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A revision to Japan's Unfair Competition Prevention Act has reportedly introduced criminal penalties for reselling software product keys without permission, distributing save-game editors, and offering to edit save data as a service. Speculation is rampant as to how broadly the data-editing ban may apply.
http://mmofallout.com/japan-criminalizes-editing-save-games-punishable-with-jail-time-and-fines/
http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/333748/Japan_has_made_reselling_digital_game_keys_illegal.php
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Japan Cracks Down on Game Mods, Cheats, and Reselling
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You can't have your cake and let your neighbor eat it too.
-- Ayn Rand
(Score: 3, Interesting) by VLM on Saturday January 05 2019, @02:25PM (10 children)
Does anyone have real data on this, other than 4th hand hearsay "fake news clickbait"? I mean... we're quoting gamasutra and mmofallout here.
It smells very much like the GDPR debacle where a handful of big corporate opponents tried to astroturf that the world would end. It didn't. It was mildly annoying and I got caught up in the crashlytics / advertising ID foolishness where I'm liable for the actions of something that I can't know about legally under the DMCA that turn out to not really matter in the real world anyway.
I can find a english language law blog mentioning that it would definitely make modding a console for the purpose of playing pirated games illegal; says nothing about modding for homebrew. Says nothing about making EMACS binary mode illegal, or making first sale doctrine illegal as has been implied on the clickbait sites.
Helping out the research is Japan seems to have a UCPA acronym with the same name that seems oriented entirely toward opposing bribery of foreign government officials, so it would be a Japanese crime for a Japanese citizen to bribe a Chinese building inspector when standing up a new factory or it would be illegal to bribe a customs official to mark that shipment of $$$$$ CPUs as merely $$ hobbyist kits. Maybe the new act which I can't find was snuck into this act, sounds very USA-ian for the Japanese to try that.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Saturday January 05 2019, @02:43PM (9 children)
Brutal. Everyone knows how google censors and "adjusts" search results for political purposes and it appears they're doing it for this situation. Thats why I couldn't google anything... on google search.
I duckduckgo'd which doesn't seem to be politically censoring this topic, and found a crappy reddit post (admittedly reddit is shit tier in general) but one comment contained what claimed to be a valid legit reference link to
http://www2.accsjp.or.jp/activities/2018/pr6.php [accsjp.or.jp]
Now because thats in Japanese and my one semester of Japanese a decade ago is gone like the wind, I have no idea what that page says, could be the literotica Japanese translation of lemonparty for all I know. Its all Japanese text and looks like an outline with a list or two. Could be a legit legal document, or fake news clickbait in Japanese, or instructions to assemble an Ikea table, I honestly donno.
The story is very exciting, but seems essentially undocumented outside fake news and clickbait; which doesn't necessarily prove its false, but does prove it smells bad even if its true.
(Score: 3, Informative) by VLM on Saturday January 05 2019, @02:50PM (2 children)
And in a mysteriously linked display of laziness and actual agency, I ran parts of the copied and pasted Japanese article thru a translation service and got the following:
"Act 3: Perform remodeling of save data, substitute remodeling of game machines"
It seems to be a site called In the Computer Software Copyright Association (ACCS) and they seem to be a software industry PAC focused on strengthening the Japanese equiv of the DMCA. Not a legislative body or judge's legal finding or whatevs. So their "We gonna smash those hackers" stuff might just be the usual political action committee chest thumping.
Or maybe using online translation services is not 100% accurate. Still I put forth a reasonable effort and am tentatively not overly impressed. Maybe someone with better Japanese reading skills (AKA any at all) could chime in?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 05 2019, @05:27PM
What do you intrepret to mean, and what do you think of how it applies to you, in that Google filtered your results for this search?
Seems like a great way to suppress arguments if they are silently removed prior to your searching for it, based on what Google believes would be harmful for you to know.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by shortscreen on Saturday January 05 2019, @10:20PM
Several Japanese news sites are carrying this same headline and article text: https://news.biglobe.ne.jp/it/1220/nlb_181220_5434014301.html [biglobe.ne.jp]
It notes that the Cyber Gadget save editor has been withdrawn and raises the question as to whether the Unfair Competition Prevention Act was the reason. Cyber Gadget did not confirm whether that was the reason. There's no additional information.
The ACCS link lists the three things mentioned in (my) TFS. It links to this page which appears to have the complete text of the law, including a 2018 amendment: http://www.meti.go.jp/policy/economy/chizai/chiteki/kaisei_archive.html [meti.go.jp]
The legalese is way beyond me and since they are PDFs I can't do a search or copy-and-paste words into the dictionary :(
It's weird that I can't seem to find any commentary or reaction to the passing of the law.
Here is another brief article in English: http://www.nintendolife.com/news/2019/01/it_is_now_illegal_to_sell_unauthorised_game_keys_in_japan_save_file_editors_also_banned [nintendolife.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 05 2019, @05:24PM (5 children)
I definitely see your criticisms of Google. They seem to be pretty well integrated into the state apparatus as official record correctors and memory hole operators.
Google's translation [google.com]
Yandex's translation [yandex.com] for comparison.
(Score: 1) by Ethanol-fueled on Saturday January 05 2019, @05:33PM (4 children)
AGREED. [google.com]
(Score: 2, Informative) by fustakrakich on Saturday January 05 2019, @06:30PM
"Holy shit, dude" [google.com]
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 05 2019, @06:33PM (2 children)
Congratulations, EF! You've taken your first step into the world of linguistics with your observation that basic sequences of phonemes, even ones that seem to be nonsense in one language, can communicate different things depending on the language!
Do you plan to start out with languages like Hebrew and Farsi? Or will you start as many English speakers do with the Romance languages like Spanish and Portuguese, so that you may communicate with our American comrades both in our local communities and down south when the revolution comes?
(Score: 3, Funny) by Ethanol-fueled on Saturday January 05 2019, @07:27PM (1 child)
I cannot tell you that, but what I can tell you is this: What I posted above explains rather succinctly why that guy had a high-pitched voice after the Somalian witch-doctor he visited shrunk his head.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 05 2019, @11:56PM
No te olvidas el habanero buey!