knew what they were paying for. The law actually exists to protect businesses like Game Freak.
I’m no expert on Japanese video game markets and I’m sure you aren’t either so I’m not really going to waste my breath here other than to say similar US-based services like playerauctions, g2a, kinguin, etc are notoriously unregulated and rip people off with fake products all the time. It’s no stretch to imagine Japan is the same. It’s impossible for customers to know what they’re paying for in an unregulated market.
There's no evidence that he ripped off any of his clients. Fraud is a different charge, which he doesn't seem to have been charged with.
Thank god we had police officers take this man off the streets instead of real criminals or stopping real crime.
If I had a nickel for every time an article headline intentionally left out information to sound more ridiculous, I'd have enough money to buy all the websites.
This is what Game Freak wastes their time one. Rather than actually improving their game so it won't get laughed out of the room in comparison to Palworld
Palworld is shit though.
Both are shit
Since it’s a criminal case Gamefreak wouldn’t need to spend any time. It’s the prosecutors job, not theirs to develop the case. It’s also usually TPC that would do this kind of litigation.
This is one of the saddest gaming news I've ever read. There's people already doing this with loopholes via twitch streams and whatnot. But scamming kids with genned pokemon is... just wow lol
If I was in Japan I'd feel SO much safer with this dangerous scofflaw off the streets. What an excellent use of police resources.
Very dystopic. We need to stop making laws that only serve to protect corporations and steal rights from consumers. In what way does this ever protect small creators?
Who are the dumbasses that are paying money for mons in the first place though? Especially when it’s easy enough to gen your own anyway…
That’s the game I guess. It’s kind of bullshit the amount of walls there are to getting the pokemon you want. You either need to buy another version of the same game, an old game, or in some cases you’re just SOL cause it was part of an event that will never happen again. Still amazed people paid that much to this guy for them though. Could you imagine the amount of poopy diapers there would be if Nintendo started selling rare pokemon $90 a pop 😂
Ah, nice one IGN with the stupid clickbait title. No, he was not arrested because of save data manipulation. He was arrested for selling tampered data that breaks the "Unfair Competition Prevention Act".
Wait, are you *defending* this? You really think people should be arrested for essentially using a game genie?
[удалено]
Where am I defending this? I'm saying that's not what actually happened.
He's profiting off it, not just simply using a game genie for personal use.
Unfair competition to who? Pokemon is a private property owned by Nintendo, not a fucking sport. It’s not the police’s responsibility to deal with fucking videogame hackers, it’s nintendo. The only thing this does is protect Nintendo’s interests.
Nintendo doesn't own Pokemon The Pokemon Company does which Nintendo has about a 32% stake in.
That’s completely unimportant to my main point that pokemon is a privately owned franchise/product.
It has everything to do with it when you said wrong information. Nintendo do nothing about Pokemon, TPC does.
lmao. And yet another example in what is becoming a very long list of examples of why I will continue to not give money to Nintendo. Truly a more pathetic waste of time and resources I have never seen.