A Washington federal court has ordered r/SwitchPirates moderator James ‘Archbox’ Williams to pay Nintendo $4.5 million in damages.
A Washington federal court has ordered r/SwitchPirates moderator James ‘Archbox’ Williams to pay Nintendo $4.5 million in damages.
So what could Archbox have don’t differentlu to avoid being brought to court? I feel like a lot of pirates online seem to do just fine circumventing the law.
This headline is bad. It implies that moderating a piracy subreddit is why this dude got sued. This guy hosted direct HTTP downloads of Nintendo ROMs.
Bit of piracy history: for a long time on the 3DS, Nintendo’s shop system was bugfucked. If you had a valid key pair, you could download games directly from Nintendo’s servers and that keypair wasn’t tied in any way to your console or account. That means one buyer could “share pirated games” by posting a couple 32-digit codes they got.
This led to an on-3ds app called “freeShop” that handled a community database of valid keypairs and used them to download and install pirated games directly from Nintendo’s servers.
After Nintendo patched the system and disabled the freeShop, pirates had gotten used to the convenience of on-device downloads and installs. A very common type of piracy app, especially on the Switch, is “pirate shops”. The user would still be able to pirate on the console directly, but the backend is a traditional server sending actual dumped files (rather than fooling Nintendo into delivering the files directly).
These pirate shops are fundamentally the same thing as hosting/connecting to an open server full of roms. The guy in this lawsuit was operating multiple pirate shops. The whole thing with internet piracy is accountability: you’re not gonna get away with a google drive link to Avengers Endgame Dot MKV for long.
Oh gods, freeshop on the 3DS. When the thread popped up on the GBATemp forums I couldn’t believe what I was reading. Then when I tried it I couldn’t believe how Nintendo fucked up so hard. XD
As soon as the first proof of concepts showed up (a command line PC tool that generated CIA files from a key pair, followed by CIAngel which did it directly on the 3DS but still needed an installation step via another app) it was only a matter of time until someone Frankensteined the open source CIAngel and FBI together and slapped a cute browse UI and json parser on top. Thus freeShop was born.
The 3DS was already thoroughly pwned before freeShop, but pirates still had to actually use a yucky computer to download yucky “files” to do their thing. FreeShop opened up piracy to a new level of tech-illiterate user, and when Nintendo closed the gaping security hole those pirates that didn’t know what a .cia file actually is were left floundering. That was the scene that inherited Switch piracy. Dozens of competing closed-source “shops” that all used their own proprietary databases to pretend to be freeShop. Paid piracy apps. All so that users wouldn’t have to plug in their microSD card (later, the Switch itself via USB) to pirate games. Traditional “download the file from a torrent or trusted HTTP source and then put it on the SD and install it” piracy was always possible in the “shops” era.
You know, that’s interesting, because I was never exposed to all the paid “freeshop” apps. Maybe it’s because I has been pirating for quite a while at that point, or because I hung out on the forums where the developers discussed their projects, but when Freeshop stopped working I just used Boop.
The main issue I had with installing 3DS games was that you needed double the space on your SD card; for the installation files and for the game you’re installing. Remote installation with FBI using Boop on PC was the solution to that after Freeshop died.
Yeah, the ease and safety (and incredibly good/available guides) of piracy on 3DS made it so a lot of kids/noobs got in during the freeShop days and just kind of expected piracy to always be that easy. “Actually finding and having a reliable source for the game files” is always the actual hardest part of piracy, but freeShop kids never had to do it.
Oh I was pirating before 3DS piracy became easy. I got on as soon as browserhax was discovered, and then you still had to go through a whole process where your 3DS could get bricked if you did the wrong thing. RXTools made it a little easier, but the guides for it weren’t that written for it, and eventually the creator ragequit because he hated piracy.
Well then…
Then Luma3D came and basically made piracy a one-click solution. Well, almost.
Thanks for the clarification. That makes sense how these guys get caught. Sounds like not having streets smarts
Additionally, most Switch pirate shops charge money for access.
And there is it. pretty stupid…
I’m always tickled by how outraged various pirates are when people rip them off, or on pirate streaming sites where the site complains about ad blocking. Cheeky fuckers.
Yeah It’s a little hypocritical haha
Location, location, location. Be somewhere that has lax or absent laws enabling foreign entities to prosecute you for this sort of thing and has no extradition treaty with Japan and/or the US. And remain anonymous and avoid identification. This guy was a reddit mod and lived in friggin’ Arizona, both of which were bad moves on his part. So I imagine Nintendo or the courts subpoenaed reddit for everything they had on the guy and they eagerly complied.
If you lived in, say, Cambodia and only distributed your stuff through decentralized or anonymized channels and did not seek fame or fortune for yourself it’s pretty likely nobody would actually be able to bring the hammer down on you for it.
Selling the pirated stuff, I guess? I don’t really follow it, but whenever I hear a judgement like this it’s usually from someone actually making money from selling pirated games rather than just cracking or distributing.