Retro gaming YouTuber Once Were Nerd sued and raided by the Italian government

Maybe you can tell me, since I only noticed around 2007-2008.

Did Sourceforge always suck balls?

eMule is doing fine and well tho

maybe we should make more p2p kademilia software to combat the social media giants

I downloaded episodes of South Park using eMule over dial up internet.

> Sourceforge

That's another trip down memory lane...

I don't think that's the only possibility, but I am wondering why Once Were Nerd was targeted. Is he famous enough to serve as a good example for a new policy? Did he cut someone powerful off in traffic? Did his videos threaten someone's business? Cui bono?

> They don't do anything unless money is involved.

I disagree. They could have done it to be under the spotlight and progress their career.

It really is alive and kicking, and now there's a smarter way to find things compared to the integrated file search (which can lead to fake content, viruses or... worse).

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.

devil's advocate says that lawyer is just doing the job hired to do by the copyright owner. if a copyright owner didn't care, they wouldn't hire these lawyers. if a lawyer is somehow the copyright owner, well, they obviously care

On the other hand, your criminal record matters far less in Germany than it does in the US. Most employers never ask for your record, especially in white collar jobs, and the ones that do usually only look for relevant offenses. If you are convicted for fraud that will make it harder to get a job as accountant, but an conviction for insulting an official or for drug possession years ago is unlikely to have a major impact.

Obviously you shouldn't be charged for stuff like that (and there was backlash for that incident), but the are less than it might appear to the American reader. Being convicted does not turn you into the scum of society in Germany

> uk is starting to arrest and jail or threaten to jail old grandmothers

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

Many European countries also have "election silence", basically a blanked ban on political speech, usually for a day or two before and during an election. This is supposedly done to "give people space to deliberate without undue influence."

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.

As a New Zealander, I was most surprised to learn we had a daily telegraph.

Looks like webworm has covered them

https://www.webworm.co/p/badnews

The Daily Mail is a right-wing tabloid rag by Rupert Murdoch. That's propaganda and untrustworthy on its face

> No, they re-release a couple of them, as it conveniences them,

It's significant more than a couple these days. But the number doesn't really matter, it's an ongoing process, and nobody knows which are released at which point. So nobody can claim any more that it's dead content.

> And the handheld consoles aren't competing with nintendo for people interested in playing retro games.

That doesn't matter, it's still not legal. If people want to play old games, OK, then do it, but let it stay with the fans, uncommercial. Don't the f** make money with it, and the h** don't make public advertisement for it. It's illegal, and owners are going after you for it if it's too obvious, because they have the right.

> 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.

Arguably this is a flaw in copyright laws. If a copyright owner refuses to make their copyrighted work available to the public, there should be some kind of "use it or lose it" exception - after all, this is all supposed to be in the public interest, in the end. (Haha yeah I know.)

But, that raises the issue of a company's older work competing with their newer work. They use copyright as a tool to withhold their own work, to increase the market for newer works. And companies like Disney use a "vault" model to artificially create demand for older works.

The question is, should companies be allowed to do this?

Technical forums assume that law is code, and everything is processed as if/then statements.

I mean, yes, but it is how IP works.

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.

"we grant them monopoly rights to do so"

Who is we? the combined world's governing bodies? the US corporate legal protections systems? japanese corruption?

Regardless, that is not how IP works and I do not think you think this is a proper resolution.

"just because we want it" or "it's been x years" does not pass legal scrutiny and would be dismissed in any legal venue on improper cause. You are free to not purchase the product whe navailable, where made no promises at time of orignal purchase, and are in no way harmed from the decision making of the firms.

is 30 years too long for copyrighting/trademarks? Maybe...but can't really argue that if for those 30 years they have actively defended the IP and proliferation of it from other vendors/firms. And even then.....the world is not the US.

The solution is to never purchase from the IP holder as a matte or protest. But with global scales, good luck affecting any corporations decision making.

Not the entire library, though. Games that aren't offered in any form anywhere, and also games that weren't localized (like Mother 3) shouldn't have copyright enforceable. It's either you give up production of the game or you produce it forever, no other sane way to go about it

Rent-seeking brings lots of money to lots of politicians, so they encourage it. Those same politicians also have the power to legally murder people, or lock them up for life. "Should" is irrelevant - focus on the "is".

Let's not give up just like that.

The rule of law is one of the greatest achievements of western society and a major reason for the west's global dominance.

True, it was always imperfect due to the realpolitik of power. But that doesn't change the fact that the very idea of rule of law is in opposition to rule of power.

Property Laws usually applies to weak in power. Courts teach to masses to show how they lack true power and wealth. It's for show

Natural Law is fair by definition. It is merely a reflection of ancient ethical norms.

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.

The jurisdiction is different. The alleged offense is different. The stage of legal proceedings is different.

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.

Consistency is the hobgoblin.

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.

> But AI-Companies usually do not steal data.

There at least two documented cases of the major AI companies downloading millions of books of torrents. Anthropic is in litigation about it right now, meta was in the news about it. I would be surprised if it's not all of them.

> LLMs are not being trained for personal use, they're being trained to be sold to the masses.

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.

One example is basically all of the major AI players have used Annas Archives/Libgen's database to unlawfully access millions of books.

To be clear, scraping the entire internet so that ChatGPT knows what Mickey Mouse is may not be a fair use of copyright. Or to be more specific, being able to generate images of Mickey Mouse may not be legal- that is the ingestion of those images that give the model the ability to generate images of copyrighted material. I guess the courts will decide that soon-ish?

My personal opinion is that since the laws haven't changed and society is still harshly punishing individuals for copyright infringement all the companies that have downloaded e.g. anna's archive should be dismantled, or at the very least their executives should be jailed.

Maybe the laws should be changed, maybe not, but the fact is that they haven't been.

RIP Aaron Swartz.

For covers, the recording is not considered the same as the original, but the underlying composition (notes and lyrics) are. Both composition and recording are separately covered by copyright.

No, but we don't need it to define what's our expectations of the effects from capitalism in it's later stages of maturity. Can we agree that the function of a corporation at least is to satisfy it's investors and maximise profits?

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.

All of language is tenuous overlap between speaker intent and listener interpretation. In this instance, how do you interpret the definition of capitalism for this context? Better to add meaning.

Capitalism is to capital what monarchism is to monarch.

You've used terms in the past like "autocracy", "cascading failure", "plastic", "human capital", "optical media", and "infotainment". Is that what precision looks like? Was that CD, CD-ROM, CD-RW, DVD-RAM, BluRay, etc, made of polyethylene or polypropylene, or maybe polyvinyl chloride?

>you chose to pirate them because your desire to play them outweighed your estimate of the moral / legal downsides?

textbook bs of putting other people action under microscope, no one is this precise in making decisions related to day to day stuff.

Wouldn't it show more agency to acknowledge you chose to focus on the word 'forced' because your desire to make a rhetorical critique outweighed your interest in engaging with the substantive issue of abandoned software preservation?

What are the moral downsides of pirating a game you can't buy anywhere?

I'm pretty sure the post you're replying to was referring to "legit ways" as in the purchase would be actually from the current rights holder. Buying on the secondary market comes with its own problems:

1. The people who made-- er, own the rights to the game get no financial benefit. Functionally, what is the difference to EA if I download a copy of NFS: Underground, or if I buy a copy from some rando on eBay? Yes, the courts care, but it's not exactly like I'm supporting the artists.

2. You are not guaranteed a legitimate copy. eBay sellers will ship duplicated discs all the time, whether contemporary copies or ones made recently to meet the demands of retro gaming. Can you claim you got duped and offload your moral responsibility to the seller? Maybe. But you could still be a pirate.

3. Copyright law is complicated, and you might still be pirating if you do get a legitimate copy. The arcade cabinet is a great example. Did the seller own it outright, or was it on a lease that got abandoned when the game was no longer profitable? In the latter case, your purchase would not be covered by the US first-sale doctrine. So you could spend £4095 and then may as well hoist the jolly roger.

4. The used game market is a long-standing problem currently being solved by games publishers. It will not be long before there are no old CDs of retro games available because they never existed in the first place.

I've just always been weirded out when people hold up gray market purchases of used media as some paradigm of moral responsibility. It's like a financial transaction with the transfer of physical media is some magical incantation that erases all questions of ownership.

So it's not immoral for a rights holder to manipulate you into buying more product...but it is immoral for me to continue to use the product I want, even after the company has made it impossible for me to compensate them for it?

The article mentions promotion. It also says he turned off affiliate links.

They seized 30 consoles of different types, which is not consistent with someone selling a lot of one.