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After being indicted in 2020, Gary Bowser's trial is finally over, and he has been sentenced to 3+ years in prison. Bowser was facing eleven felony charges as the public face of Team Xexuter, estimated by the U.S. government to have cost the videogame industry between $65 million and $150 million by facilitating piracy. Bowser pled guilty to charges of trafficking in circumvention devices and conspiracy to circumvent technological measures in November, agreeing to pay $4.5 million in fines, but was also ordered to pay another $10 million to Nintendo in a civil case.

"This is not a victimless crime. The leaders of this multimillion-dollar scheme are responsible for diverting money from creative professionals who have worked hard to provide unique products and experiences,” said Special Agent in Charge (SAC) Robert Hammer. Another Special Agent in Charge, Donald M. Voiret, is quoted saying "he also wasted the efforts of legitimate companies as they attempted to build protections for their products.”

Last week, the prosecution announced they were seeking a five-year sentence, while the defense only wanted nineteen months. Bowser has been detained since October 2020 as he was not able to secure pretrial release, so, assuming he serves his full 3+ year sentence, he will have actually been detained for closer to four and a half years.

Source

 

[ZeroT21]

Makes me wonder if the act of jailbreaking my own console is legal, as I may not even own it, according to big corp

 

[weatMod]

They probably tried.

death is to rite
prease understan
forced seppuku under threat of torture
is the onry fair sentence

 

[DarknessPlay3r]

Really, there's no way companies lost this much from piracy. Seems like they used a RNG to calculate the cost.
A, because a digital copy of a game is free to make, it doesn't cost Nintendo anything to create one single more copy of the same game.
B, because most pirates would have not bought the game in the first place (not winning ≠ losing) or may have bought it at some point already (which counts as winning money, not staying on the same spot, since again, digital copies are free to create)
C, because the hacking scene is still pretty small compared to the full fanbase, and even with highly priced games, it wouldn't be enough to reach those numbers anyways.
D, because used games also exist, and they "cost" as much to companies as piracy.
E, because SX devices aren't exclusively used by piracy, even though that's their main focus.
F, especially in Gary's case, he didn't cost nearly as much anyways, he's just the marketing guy, it's almost like he did nothing for SX anyways.

I personnally would never pay that much money if i was sentenced for it. Like what are they gonna do? Make me homeless? I'll sue them for endangering myself. Give me permanent jail? Better escaping then. This just shows that the world would be a better place with no justice system at all than a completely broken system like that.

I feel the need to clarify a few of these points as your missing the point behind the reasoning:

A) Nothing is free. Absolutely nothing. A1) reproduction of said digital copy not only takes some means of transmitting that copy, in this case their own network. Servers, staff to maintain, power, all come to mind when recreating. A great example of how this can be exponential is the WiiU where you would download games directly from Nintendo and then apply tickets to quite literally pirate from them.

Side note of value, our viewing this thread takes the server to host it, all of which incurs cost that someone has to pay for, I often feel facts like this are easily over looked.

B) In the eyes of the law piracy is piracy, and while your statement does apply to some, it doesn't apply to all. Piracy that allows purchase at a later time, can also lead to lost sales as they could be puchased second hand or later at a discounted rate.

This does equal loss as far as accounting goes

C) This case isn't just related to Nintendo, it's from the early days of TX which go back to Xbox (2004 era). As stated in a post from the justice department in this very thread The correlation most people are mistakenly making is that this is just Nintendo vs Bowser.

D) Used games still contain a sale, and while they do dampen sales, piracy is strictly loss. In the business world that will never equal the same.

E) The only reason to purchase and buy this over the free alternatives is piracy. This fact alone creates loss as now there is a transfer of funds that *potentially* would have gone to sales for those effected. This part is huge.

F) I hate to say this, but Gary DID (almost) EVERYTHING. With out him (or someone doing his job) TX would never have been a name people would say anything more than "what?" too. His work was critical, without advertising, and awareness TX wouldn't have captured the audience it has. Look at how many SX threads there are, credit where it's due. Gary is responsible for the awareness.

Marketing is everything, why do you think the internet is full of ads?

On a more personal note of things, I didn't care for him, his salesman like shilling of his views and products he "seemingly" had no association with (this is also long before this era) add to this the fact that Gateway was again part of the brand with shit like fucking brick code...

I may not care for him, but he did an incredible job at what he did do. When you sit down and plot it all out like someone in the justice department clearly has, this all falls inline with what one would expect. He became a global name in piracy, not an easy feat...

I left the final part of your post in as I believe you actually don't know just how bad a world with out a justice system could be. If you want an idea of what that looks like, take a look back to World War II. What happened then alone is why people must be held accountable.

 

[shanefromoz]

I wish Gary all the best.
He did nothing wrong to me.

 

[HRudyPlayZ]

I feel the need to clarify a few of these points as your missing the point behind the reasoning:

A) Nothing is free. Absolutely nothing. A1) reproduction of said digital copy not only takes some means of transmitting that copy, in this case their own network. Servers, staff to maintain, power, all come to mind when recreating. A great example of how this can be exponential is the WiiU where you would download games directly from Nintendo and then apply tickets to quite literally pirate from them.

Side note of value, our viewing this thread takes the server to host it, all of which incurs cost that someone has to pay for, I often feel facts like this are easily over looked.

B) In the eyes of the law piracy is piracy, and while your statement does apply to some, it doesn't apply to all. Piracy that allows purchase at a later time, can also lead to lost sales as they could be puchased second hand or later at a discounted rate.

This does equal loss as far as accounting goes

C) This case isn't just related to Nintendo, it's from the early days of TX which go back to Xbox (2004 era). As stated in a post from the justice department in this very thread The correlation most people are mistakenly making is that this is just Nintendo vs Bowser.

D) Used games still contain a sale, and while they do dampen sales, piracy is strictly loss. In the business world that will never equal the same.

E) The only reason to purchase and buy this over the free alternatives is piracy. This fact alone creates loss as now there is a transfer of funds that *potentially* would have gone to sales for those effected. This part is huge.

F) I hate to say this, but Gary DID (almost) EVERYTHING. With out him (or someone doing his job) TX would never have been a name people would say anything more than "what?" too. His work was critical, without advertising, and awareness TX wouldn't have captured the audience it has. Look at how many SX threads there are, credit where it's due. Gary is responsible for the awareness.

Marketing is everything, why do you think the internet is full of ads?

On a more personal note of things, I didn't care for him, his salesman like shilling of his views and products he "seemingly" had no association with (this is also long before this era) add to this the fact that Gateway was again part of the brand with shit like fucking brick code...

I may not care for him, but he did an incredible job at what he did do. When you sit down and plot it all out like someone in the justice department clearly has, this all falls inline with what one would expect. He became a global name in piracy, not an easy feat...

I left the final part of your post in as I believe you actually don't know just how bad a world with out a justice system could be. If you want an idea of what that looks like, take a look back to World War II. What happened then alone is why people must be held accountable.

A) That would be valid for a console like the Wii U or the PSVita that uses the official servers for piracy. The Switch, and indeed the Xbox, didn't cost anything to the console authors reproduction-wise though since pirates weren't profiting of their servers.

B) Yes, in the eyes of the law, piracy is piracy, but they just can't ethically count every download as a sale lost. Yes there are some downloads out there that would've been a sale if not for piracy, but they're very minimal compared to the portion of sales that would never have happened anyways.
Meaning that those 60 millions they claim as damages are completely biased and came out of nowhere.

C) They might have counted the Xbox as well, but it would just make my point stronger as there's an even smaller proportion of hacked xboxs compared to vanilla ones, due to them requiring an hardmod.

D) Used games contain a sale, and so does piracy. Copying the game or the keys often requires to already have bought the game in the first place.
Piracy isn't a strct loss considering this.
Piracy and a largely sold used game are pretty much the same. Though, i agree it's rare to see a physical game that passed as much hands so it can compete with piracy numbers.

E) Homebrew isn't piracy, and both the chips and SXOS do let homebrew run as well, so you can't say they're exclusively used for it, even if the marketing made that a main selling point.

F) Marketing did play a big role, but keep in mind we're still talking about a specific device made for a niche part of the community. I feel the persons handling the resale websites did a much better job at insuring SX sales than Gary, since most of the community already knew about linkers and such.
He did do a great job at marketing though i agree, he maybe shouldn't have made piracy a main selling point as obvious, since in the end, it's not the chips, the brand or most of the OS (outside of the XCI code) that are illegal, it's the marketing and encouragement to piracy.

I didn't care for SX much too, rest assured. The only real losses are the dongle (which is pretty ok compared to others) and the modchips. Those definitely should be made legal. Especially since they're not circumventing a DRM, Nintendo itself is.

For the justice system i agree with you there, though i was mainly talking about copyright, patents and other DRM laws, it would definitely be better that those never existed than the currently broken system we have.

 

[dh3lix-pooch]

Sure. He should get a fine. A big one. But this time of being getting jailed it like totally not matching the crime. So stupid. That is not sending a signal but creating anger.

 

[p1ngpong]

Time for Gary to develop an IRL Jailbreak! ;O;

 

[Zonark]

According to documents provided in discovery, he only made $320,000 in the seven years he worked for Team Xecuter.

That’s his physical profit not the companies though which made the money

 

[the_randomizer]

Makes me wonder if the act of jailbreaking my own console is legal, as I may not even own it, according to big corp

Who cares what they think? Just jailbreak it anyway.

 

[SonicRings]

I never understood how he was charging money for the SX OS. How do you charge money for a damn homebrew OS?

I also never understood how so many people, especially users on this very forum, supported that by buying licenses. Have you no shame? The whole purpose of homebrew is to free your devices, not lock it behind another proprietary operating system. Free and open source or go bust.

I'm glad such a practice is being punished to this extent to discourage anyone else from trying to do the same. Sure, you can monetize any devices that are required to hack a system, but the moment you monetize the operating system, you've lost my respect.

 

[grabman]

I never understood how he was charging money for the SX OS. How do you charge money for a damn homebrew OS?

I also never understood how so many people, especially users on this very forum, supported that by buying licenses. Have you no shame? The whole purpose of homebrew is to free your devices, not lock it behind another proprietary operating system. Free and open source or go bust.

I'm glad such a practice is being punished to this extent to discourage anyone else from trying to do the same. Sure, you can monetize any devices that are required to hack a system, but the moment you monetize the operating system, you've lost my respect.

I pay for USB load ability. i have also enjoyed auto rcm and dongle allowing me to easily load payload....

 

[relauby]

I never understood how he was charging money for the SX OS. How do you charge money for a damn homebrew OS?

They weren't charging for the OS itself, but the devices that let you install a custom OS.

 

[the_randomizer]

They weren't charging for the OS itself, but the devices that let you install a custom OS.

He did charge money for devices that can brick your console, so that's fun

 

[ut2k4master]

They weren't charging for the OS itself, but the devices that let you install a custom OS.

they were charging to play pirated games specifically

 

[Psionic Roshambo]

Nintendo making more money from courts and they still cant be arsed to put some money down and make something new.

Problem is, they claim Gary caused millions in damages to hard working folks making games, but will any of this money go to them?

That there is probably robbery, who the fuck pockets the money.

In all probability, this is what will happen...

1. Gary will hire a lawyer and file for bankruptcy.
2. Mediation will ask Gary for bank records going back up to like 6 months, due to the amount probably hire a forensic accountant... If Gary's lawyer is really good he will be able to hide some money (not much) depending on the state laws he can keep his house but almost any other property is up for grabs to sell and pay for the 4.5 million... Anything unpaid like if Gary only had like 50K in the bank and 50K in other property... The other 4.4 Million just goes poof. No one gets anything.

Now if Gary has that much money to just pay it? yeah Nintendo gets whatever the Lawers and courts don't scoop up. Likely something like 30%. I think Nintendo also has to pay taxes on that? Not sure....

Although if I was Gary, I would appeal everything. A lot of times initial judgements are reduced massively.. Everyone remembers the lady that spilled McD coffee on her crotch and won millions in the lawsuit. Very few people know that McD's appealed and reduced that to something way less than one million.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liebeck_v._McDonald's_Restaurants

 

[SonicRings]

They weren't charging for the OS itself, but the devices that let you install a custom OS.

What were the licenses then?

 

[Tsukiru]

Yeah that's what happens when you make a commercial product purely for piracy. Not to mention bricking and what was done during the 3DS era.

Unfortunate how this is being framed and not leaving out the questionable baggage that brought it to this point, but that's to be expected. People worrying about if its okay to jailbreak their systems when that isn't the matter at hand anyways. It's not "don't mess with Nintendo" it's just "don't be stupid."

I don't like Nintendo either, I stopped buying from them and homebrew my consoles often, but not enough to ignore this dude was an asshat.

 

[cracker]

I don't know about anyone else, but damn! life has already punished him it sounds like.

 

[CJL18]

I feel bad for the guy but just imagine how all those people who made the games working countless hours feel about there game getting pirated after all there hard work. He had it coming he stole millions of dollars from nintendo and all the people who worked there ass off on making the games!

 

[subcon959]

I feel bad for the guy but just imagine how all those people who made the games working countless hours feel about there game getting pirated after all there hard work. He had it coming he stole millions of dollars from nintendo and all the people who worked there ass off on making the games!

The people who worked on the games got paid for doing their job. The only time piracy could possibly hurt devs themselves is with indie games, and I seriously doubt Nintendo would hand out any of the millions they made from this to them.