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When 54-year-old Gary Bowser pleaded guilty to his role in helping Team Xecuter with their piracy-enabling line of console accessories, he realized he would likely never pay back the $14.5 million he owed Nintendo in civil and criminal penalties. In a new interview with The Guardian, though, Bowser says he began making $25 monthly payments toward those massive fines even while serving a related prison sentence.
Last year, Bowser was released after serving 14 months of that 40-month sentence (in addition to 16 months of pre-trial detention), which was spread across several different prisons. During part of that stay, Bowser tells The Guardian, he was paid $1 an hour for four-hour shifts counseling other prisoners on suicide watch.
[...] Nintendo lawyers were upfront that they pushed for jail time for Bowser to "send a message that there are consequences for participating in a sustained effort to undermine the video game industry."
[...] Bowser also maintains that he wasn't directly involved with the coding or manufacture of Team Xecuter's products and only worked on incidental details like product testing, promotion, and website coding. Speaking to Ars in 2020, Aurora, a writer for hacking news site Wololo, described Bowser as "kind of a PR guy" for Team Xecuter. Despite this, Bowser said taking a plea deal on just two charges saved him the time and money of fighting all 14 charges made against him in court.
[...] Now that he's free, Bowser says he has been relying on friends and a GoFundMe[https://www.gofundme.com/f/garyopa-restarting-his-life] page to pay for rent and necessities as he looks for a job. That search could be somewhat hampered by his criminal record and by terms of the plea deal that prevent him from working with any modern gaming hardware.
Despite this, Bowser told The Guardian that his current circumstances are still preferable to a period of homelessness he experienced during his 20s. And while console hacking might be out for Bowser, he is reportedly still "tinkering away with old-school Texas Instruments calculators" to pass the time.
Alternate source with GoFundMe link (added to the story above): Nintendo Sued a Man So Severely That He Can Only Survive on GoFundMe
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(Score: 5, Interesting) by Rosco P. Coltrane on Monday February 05 2024, @02:59PM (4 children)
If anybody can convincingly tell others that it's possible to keep living and not commit suicide, it's someone being paid a slave wage to work in a prison he's doing time in for hacking a fucking Nintendo console, and having to give away his meager earnings to Nintendo for absolutely no good reason other than making sure the guy feels the spite.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 05 2024, @03:14PM (3 children)
As far as I know they have not actually arrested or caught anyone that did any of the actual code or hardware side. They managed to nab the talkers and the organizers. There are already new projects out that are assumed to be from the same people that was behind this. So all they did manage to do was ruin this poor sobs life. For more or less running some webshops and a couple of online forums. Was what he did illegal? Sure, all things point to yes by current laws. They can talk all they like about backups or homebrew or whatnot, but it's software piracy for sure. But the people caught was the low hanging fruit that amount to nothing.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Rosco P. Coltrane on Monday February 05 2024, @04:51PM
Just and legal are two very different things.
(Score: 4, Funny) by JoeMerchant on Monday February 05 2024, @10:36PM (1 child)
>They managed to nab the talkers and the organizers.
IMO the talkers and the organizers are the most culpable in the whole deal. The code jockeys should have known better, but quite possibly had no idea how their work was being used to defraud / subvert / profit / etc.
Fraud is fraud.
🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by Freeman on Wednesday February 07 2024, @03:00PM
The "code jockeys" as you say are doing this for fun and/or profit. There's no coincidence that they've not been caught and are likely located in countries that don't have an extradition treaty with the USA.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"