Man Fined $1.5 Million For Leaked Mario Game 287
An anonymous reader writes "A Queensland man will have to pay Nintendo $1.5 million in damages after illegally copying and uploading one of its recent games to the internet ahead of its release, the gaming giant says. Nintendo said the loss was caused when James Burt made New Super Mario Bros Wii available for illegal download a week ahead of its official Australian release in November of last year. Nintendo applied for and was granted a search order by the Federal Court, forcing Burt to disclose the whereabouts of all his computers, disks and electronic storage devices in November. He was also ordered to allow access, including passwords, to his social networking sites, email accounts and websites."
Pro-piracy (Score:4, Insightful)
I often see many pro-piracy comments on slashdot on these things (probably also because pirates are more interested on the matter). But many times these are actual damages caused to companies. Putting out that game a week before surely counted a lot of illegal downloading and people not buying the game. Sure it's bad to for him, but those are the lost money for Nintendo. What's so wrong about them suing him?
Re:Pro-piracy (Score:4, Interesting)
What's so wrong about them suing him?
There's nothing wrong with them suing him.
The Pro-piracy comments you've seen is (probably) more directed towards "freedom" as the technologies/laws that limits piracy also limits that much valued freedom.
Ergo pro freedom = there will be piracy
Re:Pro-piracy (Score:5, Insightful)
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Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)
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Exactly. I don't think I've seen that many people on here advocate piracy, it's usually anti-anti-piracy laws, such as the proposed UK law where suspected filesharers can be cut off without trial, disproportionate fines (especially from the RIAA) or the treating of bittorrent as illigal regardless of what's being shared (open source software etc). This can't really be treated as any of those. It would seem that the fine is roughly equivalent to 15000 copies of the game. That's assuming none is added for the crime, so it seems like a fairly reasonable fine. The only possible problem I can see is that he had to give over access to social networking sites etc. as that has little to do with the crime.
Plus, most people here would only advocate it when it's obvious there's no losses.
Like TV shows. Many people here torrent TV shows. When's the last time you let an ad influence your purchasing decisions? A lot of us won't, so why cost the companies money, while also annoying yourself with ads? Plus, after watching a good TV show, many people talk about it. The overall net result is more viewers, even if the pirates provide no direct financial gain, and even if you feel they shouldn't have access to that con
Re:Pro-piracy (Score:4, Insightful)
There's nothing wrong with them suing him.
He should go to jail. He used the special access his job gave him to steal from Nintendo. Yes, I used the s-word. Redistributing unpublished content is theft...he stole something valuable and monetizable from Nintendo (the right of first publication), and they don't have it anymore.
What he did was deliberate and premeditated. He abused a position of trust. There is no "Haha, just kidding" defense or excuse for this crap. This kind of shit severely weakens the man-years of effort expended towards fixing broken copyright laws.
He's not cute. He's not funny. He's a criminal.
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Totally agreed, and this is one of the main reasons why I am so against special "electronic" versions of already-existing laws.
If I am recording content from my legitimate cable TV connection and consuming it in my own home, with my friends and family, it should not matter if I am using the cable company's hardware or my own. The second I take that data and publish it (torrent, for example) nail my ass to the wall with existing copyright and/or distribution laws. There's no need for a special "digital" ver
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This is not some guy who shared a wii game. He stole (and yes, in this context that is the correct term) an unreleased game from his employer and released it to the world. This is the same action that just landed that chinese guy a 15 year jail term--taking your employer's proprietary information is straight up illegal. We call it espionage when you take it to benefit a competing company/government...we call it leaking when you take it to spread around...but either way
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Ok, and I agree to that, but why do they get his passwords and access to various online accounts? Is his Facebook account really relevant to this? THAT is the real scary part -- not that a dude got busted for doing something illegal, but that once busted the 'authorities' decided they should get access to everything in his life.
Re:Pro-piracy (Score:4, Interesting)
More chilling - a corporation with suspicion of someone not 'busted' can get a court to confiscate every computer and device someone owns, and force them to turn over every password to every account they have so the company can root around for evidence for a civil matter (copyright infringement).
Maybe when the MafIAA alleges an IP address that might have been assigned to you at some point was infringing, and gets the thugs to toss your place and take anything they want and look at all your emails, texts, and friends online you might then want to complain, but you won't own anything electronic anymore to complain with.
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Was Nintendo deprived of the game completely? No?
Then it was breach of trade secret or infringement that the person that we're discussing is guilty of, not theft. It's neither correct nor insightful to call it stealing- because, sadly, it still isn't that.
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Re:Pro-piracy (Score:5, Insightful)
No, that's still not stealing. It's still copyright infringement. If he say, stole the disc from his company and kept it in a vault, then that would constitute theft. Otherwise, it's still copyright infringement.
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unfortunatly nothing is so clear cut. There are three types of downloaders:
a) A person wanting to try out a game, but the trial versions are inaccesible for some reason or another. Or maybe he wants to test it on his rig, to see if the "final" product performs well on his rig as there may be some differences between trial and final versions. He illegally downalods, finds he likes the game and it runs well on his system, then buys it. In this case it is not a lost sale, and in fact can be argued that the ill
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Unfortunately, most of the comments I see tend to be freeloaders hiding behind a banner of freedom so they can feel all warm and fuzzy inside when they blindly download dozens of games without paying for them.
DING DING DING! You are absolutely right.
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In most realities people both buy and download, they buy the games, music, movies that are worth re-playing/listening/watching. And discard those which are utter crap, believe it or not pirating is capitalism at work. It forces companies to manufacture goods on a competitive level that needs to actually be better for the consu
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Re:Pro-piracy (Score:5, Insightful)
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I was going to write a post about that as well, and wondering why it would matter for an AUS release, as they actually have laws (or had, I assume they still exist) making region locking illegal, and thus importing media from else where a trivial matter.
However, I then looked up the release dates of the game. Australia got it on Nov 12th, NA got it on the 15th, EU got it on the 20th, and JP got it on Dec 3rd.
So, however he got it, he released it prior to ANYONE getting it, and probably in a region free ver
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I was going to write a post about that as well, and wondering why it would matter for an AUS release, as they actually have laws (or had, I assume they still exist) making region locking illegal,
That sounds odd, since they have laws regarding violent videogames and such. Certain games get banned. Wouldn't it make sense for them to condone regional banning and then just get game developers to comply with government regulation?
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It's true - region locking isn't permitted here. The most obvious manifestation of this is the fact that any DVD player you buy in Australia can play any region disc with no issues. Really pissed me off when I moved to the US for a few years and found I couldn't play any of my DVDs with a US DVD player except for the couple I had that were region 1 (I have an assortment of region 1, 2 and 4 DVDs, depending on which ones I could find cheapest on Ebay usually).
Secondly we don't exactly have "laws against viol
Re:Pro-piracy (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Pro-piracy (Score:5, Interesting)
And yet they still don't give a damn about piracy, technologically speaking, or at least they care about it a lot less than they care to annoy homebrewers and importers.
Proof: the last three iterations of Wii System Updates closed exploits used to run homebrew, but an ancient exploit that is still being used for piracy has remained untouched for that long (and counting). More proof: it would be trivial for them to detect and block modchips at the system update level, but so far they haven't even tried. Even more proof: NIntendo seems to be happy deliberately bricking your Wii if you have imported it, but it certainly hasn't even crossed their mind to do that for people who pirate. Yes, System Update 4.2 deliberately bricked all Korean Wiis that had been switched to the USA or EUR region. And by this I mean an explicit if(korean_detected()) { show_error_code_on_boot(003); }.
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Because it's all about money...
People who modchip their machines to pirate games will either pirate or do without. If you make piracy impossible, your game sales will be largely unaffected but sales of the hardware and associated physical accessories will go down (pirates can't pirate the hardware so they have to buy it).
People who play legitimate out of region games or homebrew are typically not interested in piracy, and want to do legitimate things such as playing cheaper (but still legit) games from abro
Instead of homebrew, get an Aspire Revo (Score:2)
or buy additional devices to perform the functions that homebrew would achieve on a console
I have run Wii homebrew once or twice, but now I really don't see the point. Back in the days of the original Xbox, a lot of people used to buy Xbox consoles just to run XBMC or other homebrew. That's no longer necessary now that Acer makes the Aspire Revo, a $200 PC the size of a Wii that runs a standard Windows or Linux operating system. Depending on the TV, you can use a $40 VGA-to-composite cable or a $10 HDMI cable.
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As i said, to avoid having to buy additional devices...
That $200 PC is unlikely to be very good for gaming, and few (if any) of the games will be designed for a wii style control method.
Some of us might want both wii games *and* a media player without having to buy multiple devices.
And just because you can...
And most importantly, for the principle of it - you buy the device, you don't rent it, you should be able to use it for any purpose you see fit
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Both the Xbox1 and the Wii can run Linux. On the Wii nowadays this means using BootMii + Mini, which is a completely new framework that has no relation to any Nintendo code (though strictly speaking it isn't cleanroom, as we didn't go through the cleanroom process which involves having separate teams write a spec and implement the software to it). This is a completely legal setup as far as we know.
"Native" Xbox1 homebrew (running on the Microsoft kernel) uses the Microsoft SDK, which makes binaries illegal
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Re:Instead of homebrew, get an Aspire Revo (Score:4, Informative)
It's mostly IRC logs, but I can put up a more detailed report if you're interested.
The gist is that libogc can be mostly broken down like this:
The big fat problem is the GX driver (graphics). Everything else could be replaced with little to average effort, and the hardware is documented enough to get it to work.
Personally, though, once the large obstacle that is legal GX is overcome, I'd advocate developing an entirely new system from scratch, based on Linux or eCos or some other embedded OS, working on top of mini and ditching Nintendo's IOS. I've tried to get people interested in such a project for quite a while but haven't really found any significant support, and by now I've mostly move away from the Wii and on to other systems.
Wii homebrew legal status (Score:2)
It's mostly IRC logs, but I can put up a more detailed report if you're interested.
Yes, I'd appreciate a public document about the legal status of libogc that I can cite in discussions or in a page comparing platforms as possible homebrew development targets.
and at least one binary blob ripped verbatim from Nintendo (the DSP program to perform memory card unlocking).
DSP programs like that might have such a thin copyright that they're not worth rewriting, if the U.S. cases Sega v. Accolade and Lexmark v. Static Control Components are anything to go on.
Personally, though, once the large obstacle that is legal GX is overcome, I'd advocate developing an entirely new system from scratch, based on Linux or eCos or some other embedded OS
How much CPU and RAM overhead would Linux add? And how long does it take to boot Linux from HBC, or were you planning "Linux Channel"? And how much
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I'll see what I can do about the report.
Linux has some extra overheads, which is why I suggested eCos, althought the kernel does boot in a of couple seconds and the userspace framework could be very thin. USB, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi are already supported by Linux (they're standard chips/interfaces). Mini doesn't have to support anything, as it can just enable direct access by the PPC by flipping some bits in a register (this is how Linux works), and the advantage of offloading driver support to the Starlet CPU is
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Wi-Fi would need some porting of the Linux b43 driver.
Wouldn't that actually be quite a bit of effort? WiFi drivers don't seem to me to be the pinnacle of elegant and concise driver programming.
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The Linux b43 driver uses the standard Linux wireless driver interface. I don't see it hooking into that many places in the kernel. There also appears to be a driver in OpenBSD for the same hardware.
It's obviously not trivial, but I don't see why it would have to be a huge effort.
Re:Pro-piracy (Score:4, Interesting)
Hey marcan, first let me tip my hat for your work.
Second, I use some of those "oh noes piratz" enhancing mechanisms to copy my legally purchased games to a USB hard disk and play them. Note that I bought my Wii console while living in Britain, I have bought games in Mexico (where I am from) and USA (cheaper to ask a relative to get them from there) AND Germany (where I am currently living and playing games).
When I moved to Germany, I refused to take all my CDs/DVDs with me [Laugagge handlers at Lufthansa are a bunch of monkeys.. you should see the state of my bags when they arrived to Germany], therefore I put all the content (serveral music CDs, some DVD movies and several Wii games) into magnetic media and took them with me.
Having said that, I really applaud Nintendo for doing this specific move, and I completely believe that this is the *right* move to combat piracy.
It is not illegal to modify hardware you buy, it is not illegal to play a copy of your purchased media, however, IT IS illegal to distribute such media without copyright permit; and that is what Nintendo prosecuted with this guy.
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The funny thing is the homebrew community does much more to fight piracy than Nintendo. They ban any app that even remotely might be used to facilitate piracy. And still Nintendo goes after the homebrew.
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95% of the modchips out there are trivial to detect. They'll have stupid stuff like custom commands that can be used to identify them, and broken or flat out incorrect implementations of standard commands. Seriously. They aren't even trying. This isn't even remotely in the same league as Xbox 360 hacks and the like, which have evolved to be quite a bit stealthier due to Microsoft's detection efforts.
As for the exploit, it's the downgrade hole originally used by Comex's DVDX34 installer (which was quickly ab
Re:Pro-piracy (Score:5, Insightful)
Seriously. They aren't even trying. This isn't even remotely in the same league as Xbox 360 hacks and the like, which have evolved to be quite a bit stealthier due to Microsoft's detection efforts.
So the choices are...
1. don't try, and people will copy your stuff
2. try, and people will defeat it and copy your stuff.
I wonder which of the above two options is cheaper?
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They could completely disable an entire generation of older non-upgradeable or crappily-upgradable modchips with a relatively simple update, permanently. Talk about low-hanging fruit.
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95% of the modchips out there are trivial to detect. They'll have stupid stuff like custom commands that can be used to identify them, and broken or flat out incorrect implementations of standard commands. Seriously. They aren't even trying.
Why should they go out of their way to try? Why should they have to chase down every single different mod chip, find a way to identify it and implement that way? Why should they have to go to this effort?
The hardware as sold is in an expected configuration - if you are going to run it outside of the expected configuration in any way, then why are you expecting updates or addons to work at all?
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Uhh, because ostensibly they don't want piracy?
I don't have a clue what point you're trying to express there. Of course Nintendo has no obligation to do anything. I'm just pointing out how simple and effective modchip detection would be against a large class of users who pirate.
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It's not so much pro-piracy, as anti-the-things-that-would-be-required-to-prevent-piracy.
In order to make a song or movie uncopyable, you end up punishing the people who aren't breaking the law. It's been the same way with copy protection ever since it was invented - the pirates make a copy with the copy protection removed and distribute that, and the legitimate users have to put up with the inconvenience. The list is long...
When software was distributed on audio tape for home computers, copy protection oft
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I often see many pro-piracy comments on slashdot on these things (probably also because pirates are more interested on the matter). But many times these are actual damages caused to companies. Putting out that game a week before surely counted a lot of illegal downloading and people not buying the game. Sure it's bad to for him, but those are the lost money for Nintendo. What's so wrong about them suing him?
There is nothing wrong with suing him.
However, slapping him with US$ 1.5mil fine is pretty retarded.
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There's the standard arguments about: pirates weren't going to buy the game anyway; legitimate customers don't like to do illegal things to begin with; some people will buy it even after pirating it once it actually comes out; some people will play their friends' pirated version and buy their own.
All of that aside...why do they need the passwords to his email/facebook/etc? That seems like a massive invasion of privacy. Would they ask for all of the snail mail correspondence that he's had for the last few
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Let me preface by saying that this case was actually a settlement and not a judgment, so my comments don't necessarily apply directly to this one case.
What's so wrong about suing? Nothing. The problem most people have is how bogus and utterly life-ruining the amounts are. Most people won't be able to pay something like $1.5MM. Ever. Whether an individual cares about piracy or not, right there we have to stop and question whether or not literally ruining a person's life is justice being served. Just
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Common sense tells you that a release of a new game (or movie or whatever) is a big event, and it goes off to a timetable in order to maximise the hype and all that. Much as we hate those marketing types, that's reality.
Someone who buggers up that timetable is committing serious sabotage against that company, a
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You know, that's a bit silly. First of all, nobody, or at least not I, have argued that he should go completely free, and secondly;Do you seriously think he'd be more or less of a deterrent if he had been hit with a $100 000 stick instead?
The difference is that there would have been some hope to actually pay that amount and move on with his life, rather than being stuck in eternal poverty with nothing left to lose really. By this decision justice has not been done, and nobody got deterred that wouldn't have
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Yep. And, in the end, I think we're going to find that he's being charged with infringement, breach of trade secret, tortious interference, or some combo of part or all of the aforementioned before it's all said and done. And, honestly, while I won't call it stealing like some have (it's not), he very definitely needs to face th
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I'm pretty sure bankruptcy doesn't free you from civil penalties like this. I'm willing to be corrected though.
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Depends on what the country's statutes of limitations might be- if there is one, they can only attempt to collect within the timeframe allowed by law. If they can't, they can only get from you what they can collect during that time. If you're broke, they can't really collect, making you effectively what they call "judgment proof" for the duration of your inability to pay and the statute's clock, which begins when you default on it.
For Australia, I think it's something like 6 years for debts of any kind, b
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Meh, teaches him consequences. Do bad things, get punished. Maybe his parents should've taught him that lesson before he learned it the hard way.
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You mean:
Do bad things->Get caught->Get punished.
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What does the companies lack of protecting their IP have to do with anything?
Great I get to sound like an RIAA commercial now. If there is a car sitting on the street with the keys in it and door open, you aren't allowed to take that car.
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It contains - "The matter was settled between Mr Burt and Nintendo last month."
I assume some sort of settlement has been agreed upon.
There's a leak? (Score:4, Funny)
Quick, we need a plumber.
Re:There's a leak? (Score:4, Funny)
Quick, we need a plumber.
It has always amused me that the most popular video game character by far is a "fat Italian plumber" instead of mister "awesome cool superdude".
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Basically, I've always hated Superman, but I started to like him a bit more after I saw Kill Bill, they had a nice conversation about him.
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Re:There's a leak? (Score:5, Insightful)
One of the recent big ones was a cynical doctor with a lame leg and drug addiction.
I think you meant "One of the recent big ones was a completely honest doctor with a lame leg and takes prescription pain killers for the pain his lame leg causes him".
Sorry, but it really irks me when people call House a drug addict when it's been clearly shown that he's not (when his leg was temporarily better from the end of season 2 through early season 3, he didn't take any Vicodin - if he was addicted, he'd have continued to take Vicodin even after the pain was gone). Also, it bugs me that people call being honest about shitty things "cynical", but that's a lesser annoyance.
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Proportionality. (Score:5, Insightful)
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In most countries bankruptcy does not delete money owed in judgements. I don't know how that works in Australia though.
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In AU, there is the very rare "Part X" bankruptcy, which does wipe all debts completely after a decade or so. It's mostly intended for people who somehow owe so much money that they will never pay it off (happens a lot more that you would think, since eg. banks force people such as directors to be jointly and severally responsible personally for company debts even when acting with due diligence, and so on).
It does have serious downsides (something pretty close to "no more credit, ever", plus an awful lot of
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No, that is not why bankruptcy laws were introduced. Maybe you should go read a book on the subject before showing your ignorance to the world.
Re:Proportionality. (Score:5, Insightful)
Now, if you're going down these lines you need to separate out the punitive damages from the actual damages. The former should be taken in context of the ability for the person to pay (i.e. if you're suing a multinational, you expect punitive damages significant enough for them to sit up and take notice.) The later should probably not be.
Re:Proportionality. (Score:4, Interesting)
You have a point. BUT... the guy didn't just trip over and somehow end up leaking the game by accident. He made a conscious decision to do what he did, knowing full well it could land him in hot water. It was an easily avoidable situation which he chose to place himself into, and paid the price. A very high price, and probably an immoral price, but he made his choice.
Re:Proportionality. (Score:5, Interesting)
here should be some kind of proportion to the damages, seriously that amount ruins an ordinary person for the rest of their life. Did the court deliberately set out to give him a life sentence of sorts? And if the amounts are to be set at company rates for individuals he should have his own choice just to do some time for it. Seriously, go on a walk for 3 years and move on in your life instead of being sentenced to financial death for the rest of your natural time.
Your suggestion seems to be setting the amount as punishment, not as restitution for lost sales. Now, I think the $1.5 million in lost sales is highly debatable, but I would think that whatever amount is awarded should be to recover the amount of lost sales, not a punitive amount as punishment that's scaled to what the person makes.
To flip this around, if someone committed a premeditated violent crime that they are sentenced to jail for 20 years, I wouldn't expect them to reduce the sentence for a 70 year old because "20 years might be all he's got left, it's a life sentence" vs. the 25 year old who committed the same crime.
Re:Proportionality. (Score:5, Informative)
I read TFA (I know, I know).
He hasn't actually been fined a single cent. The $1.5 million is an out of court settlement.
From what I understand (I don't know how true this is, IANAL), when settlements of this nature are made it's not uncommon for the company getting the settlement to make no real effort to actually get the money. They just wanted a big news headline saying "Man has been stung for $1.5 million for pirating our product".
Though if it's an out of court settlement, I daresay bankruptcy would probably make it go away altogether.
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Also - if he did write off the settlement in bankruptcy, would Nintendo be able to sue him again, since the original settlement no longer stands? I have no idea how Austrailian law works...
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To flip this around, if someone committed a premeditated violent crime that they are sentenced to jail for 20 years, I wouldn't expect them to reduce the sentence for a 70 year old because "20 years might be all he's got left, it's a life sentence" vs. the 25 year old who committed the same crime.
Old age is considered all the time in parole hearings. Also, if you think $1.5x10^6 is an appropriate fine for a middle class fellow, why is that the upper class never gets fined for robbing the middle class of money to the tune of 10^12? If you are fine with that double standard, then you can blow me.
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There is a proportion to the damages. It has nothing to do with what the perpetrator has, owns, or makes. It has to do with the damage to the victim. He took a game that was expected to sell 15 million copies and illegally released it on the internet. Then, when the game was released, it sold 10 million copies. The damages should be the profit from those 5 million unsold games. $1.5 million seems fair to me.
You act like James Burt is the victim, but he is not. He is the perpetrator. He doesn't get to chose
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There should be some kind of proportion to the damages, (...) Seriously, go on a walk for 3 years and move on in your life instead of being sentenced to financial death for the rest of your natural time.
Games can generate hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue, Modern Warfare 2 has passed the billion. It is very possible that 1.5 million dollars is in proportion to the damages. What good does prison time do to recover those? If a homeless guy vandalizes my car either I or my insurance company will have to eat the cost, I don't get anything back from him doing jail time. But if that guy ever wins the lottery I want them to take the money and pay me back no matter how long time has passed. That it's a co
Comment removed (Score:4, Interesting)
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I remember people who pirated Quake 2 and then played it for 2 hours a day for the next 3 years - I don't think value for money enters the equation.
There's also the "getting the game before the release" aspect that people seem to like.
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The question is how many would have sold if the game was not put out for unauthorized and illegal copying? It could have been 10 million and 1, or it could have been 20 million.
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The people who are going to download instead of paying are not the people who will go to the store and buy a game - they think that they're overpriced and if piracy wasn't an option, they just wouldn't play it.
I've always paid for games until recently when I got pirated copies of a few games - not because I didn't feel that the game was worth the money, but because of the DRM involved. Hell, I even had conversations with employees at the companies where I told them flat out "I WANT to buy your game, but yo
Did he do the damage? (Score:2)
If it's that easy for one ordinary person to do that much damage, then I think you have to call into question, philosophically, if it's really him that did the damage. Information can be copied, as a fundamental principle. They have created information, and people are copying it. Is that Burt's fault? By enabling information - whose inherent property is its reproducibility - to be reproduced, has he not just allowed the natural order to be established? I guess that's just a long-winded way of saying "inform
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a week ahead of its official Australian release
Australian game releases typically lag behind other regions.
Re:Curious... (Score:5, Funny)
Australian game releases typically lag behind other regions.
Australia: kicked from the world for unacceptable latency.
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It appears this was supposed to be one of those simultaneous releases.
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I'm more curious as to how they caught him. Are pre-release copies of the game watermarked? Or did he just have a big mouth?
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No it should mean that the punishment reflects both the harm done and his ability to pay, unless you're saying that what he did really does merit the punishment of lifetime bankruptcy. It should cut the other way too: if he'd been rich he should have been fined more.
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What a heap of ill thought-out bullshit.
The defendant not having enough money isn't a valid reason for giving him a fine that, to him, is an economical death-sentence. "Scot free" doesn't even enter it. Why should a multimilionaire get a slap on the wrist if even that, and a poor guy get the economical death-sentence for the same crime? And is this a "crime" that really should carry the economical deathpenalty? Should any offence? Is it even consistent with human rights and the constitution of the United St
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This is Australia not the US.
Interesting is that he had to give up his social networking and email passwords... That wouldn't fly in the USA.
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The average wage in Queensland is $61,464 (figures from around 2009). So, the average person would earn that in his lifetime (around 25 years working).
Of course, I don't what he is earning, but he is more likely to make that much in a life then not, assuming people on average work for 25+ years (fair enough assumption).
In US$, this would be closer to 1.3 million.
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But how close is that "average wage" to reality? Take 20 people, 19 making $20,000 and 1 making $1,000,000m. The average (arithmetic mean) is $69,000... which is almost two and a half times what 95% of the population make. While that's just random, it shows how big outliers can distort statistics.
Not to mention even were it true, and he was making that much before - he won't be now.
FWIW, I actually live in Queensland, and I'd trust that figure to accurately represent your average Queenslander like I'd trust
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Of course statistics are only a sampling of reality, my only point is that the average Male (and Female, but Males on average make more) in Queensland will probably make 1.5 million in total earnings during his lifetime. Of course the unemployed and the high-makers effect the likelihood.
Obviously big outliers can cause problems, but I would hope a Government commissioned study would have a larger sample size than in your fictional example.
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That's why you also look at the median income which is still well over 50k.
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