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

255 points by BallsInIt 1y ago

logicchains 1y ago
It's astounding how much authoritarianism people are willing to tolerate in the name of maximising the economic incentives for producing entertainment media.
- gchamonlive 1y ago
  I don't think every regression in civil liberties is something that the society collectively accepted to tolerate. I'd say it's more often than not shoved down people's throats by lobbyists. It's just capitalism functioning as it's intended.
  - HPsquared 1y ago
    "Capitalism" doesn't have a proper definition; it's one of those words that just means whatever the speaker/listener wants it to mean. Better to use more precise terms.
    - 44520297 1y ago
      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.
      - Arch-TK 1y ago
        In cases like these it's sufficient to substitute "capitalism" for "crony capitalism". However, the people making these statements are unlikely to ever agree that there can exist a non-crony-capitalism.
      - HPsquared 1y ago
        Money in politics. An excess of political power in the halls of commerce as opposed to the other estates of the realm.
    - gchamonlive 1y ago
      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.
    - immibis 1y ago
      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?
      - HPsquared 1y ago
        Fair point, and A+ for effort.
- like_any_other 1y ago
  > willing Don't mistake the IP cartel's backroom lobbying for the will of the people.
  - izacus 1y ago
    These topics are full of people defending it. Every single time.
- kmeisthax 1y ago
  [dead]
- stale2002 1y ago
  Here the worst part, it doesn't even maximize economic incentives! This is about media that isn't even being sold in the first place. There is no financial benefit to anyone for strictly enforcing copyright on media that isn't being profited from in the first place.
user_7832 1y ago
> Authorities believe Once Were Nerd's activities may still run afoul of Article 171 in Italy's copyright law, which allows for up to three years imprisonment for violations. (Emphasis mine) That seems... very excessive? Who's actually being hurt here? No one is buying 20 year old consoles and games that probably aren't even sold by the original company anymore. Seems pretty much like a classic victimless crime IMO. > Agents accused the creator of promoting pirated copyrighted materials stemming from his coverage of Anbernic handheld game consoles. Seems hardly something worthy of arresting, let alone jailing someone. > Italy has a history of heavy-handed copyright enforcement—the country's Internet regulator recently demanded that Google poison DNS to block illegal streams of soccer. So it's not hard to believe investigators would pursue a case against someone who posts videos featuring pirated games on YouTube. Oh well... didn't realize Italy was like that
- progval 1y ago
  France too: https://torrentfreak.com/opendns-suspends-service-in-france-due-to-canal-piracy-blocking-order-240629/ https://torrentfreak.com/opendns-suspends-service-in-france-...
- bmacho 1y ago
  > Who's actually being hurt here? No one is buying 20 year old consoles and games that probably aren't even sold by the original company anymore. People are buying them, they just pay the Chinese, and not Nintendo/SONY. "Who's actually being hurt" and " aren't even sold by the original company" is not a good argument. Nintendo clearly can sell those games for a sum anytime it wants to. They are just manufacturing a scarcity right now, or at least they are trying. They are the ones "being hurt", in the standard sense.
  - crtasm 1y ago
    Access to NES, SNES and N64 games is a perk of Nintendo's paid online subscription so pirate copies do compete with that to some extent.
    - 1y ago
dartharva 1y ago
[flagged]
- ktallett 1y ago
  No clue where you come from but Germany and the UK are just as bad.
viraptor 1y ago
The Paco Gutierrez copypasta will now have a new version... but Nintendo didn't deliver the papers directly this time.
Tade0 1y ago
Guardia di Finanza is the most militarized branch of Italian law enforcement and if they knock on your door (provided they bother knocking), you better comply. To me it seems excessive to call specifically on them - regular police would suffice, if at all - this guy is nothing like the people this formation usually deals with.
- thefz 1y ago
  Nope, commerce of anything illegal is handled by GDF. Drugs even.
elric 1y ago
I was briefly hopeful that we'd see meaningful copyright reform in the EU back when the Pirate Party had its moment in the spotlight. But nothing happened. Now LLMs are stealing everyone's data, claiming be "fair use", getting away scot free, while irrelevant YouTubers are facing threats to be jailed over nothing whatsoever. Make it make sense.
- meowface 1y ago
  I am consistent on this one, personally. Let LLMs train on anything and let YouTubers do things like this one. It's all fine to me.
  - drweevil 1y ago
    Consistency would be welcome indeed. We have courts saying it's fair use to do this at scale to train LLMs, but minor violations like this trigger man-years of investigations and threats of imprisonment. The contradiction is grating. This circle can be squared only by admitting that there is one law for the wealthy and powerful, and another for the rest of us.
    - yorwba 1y ago
      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.
      - navane 1y ago
        No one is claiming that the law is wrongly interpreted. We're saying that the law is wrong. How is it legal to generate the content of that YouTube with genAI but not to actually tape it with real people. Why does an AI have more rights than this YouTuber.
    - 1y ago
awongh 1y ago
It's interesting to me that for critiques of AI, one of the major arguments is "stealing from artists"- and I know that the argument is more nuanced than this- but a lot of the specific legal framework for intellectual property rights and enforcement- current lawsuits that are against AI companies- are based on the same ideas that allow this kind of prosecution. I know that people saying "stealing from artists" who are against AI scraping mean, my poor friend who posts on deviantart and not Disney, Sony or Nintendo, but in the sense that intellectual property is a law and the mechanism for enforcement is ultimately something like this, I don't get why it's such a popular argument. Ultimately I hope AI will force us to decide on an updated paradigm of who owns ideas and it won't be a case of me receiving a cease and desist letter if I type a ChatGPT prompt that includes Mickey Mouse or "Miyazaki".
- snickerdoodle12 1y ago
  Many people, including myself, object to companies violating copyright on a massive scale without any consequences whatsoever while people like this, who cannot possibly have the same impact, get their lives ruined.
  - ronsor 1y ago
    Well, I object to copyright in general, regardless of the parties involved. We should not promote regression in the name of fake "fairness."
  - awongh 1y ago
    My main point was that if you are against AI scraping, are you also against this guy being able to post this video? Separate from the level of consequences for an AI company or this guy- for example if he was forced to simply take the video down or pay a small fine relevant to the level of piracy he was encouraging.
    - snickerdoodle12 1y ago
      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.
saubeidl 1y ago
Meanwhile, AI companies break copyright law at an industrialized scale. Rules for thee, not for me.
- bigyabai 1y ago
  Boo hoo, those poor copyright owners. Who remembers the last time they banded together to get their ass whooped in appellate court? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Authors_Guild,_Inc._v._Google,_Inc https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Authors_Guild,_Inc._v._Google,....
CivBase 1y ago
Game publishers are strangely aggressive about people playing pirated copies 20+ year old video games which haven't been available for purchase for over a decade. Meanwhile they are actively arguing for their right to destroy copies of games they have sold. It's clear they view old games as competition for new releases, so they want to make those old games as inaccessible as possible. But we the people just want to be able to replay old games from our childhood that we already bought.
- FMecha 1y ago
  Even if they do reissue said older games whenever possible for them, these are often times in altered form from the originals as well.
I_am_tiberius 1y ago
[flagged]
- specproc 1y ago
  I don't see what's "woke" or even "unwoke" about absurdly aggressive copyright enforcement or your bitcoin account being frozen.
  - rvnx 1y ago
    I think he means that leftists with a real political will wants to cancel private property in favor of a single shared property. Which means no copyright, or copyright owned by the state. And the state to be in charge to collect royalties from foreign countries. Wokeness and the hammer and sickle covered in blood are symbols that often appears concurrently true left parades (at least in Europe, though actually occasionally in the right too) So I think he connected the two concepts by association.
- suddenlybananas 1y ago
  What on earth does bitcoin exchanges being locked have to do with wokeness.
  - I_am_tiberius 1y ago
    I am not saying copyright laws or my frozen crypto account are woke. The link is the method: In all the cases, being called out for saying something politically slightly incorrect, the youtube handheld thing case in Italy, and my Bitcoin funds in Austria => people are punished before any wrongdoing is proven. Different issues, same "guilty first, check later" mindset.
BLKNSLVR 1y ago
Does Youtube still show advertising for finance scams in Italy? (yes, whataboutism, but I feel the need to point it out)
- riffraff 1y ago
  don't know about YT but my brother recently introduced me to finance scams inside facebook, based on AI generated videos of prominent politicians and members of the government. How this shit keeps happening is beyond me.
renewiltord 1y ago
That’s the thing with the hyperregulators. You cheer them on when they’re biting others. You’d better believe they’re going to bite you one day.
amelius 1y ago
But when will we have jail time for CEOs who invade our privacy?
- rvnx 1y ago
  I’m sure right after street criminality will be taken care of.
marcofiset 1y ago
Jail for non-violent crimes? That needs to stop.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- aranelsurion 1y ago
  You say that, next thing you know this guy installs bsnes on a Raspberry Pi going on a rampage on innocent Goombas from an illegal ROM of Super Mario World. What then? He’s clearly a dangerous maniac and a threat to the society. That’s why the only option was to lock him up.
basfo 1y ago
To me, it's kind of strange that buying and showing something that is sold legally (like a console purchased from China, which I assume went through customs, or even sold on Amazon in some cases) can make someone a criminal. I believe this should be protected under freedom of speech: he's legally buying a product and demonstrating what it does. Maybe posting a referral link and profiting from it could be considered questionable, but come on... If you want to stop piracy, start by blocking these devices at customs and investigating the businesses that import and sell them to the public. Never put someone in jail for what is, after all, a form of journalism.
- Aurornis 1y ago
  > buying and showing something that is sold legally (like a console purchased from China, which I assume went through customs, or even sold on Amazon in some cases) Going through customs does not make something legal to buy or possess. Customs is a spot-check that doesn’t catch everything and Customs cannot possibly verify every single product’s legality. Many people buy illegal drugs internationally and just hope they get through customs, for example. That doesn’t make it legal.
  - basfo 1y ago
    Well, but they are controlling that, the fact that they fail to check it shouldn't be on you. But besides that, if they consider that aliexpress is selling illegal stuff, they can easily block access to ali express in the country, decline all credit card transactions to ali express, block in customs any package coming from ali express... since is basically a criminal organization. I mean, they are selling the product in amazon.it and you put in jail a reviewer? https://www.amazon.it/portatile-illuminazione-Joystick-integrata-compatibile/dp/B0D9YFKM37/ https://www.amazon.it/portatile-illuminazione-Joystick-integ... I don't think putting in jail a customer that is just reviewing what he bought is the way to go.
jmyeet 1y ago
I'm surprised this is Italy and not the US. What I want people to take away from this is that governments in the so-called "developed" world act at the behest of corporations. In this case it's to criminalize something that should, at best, be a civil matter. But suing people is expensive and often they have no assets to claim so let's just make it a criminal offense and let the government pay for it and threaten them with violence (ie putting them in prison). There's a not particularly well-known case of this in the US that I wish more people knew about: the case of Steven Donziger. Chevron extracted oil in Ecuador and because of lax legislation and oversight, polluted everywhere. Farmers and indigenous people sued (in Ecuador). Donziger handled the case and an Ecuadorian court brought down a $9.5 billion judgement against Chevron. Chevron filed a RICO suit against Donziger in NYC. A US Federal district court decided the judgement was unenforceable because (in the court's opionion) it had been obtained through fraud with fairly scant evidence of such. Donziger was disbarred. But it doesn't edn there. In subsequent legal proceedings, Donziger refused to hand over electronic devices to Chevron's experts arguing--rightly--that it was a violation of attorney-client privilege. In subsequent legal proceedings, Donziger refused to hand over electronic devices to Chevron's experts arguing--rightly--that it was a violation of attorney-client privilege. A criminal complaint was made but the DOJ declined to prosecute. In an extraordinary move, a judge appointed lawyers at Chevron's law firm to criminally prosecute Donziger for contempt. He was on house arrest for years with an $800,000 bond... for contempt of court. Criminal prosecution being available to private companies should scare everyone. The government and even the judicial system has been subverted to do the bidding of companies. So, sadly, a criminal proseuction for revealing a gaming handheld doesn't surprise me at all.
Chronoyes 1y ago
I have an opposing viewpoint here. Incompressible to me how normalised copyright theft has become in the commercial emulation space. There are huge YouTube channels such as Linus Tech Tips reviewing $100 devices that contain copyrighted games that would have retailed for over a million dollars. This is not normal and is very different from an individual downloading some ROMs. And to clarify the story, this guy is being investigated because it was suspected he was selling these devices, not just reviewing them.
- colechristensen 1y ago
  The copyright on games and software should really expire after maybe 20 years. Sure, everyone should know that this is technically illegal, but not following these laws isn't "incomprehensible".
  - forinti 1y ago
    They should be freed as soon as they aren't being sold by the creator.
  - ziml77 1y ago
    Need to do this to music too. Otherwise you'll end up in a situation where the game still can't be distributed in its original state because the music that's used is still under copyright. Even when the original developers of a game re-release it, sometimes they have to change the soundtrack if they used licensed music because acquiring a new license may be too expensive or just entirely disallowed.
- Aurornis 1y ago
  > And to clarify the story, this guy is being investigated because it was suspected he was selling these devices, not just reviewing them. Do you have another source for that? I don’t see it in the article. It says the exact charges aren’t known due to the way their legal system works.
  - yorwba 1y ago
xg15 1y ago
Do already have an LLM that trains on the ASM and resources of old game roms and can generate "new" ones? Easy fix there...
mrep81 1y ago
Fucking Vogons
mrep81 1y ago
F*cking Vogons
DrNosferatu 1y ago
Did he post affiliate links to profit from the sale of said devices? That makes a whole lot of difference.
- npteljes 1y ago
  That would make a difference, but "he claims to have taken things one step further by not including any affiliate links in his content", and indeed I checked some, and the links were, if any, normal links.
tomhow 1y ago
We changed the URL from https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/07/youtuber-faces-jail-time-for-showing-off-android-based-gaming-handhelds/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/07/youtuber-faces-jail-..., which credits this URL as the original source.
devinprater 1y ago
I play video games through emulation, mainly because if I were playing, for example, Dissidia Final Fantasy on a regular Playstation Portable, I wouldn't be able to scan the text with my screen reader, or get AI image descriptions. I tried to buy all the PSP games I wanted to play, but that store was shut down. So now I don't think I could pay Sony for these games even if I wanted to. Blind people use audio description to watch television and movies. And yet, none of the streaming services have Doctor Who with audio description, for example, in the US. So even if I paid to watch it, I'd have to pirate the audio description track. And yet, companies can pirate all the books, videos, art and music they want, and have the best lawyers on staff to remind the courts who are really in charge. May the rich be brought low, or the poor be lifted up.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
bgwalter 1y ago
Meanwhile, Anthropic and others aren't raided and are not blocked in Italy. The YouTuber should have used an LLM for laundering copyright.
nazgulsenpai 1y ago
No wonder the statement from Video Games Europe[0] in response to the Stop Killing Games initiative was laughed at from every corner of the internet. It didn't say anything unexpected but just underlined why these types of preservation initiatives are so important. Should Abernic ship devices loaded with illegal ROMs? Probably not. But to prosecute a customer who bought the product legally for it is a sad joke. [0]https://www.videogameseurope.eu/news/statement-on-stop-killing-games/ https://www.videogameseurope.eu/news/statement-on-stop-killi...
ThePowerOfFuet 1y ago
>The creator, assuming he didn’t do anything wrong, complied with demands, providing full transcripts of his conversations and chats with gaming handheld manufacturers. Incredible. If you wonder why I say that, please watch this video: https://youtube.com/watch?v=d-7o9xYp7eE https://youtube.com/watch?v=d-7o9xYp7eE
lormayna 1y ago
Italian here. The title is a bit misleading: the raid was not ordered by the government but by justice system. They are two different entities. Unfortunately, in Italy, we have a long tradition of situation like this one: in the early 90s, a police operation against software piracy (https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Italian_Crackdown https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Italian_Crackdown) destroyed the whole BBS ecosystem, but at the end no guilty sentence. I am betting an euro that the YouTuber will not get any penal consequence.

255 points by BallsInIt 1y ago

It's astounding how much authoritarianism people are willing to tolerate in the name of maximising the economic incentives for producing entertainment media.

gchamonlive 1y ago
I don't think every regression in civil liberties is something that the society collectively accepted to tolerate. I'd say it's more often than not shoved down people's throats by lobbyists. It's just capitalism functioning as it's intended.
- HPsquared 1y ago
  "Capitalism" doesn't have a proper definition; it's one of those words that just means whatever the speaker/listener wants it to mean. Better to use more precise terms.
  - 44520297 1y ago
    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.
    - Arch-TK 1y ago
      In cases like these it's sufficient to substitute "capitalism" for "crony capitalism". However, the people making these statements are unlikely to ever agree that there can exist a non-crony-capitalism.
    - HPsquared 1y ago
      Money in politics. An excess of political power in the halls of commerce as opposed to the other estates of the realm.
  - gchamonlive 1y ago
    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.
  - immibis 1y ago
    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?
    - HPsquared 1y ago
      Fair point, and A+ for effort.
like_any_other 1y ago
> willing Don't mistake the IP cartel's backroom lobbying for the will of the people.
- izacus 1y ago
  These topics are full of people defending it. Every single time.
kmeisthax 1y ago
[dead]
stale2002 1y ago
Here the worst part, it doesn't even maximize economic incentives! This is about media that isn't even being sold in the first place. There is no financial benefit to anyone for strictly enforcing copyright on media that isn't being profited from in the first place.

user_7832 1y ago

> Authorities believe Once Were Nerd's activities may still run afoul of Article 171 in Italy's copyright law, which allows for up to three years imprisonment for violations. (Emphasis mine) That seems... very excessive? Who's actually being hurt here? No one is buying 20 year old consoles and games that probably aren't even sold by the original company anymore. Seems pretty much like a classic victimless crime IMO. > Agents accused the creator of promoting pirated copyrighted materials stemming from his coverage of Anbernic handheld game consoles. Seems hardly something worthy of arresting, let alone jailing someone. > Italy has a history of heavy-handed copyright enforcement—the country's Internet regulator recently demanded that Google poison DNS to block illegal streams of soccer. So it's not hard to believe investigators would pursue a case against someone who posts videos featuring pirated games on YouTube. Oh well... didn't realize Italy was like that

progval 1y ago
France too: https://torrentfreak.com/opendns-suspends-service-in-france-due-to-canal-piracy-blocking-order-240629/ https://torrentfreak.com/opendns-suspends-service-in-france-...
bmacho 1y ago
> Who's actually being hurt here? No one is buying 20 year old consoles and games that probably aren't even sold by the original company anymore. People are buying them, they just pay the Chinese, and not Nintendo/SONY. "Who's actually being hurt" and " aren't even sold by the original company" is not a good argument. Nintendo clearly can sell those games for a sum anytime it wants to. They are just manufacturing a scarcity right now, or at least they are trying. They are the ones "being hurt", in the standard sense.
- crtasm 1y ago
  Access to NES, SNES and N64 games is a perk of Nintendo's paid online subscription so pirate copies do compete with that to some extent.
  - 1y ago

dartharva 1y ago

[flagged]

ktallett 1y ago
No clue where you come from but Germany and the UK are just as bad.

viraptor 1y ago

The Paco Gutierrez copypasta will now have a new version... but Nintendo didn't deliver the papers directly this time.

Tade0 1y ago

Guardia di Finanza is the most militarized branch of Italian law enforcement and if they knock on your door (provided they bother knocking), you better comply. To me it seems excessive to call specifically on them - regular police would suffice, if at all - this guy is nothing like the people this formation usually deals with.

thefz 1y ago
Nope, commerce of anything illegal is handled by GDF. Drugs even.

elric 1y ago

I was briefly hopeful that we'd see meaningful copyright reform in the EU back when the Pirate Party had its moment in the spotlight. But nothing happened. Now LLMs are stealing everyone's data, claiming be "fair use", getting away scot free, while irrelevant YouTubers are facing threats to be jailed over nothing whatsoever. Make it make sense.

meowface 1y ago
I am consistent on this one, personally. Let LLMs train on anything and let YouTubers do things like this one. It's all fine to me.
- drweevil 1y ago
  Consistency would be welcome indeed. We have courts saying it's fair use to do this at scale to train LLMs, but minor violations like this trigger man-years of investigations and threats of imprisonment. The contradiction is grating. This circle can be squared only by admitting that there is one law for the wealthy and powerful, and another for the rest of us.
  - yorwba 1y ago
    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.
    - navane 1y ago
      No one is claiming that the law is wrongly interpreted. We're saying that the law is wrong. How is it legal to generate the content of that YouTube with genAI but not to actually tape it with real people. Why does an AI have more rights than this YouTuber.
  - 1y ago

awongh 1y ago

It's interesting to me that for critiques of AI, one of the major arguments is "stealing from artists"- and I know that the argument is more nuanced than this- but a lot of the specific legal framework for intellectual property rights and enforcement- current lawsuits that are against AI companies- are based on the same ideas that allow this kind of prosecution. I know that people saying "stealing from artists" who are against AI scraping mean, my poor friend who posts on deviantart and not Disney, Sony or Nintendo, but in the sense that intellectual property is a law and the mechanism for enforcement is ultimately something like this, I don't get why it's such a popular argument. Ultimately I hope AI will force us to decide on an updated paradigm of who owns ideas and it won't be a case of me receiving a cease and desist letter if I type a ChatGPT prompt that includes Mickey Mouse or "Miyazaki".

snickerdoodle12 1y ago
Many people, including myself, object to companies violating copyright on a massive scale without any consequences whatsoever while people like this, who cannot possibly have the same impact, get their lives ruined.
- ronsor 1y ago
  Well, I object to copyright in general, regardless of the parties involved. We should not promote regression in the name of fake "fairness."
- awongh 1y ago
  My main point was that if you are against AI scraping, are you also against this guy being able to post this video? Separate from the level of consequences for an AI company or this guy- for example if he was forced to simply take the video down or pay a small fine relevant to the level of piracy he was encouraging.
  - snickerdoodle12 1y ago
    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.

saubeidl 1y ago

Meanwhile, AI companies break copyright law at an industrialized scale. Rules for thee, not for me.

bigyabai 1y ago
Boo hoo, those poor copyright owners. Who remembers the last time they banded together to get their ass whooped in appellate court? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Authors_Guild,_Inc._v._Google,_Inc https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Authors_Guild,_Inc._v._Google,....

CivBase 1y ago

Game publishers are strangely aggressive about people playing pirated copies 20+ year old video games which haven't been available for purchase for over a decade. Meanwhile they are actively arguing for their right to destroy copies of games they have sold. It's clear they view old games as competition for new releases, so they want to make those old games as inaccessible as possible. But we the people just want to be able to replay old games from our childhood that we already bought.

FMecha 1y ago
Even if they do reissue said older games whenever possible for them, these are often times in altered form from the originals as well.

I_am_tiberius 1y ago

[flagged]

specproc 1y ago
I don't see what's "woke" or even "unwoke" about absurdly aggressive copyright enforcement or your bitcoin account being frozen.
- rvnx 1y ago
  I think he means that leftists with a real political will wants to cancel private property in favor of a single shared property. Which means no copyright, or copyright owned by the state. And the state to be in charge to collect royalties from foreign countries. Wokeness and the hammer and sickle covered in blood are symbols that often appears concurrently true left parades (at least in Europe, though actually occasionally in the right too) So I think he connected the two concepts by association.
suddenlybananas 1y ago
What on earth does bitcoin exchanges being locked have to do with wokeness.
- I_am_tiberius 1y ago
  I am not saying copyright laws or my frozen crypto account are woke. The link is the method: In all the cases, being called out for saying something politically slightly incorrect, the youtube handheld thing case in Italy, and my Bitcoin funds in Austria => people are punished before any wrongdoing is proven. Different issues, same "guilty first, check later" mindset.

BLKNSLVR 1y ago

Does Youtube still show advertising for finance scams in Italy? (yes, whataboutism, but I feel the need to point it out)

riffraff 1y ago
don't know about YT but my brother recently introduced me to finance scams inside facebook, based on AI generated videos of prominent politicians and members of the government. How this shit keeps happening is beyond me.

renewiltord 1y ago

That’s the thing with the hyperregulators. You cheer them on when they’re biting others. You’d better believe they’re going to bite you one day.

amelius 1y ago

But when will we have jail time for CEOs who invade our privacy?

rvnx 1y ago
I’m sure right after street criminality will be taken care of.

marcofiset 1y ago

Jail for non-violent crimes? That needs to stop.

deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
aranelsurion 1y ago
You say that, next thing you know this guy installs bsnes on a Raspberry Pi going on a rampage on innocent Goombas from an illegal ROM of Super Mario World. What then? He’s clearly a dangerous maniac and a threat to the society. That’s why the only option was to lock him up.

basfo 1y ago

To me, it's kind of strange that buying and showing something that is sold legally (like a console purchased from China, which I assume went through customs, or even sold on Amazon in some cases) can make someone a criminal. I believe this should be protected under freedom of speech: he's legally buying a product and demonstrating what it does. Maybe posting a referral link and profiting from it could be considered questionable, but come on... If you want to stop piracy, start by blocking these devices at customs and investigating the businesses that import and sell them to the public. Never put someone in jail for what is, after all, a form of journalism.

Aurornis 1y ago
> buying and showing something that is sold legally (like a console purchased from China, which I assume went through customs, or even sold on Amazon in some cases) Going through customs does not make something legal to buy or possess. Customs is a spot-check that doesn’t catch everything and Customs cannot possibly verify every single product’s legality. Many people buy illegal drugs internationally and just hope they get through customs, for example. That doesn’t make it legal.
- basfo 1y ago
  Well, but they are controlling that, the fact that they fail to check it shouldn't be on you. But besides that, if they consider that aliexpress is selling illegal stuff, they can easily block access to ali express in the country, decline all credit card transactions to ali express, block in customs any package coming from ali express... since is basically a criminal organization. I mean, they are selling the product in amazon.it and you put in jail a reviewer? https://www.amazon.it/portatile-illuminazione-Joystick-integrata-compatibile/dp/B0D9YFKM37/ https://www.amazon.it/portatile-illuminazione-Joystick-integ... I don't think putting in jail a customer that is just reviewing what he bought is the way to go.

jmyeet 1y ago

I'm surprised this is Italy and not the US. What I want people to take away from this is that governments in the so-called "developed" world act at the behest of corporations. In this case it's to criminalize something that should, at best, be a civil matter. But suing people is expensive and often they have no assets to claim so let's just make it a criminal offense and let the government pay for it and threaten them with violence (ie putting them in prison). There's a not particularly well-known case of this in the US that I wish more people knew about: the case of Steven Donziger. Chevron extracted oil in Ecuador and because of lax legislation and oversight, polluted everywhere. Farmers and indigenous people sued (in Ecuador). Donziger handled the case and an Ecuadorian court brought down a $9.5 billion judgement against Chevron. Chevron filed a RICO suit against Donziger in NYC. A US Federal district court decided the judgement was unenforceable because (in the court's opionion) it had been obtained through fraud with fairly scant evidence of such. Donziger was disbarred. But it doesn't edn there. In subsequent legal proceedings, Donziger refused to hand over electronic devices to Chevron's experts arguing--rightly--that it was a violation of attorney-client privilege. In subsequent legal proceedings, Donziger refused to hand over electronic devices to Chevron's experts arguing--rightly--that it was a violation of attorney-client privilege. A criminal complaint was made but the DOJ declined to prosecute. In an extraordinary move, a judge appointed lawyers at Chevron's law firm to criminally prosecute Donziger for contempt. He was on house arrest for years with an $800,000 bond... for contempt of court. Criminal prosecution being available to private companies should scare everyone. The government and even the judicial system has been subverted to do the bidding of companies. So, sadly, a criminal proseuction for revealing a gaming handheld doesn't surprise me at all.

Chronoyes 1y ago

I have an opposing viewpoint here. Incompressible to me how normalised copyright theft has become in the commercial emulation space. There are huge YouTube channels such as Linus Tech Tips reviewing $100 devices that contain copyrighted games that would have retailed for over a million dollars. This is not normal and is very different from an individual downloading some ROMs. And to clarify the story, this guy is being investigated because it was suspected he was selling these devices, not just reviewing them.

colechristensen 1y ago
The copyright on games and software should really expire after maybe 20 years. Sure, everyone should know that this is technically illegal, but not following these laws isn't "incomprehensible".
- forinti 1y ago
  They should be freed as soon as they aren't being sold by the creator.
- ziml77 1y ago
  Need to do this to music too. Otherwise you'll end up in a situation where the game still can't be distributed in its original state because the music that's used is still under copyright. Even when the original developers of a game re-release it, sometimes they have to change the soundtrack if they used licensed music because acquiring a new license may be too expensive or just entirely disallowed.
Aurornis 1y ago
> And to clarify the story, this guy is being investigated because it was suspected he was selling these devices, not just reviewing them. Do you have another source for that? I don’t see it in the article. It says the exact charges aren’t known due to the way their legal system works.
- yorwba 1y ago

xg15 1y ago

Do already have an LLM that trains on the ASM and resources of old game roms and can generate "new" ones? Easy fix there...

mrep81 1y ago

Fucking Vogons

mrep81 1y ago

F*cking Vogons

DrNosferatu 1y ago

Did he post affiliate links to profit from the sale of said devices? That makes a whole lot of difference.

npteljes 1y ago
That would make a difference, but "he claims to have taken things one step further by not including any affiliate links in his content", and indeed I checked some, and the links were, if any, normal links.

tomhow 1y ago

We changed the URL from https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/07/youtuber-faces-jail-time-for-showing-off-android-based-gaming-handhelds/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/07/youtuber-faces-jail-..., which credits this URL as the original source.

devinprater 1y ago

I play video games through emulation, mainly because if I were playing, for example, Dissidia Final Fantasy on a regular Playstation Portable, I wouldn't be able to scan the text with my screen reader, or get AI image descriptions. I tried to buy all the PSP games I wanted to play, but that store was shut down. So now I don't think I could pay Sony for these games even if I wanted to. Blind people use audio description to watch television and movies. And yet, none of the streaming services have Doctor Who with audio description, for example, in the US. So even if I paid to watch it, I'd have to pirate the audio description track. And yet, companies can pirate all the books, videos, art and music they want, and have the best lawyers on staff to remind the courts who are really in charge. May the rich be brought low, or the poor be lifted up.

deleted 1y ago

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bgwalter 1y ago

Meanwhile, Anthropic and others aren't raided and are not blocked in Italy. The YouTuber should have used an LLM for laundering copyright.

nazgulsenpai 1y ago

No wonder the statement from Video Games Europe[0] in response to the Stop Killing Games initiative was laughed at from every corner of the internet. It didn't say anything unexpected but just underlined why these types of preservation initiatives are so important. Should Abernic ship devices loaded with illegal ROMs? Probably not. But to prosecute a customer who bought the product legally for it is a sad joke. [0]https://www.videogameseurope.eu/news/statement-on-stop-killing-games/ https://www.videogameseurope.eu/news/statement-on-stop-killi...

ThePowerOfFuet 1y ago

>The creator, assuming he didn’t do anything wrong, complied with demands, providing full transcripts of his conversations and chats with gaming handheld manufacturers. Incredible. If you wonder why I say that, please watch this video: https://youtube.com/watch?v=d-7o9xYp7eE https://youtube.com/watch?v=d-7o9xYp7eE

lormayna 1y ago

Italian here. The title is a bit misleading: the raid was not ordered by the government but by justice system. They are two different entities. Unfortunately, in Italy, we have a long tradition of situation like this one: in the early 90s, a police operation against software piracy (https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Italian_Crackdown https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Italian_Crackdown) destroyed the whole BBS ecosystem, but at the end no guilty sentence. I am betting an euro that the YouTuber will not get any penal consequence.