Japanese police arrest man for tampering with Pokémon Violet save data

https://www.ign.com/articles/japanese-police-arrest-36-year-old-man-on-suspicion-of-tampering-with-pokemon-violet-save-data

by josephcsible • 2 years ago

200 143 2 years ago

ign.com

t-32• 2 years ago

I don't know whether I find it more crazy that editing a save file is a criminal offence in Japan, or that people will pay $30-$85 for the service.

PaulHoule3• 2 years ago

This is the country that brought you

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fate/Grand_Order

arcanemachiner• 2 years ago

Yes, some video games are made in Japan.

What is significant about this one?

sosborn2• 2 years ago

The crime was selling - not editing. Not defending the arrest but it's a pretty big difference.

t-32• 2 years ago

Sure, but editing is probably still illegal as the save files are encrypted (sections 17-18 of Article 2): https://www.japaneselawtranslation.go.jp/en/laws/view/3629

adamtaylor_13• 2 years ago

I was certain I’d find an April 1st publication date but holy cow that’s real. What a waste of public resources.

anigbrowl9• 2 years ago

Japan takes theft seriously; you can go to prison for stealing small change, or lose your job for cheating at self-service coffee.

https://sg.news.yahoo.com/japan-man-jailed-10-yen-theft-1159...

https://www.straitstimes.com/asia/east-asia/school-principal...

It's severe, but I don't know what degree it's a waste of public resources. People like the rock-bottom crime rate. On the other hand, word is that Japanese police are not great at investigating more well-planned crime. A trend has emerged in recent years of professional criminals basing themselves abroad and using social media to recruit naïve/disaffected people for the manual labor part.

Dylan168078• 2 years ago

You can be very strict at punishing theft without having a very expansive definition of theft.

dilawar• 2 years ago

Or just police is bored because crime rate is low? They may have quota to fill to justify their job?!

vsnf• 2 years ago

Why shouldn’t someone be free to modify their purchased, owned product to their hearts content, including paying others for modifications?

gjsman-10005• 2 years ago

Replace “owned product” with “movie” and you see the problem that would require a total copyright restructuring.

sp332• 2 years ago

Huh? If I own a video, I can edit it if I want. Selling the modified version would be the difficulty? But I could still hire someone to make a modification for me I think.

antris• 2 years ago

total copyright restructuring

Yes, please. Hell, throw patents in too while you're at it.

metalspoon• 2 years ago

But, didn't the guy sell the save data? That's not the game itself.

Loughla• 2 years ago

Real question, what's the harm here?

Are the modified Pokemon being used in competitions? What is the harm, really?

josephcsible• 2 years ago

Are the modified Pokemon being used in competitions?

Even if they were, the penalty should be limited to being banned from future competitions, not prison.

grugagag• 2 years ago

I agree but the Japanese legal system is very weird. It seems like pokemon is very a lucrative business and a tough sentencing is probably only as an example to deter future violations.

drngdds• 2 years ago

Are the modified Pokemon being used in competitions?

Interestingly, it's pretty much standard for competitive Pokemon players to use hacked Pokemon because of the crazy time investment the game demands to train Pokemon with optimal stats and movesets legitimately. They use free methods to do this though.

SuperNinKenDo• 2 years ago

Based on the law invoked it seems the idea might be that his versions of the games essentially piggy-back off the trademarks attached to Pokemon, while effectively rendering the vanilla, unmodified cartridges such that they may be perceived to be an inferior product in comparison, despite being the original product.

This seems like a stretch even under Japanese law, since the article gives the impression that he was not selling the cartridges themselves, but merely the service of taking cartridges and modifying them. But Japanese copyright law is kinda crazy. There's a reason that Japanese Wikipedia is almost totally bereft of images.

matt3210• 2 years ago

Making an open source tool for easy hacking would be a good middle finger to the nintendo police.

zamadatix7• 2 years ago

I'd eat my shoe if the dude wasn't just using exactly that https://github.com/kwsch/PKHeX

sosborn2• 2 years ago

The first sentence puts it into a little bit of perspective:

"Police in Japan have arrested a 36-year-old man on suspicion of selling illegally modified Pokémon save data to customers online — a practice which is banned under the country’s 2019 Unfair Competition Prevention Act."

Now, it's still a ridiculous story, but it's a little easier to see how this happened.

idle_zealot2• 2 years ago

Does that sentence actually change the perspective? It still implies that the modification itself was illegal.

zamadatix7• 2 years ago

The law may seem silly/not worthwhile but at least it gives perspective there is a law saying selling modified things in a way that might make competition unfair is explicitly illegal instead of someone just deciding save edits are bad and something worth arresting for in a vacuum.

VS1999• 2 years ago

The selling part is more important than the modification part because the law he broke specifically references selling or renting.

anigbrowl9• 2 years ago

It does not. Selling your cheat mod is fundamentally different from playing around with it on your own workbench.

bottled_poe• 2 years ago

Seems like fraud would be a more likely charge.

Brian_K_White• 2 years ago

Yes. It changes it entirely. Obviously? Selling or otherwise distributing was illegal, or using hacked data with an on-line service, not merely hacking your own property.

LegitShady• 2 years ago

I don't think its reasonable though. I have a hard time believing that its a good use of public resources. He wasn't pirating software, he was selling a savegame file. That it was 'tampered with' doesn't really matter except when the letter of the law is used to punish people doing nothing wrong.

ranger_danger2• 2 years ago

This same law also makes console modding services illegal.

One particular company, Cyber Gadget, even used to sell commercial save game editor apps, and they had to pull them after this law was introduced.

slowhadoken• 2 years ago

Not just tampering but also selling and there’s a law against it in Japan. Nintendo usually draws the line where it counts.

roughly• 2 years ago

This feels like the Japanese equivalent of all the crazy laws that Disney’s gotten passed in the US.

zoklet-enjoyer2• 2 years ago

There were game save websites back in 2000 where people could go and download saves for their Dreamcast straight to their memory cards. People would also make homebrew games and animations for the VMUs (virtual memory unit). The memory cards were like mini Gameboys. Fun times. I couldn't imagine getting arrested for that.

GlumWoodpecker• 2 years ago

These websites still exist and are enjoyed by many! GameFAQs for example, hosts a large number of saves. Most recently I downloaded a complete save file for Micro Machines V3 for the PS2, so we didn't have to grind to unlock all cars for multiplayer :)

zoklet-enjoyer2• 2 years ago

Cool! I had no idea. Kind of just forgot that they existed because it's been almost 20 years since I downloaded a game save

mjg592• 2 years ago

People pointing out that this is some weird quirk of Japanese law: if there's an argument that reverse engineering the software to determine how this works is circumvention of a technical control, this would potentially be a violation of 17 U.S. Code § 1201 - https://dair-community.social/@kendraserra/11167540121678898... discusses case law around a separate kind of case, but one that could be argued here. Let's not criticise Japanese law without acknowledging that US law is also fucked up.

samatman• 2 years ago

Those aren't the only two options. Shall we make sure to criticize the law of all 192 remaining member states of the United Nations every time one country's legal system comes into focus? Wouldn't want to leave anyone out.

boomboomsubban2• 2 years ago

While I agree that the US law on the matter is also fucked up, 17 U.S. Code § 1201 seems to be a civil violation not a criminal one. The police wouldn't arrest you and the punishment is financial and an injunction from further activities.

mjg592• 2 years ago

US vs Elcom was based on 1201 violations?

megapolitics• 2 years ago

Let's not criticise Japanese law without acknowledging that US law is also fucked up.

This doesn’t need done at all. This is just whataboutism. This story does not involve the USA and the discussion about other countries does not need to be derailed every time with discussion about and comparison to the USA.

genewitch• 2 years ago

anyone else get a weird feeling reading the article? there is some jank in there, for example:

Its worth noting that the raw last for Pokemon — ...

there's also some duplicated lines (the headline makes an appearance without a space after a period, for instance) and some repetition.

Not sure if AI or a hastily written article by someone unfamiliar with words. Not sure what the TCG has to do with save files, either.

s4mw1se• 2 years ago

Might have been hastily written by AI not families with words

tetris11• 2 years ago

Ctrl-F "raw last"

Yeah, I'm still not sure what is meant in that sentence

Jerrrry• 2 years ago

Whenever you modify a game to sell items, that compete, even indirectly, with a currency/infer-currency of a company, you have deprived them.

This is actually pretty clear cut.

umvi2• 2 years ago

Not surprising from a country that will arrest you for other non crimes such as being in possession of lockpicks (also fun fact - their police are extremely skeptical that Americans watch lockpickers on YouTube as a hobby even if said lockpicks are straight from said YouTuber's company)

namlem• 2 years ago

I think possession of lockpicks is illegal in NYC as well. Though I doubt they're enforcing that rn

qingcharles2• 2 years ago

It's enforced here in Illinois if they catch you doing something with them. They add it on as an extra charge.

spike021• 2 years ago

I'd be curious what someone's doing that police even have any idea they've got a lock picking set or tools on their person.

umvi2• 2 years ago

In this hypothetical case, they were discovered at Haneda airport flying to another city in Japan via explorer pass

baby• 2 years ago

I’ll bite. This slippery slope is what led people in the US rooting for pro guns laws

riwsky• 2 years ago

you wouldn’t GameShark A CAR

fy20• 2 years ago

In my country it's pretty common to remap and modify the ECU settings.

For €100 you can have someone remap the fuel injection system to give you more power for less fuel (VW are notorious for this, you can easily get 25% more power), or you can have environmental features disabled that will end up breaking such as EGR, DPF, AdBlue, etc.

Someone who does it is a friend of a friend, and he drives a Tesla, so I guess it's not a bad business to be in.

morsch• 2 years ago

I guess we need a licence for car ownership in addition to driving, and that should be a way of losing it.

sidewndr46• 2 years ago

wouldn't an emissions inspection notice this or do they not do that there?

hipadev23• 2 years ago

Imagine being so mad about Palworld you hire secret police to arrest modders.

nonbirithm• 2 years ago

Something similar happened in the late 1990's when a PlayStation memory card was being sold with pre-loaded save data for a dating sim game (Tokimeki Memorial). Konami claimed it violated the integrity of the work because selling a hacked save with all stats maxed tampered with the game's natural progression. (And they won twice, the original case and the appeal.)

https://ja.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E3%81%A8%E3%81%8D%E3%82%81%...

http://gaming.moe/?p=2938

maxbond4• 2 years ago

That's such a weird theory of harm. They still had to buy a copy of the game, right? So the harm is that the consumer would experience the story in the way they chose instead of the way the author intended? Death of the audience I suppose?

ronsor3• 2 years ago

No, this theory of harm is a direct consequence of the weird "moral rights" thing that is a part of Japanese copyright law.

spxneo• 2 years ago

Title should be: 36 year old man gets his life ruined for making $84 in total profit from proceeds of "crime". If he's peddling "hacked consumer products" he's already on his last leg as a 36 year old. Even if he manages to get a job by some miracle he's going to get ijime'd hard by his co-workers who will view him as a convict.

this is up there with the case where they arrested a student for some javascript code she wrote that caused never ending alert dialog popups at the library?

Neo-confucianism is just glorified gerontocracy.

The 36-year-old allegedly took custom orders for rare Pokémon, and sold the resulting tampered data between December 2022 to March 2023, for up to 13,000 yen ($84) a time on a website that served as a marketplace for video game assets and items. He also offered deals in which six Pokémon would be created for the equivalent of roughly $30 in yen.

Yet bunch of ojiisans steal $1.7 billion as executives of a flagship Japanese company and nobody goes to jail. Some gaijin CEO 20x your struggling car company and you send HIM to jail for taking a bit of bonus as compensation!

Unreal.

sharpshadow• 2 years ago

If he would let a LLM play the game to acquire desired save data then he could sell it under Japanese law?

Japanese police arrest man for tampering with Pokémon Violet save data

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