
Japan student held for making Puzzle and Dragons hack - rtpg
http://www.tokyoreporter.com/2016/06/16/japan-student-held-for-making-puzzle-dragons-hack/
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fenomas
After a bit of poking around it looks like the tool was called "padBinEditor"
\- files and instructions can be found on various English game cheat sites.

As near as I can tell, all it does is let you edit locally stored game data
files - to lower a boss's stats and so on. Why this is illegal, I have no
idea. JP news reports all mention "bypassing data protection", so I guess that
means the data files were encrypted (for some value of "encrypted"). But
according to the app's instructions it works on non-jailbroken iOS, so it's
not like it's defeating OS protections - it's just getting files from storage
and overwriting them. I don't grasp all the details but it seems pretty
chilling.

~~~
hkmurakami
If you were to share a bunch of copyrighted material in the States, the
MPAA/RIAA et. al. would come and threaten you with a law suit (and you'd
settle out of court). In Japan, if you do the exact same thing, you will be
arrested [1]. It's a difference in "what is normal".

[1] [http://aramajapan.com/news/music/40-people-arrested-for-
ille...](http://aramajapan.com/news/music/40-people-arrested-for-illegal-
uploads-of-anime-and-dramas-this-past-week/16790/)

~~~
mikekchar
Unless it has changed recently (which is very possible) I believe Japan still
only has criminal charges for "commercial" copyright infringement. In other
words you need to make money off if it. I'm not familiar with the incident you
linked to, so take my comment with a grain of salt.

Edit: I am indeed wrong. The criminal penalties are spelled out here:
[http://www.cric.or.jp/english/csj/csj5.html](http://www.cric.or.jp/english/csj/csj5.html)

I don't have time to see when it changed, but this is a pretty big
modification from the last time I looked. Sigh...

~~~
hkmurakami
I definitely recall 3 people being arrested back in 2012'ish for sharing a
very large number of Nintendo 3DS ROMs on one of the Winny/Share/Perfect Dark
platforms, so the change must have preceded this.

~~~
mikekchar
Yeah. Now that I think about it, I probably haven't paid attention to this
since about 2007-2008. I'm getting old... I was thinking it was just the other
day ;-)

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rawnlq
If someone did this in the US, can they get in trouble?

When exactly does "hacking" a game become illegal? What about people doing it
for research like the machine learning mario guy:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qv6UVOQ0F44](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qv6UVOQ0F44).
Or tool-assisted speedruns? Or the starcraft broodwar ai?

Is it only when you breach the TOS or copyrights? Just curious since it never
even occurred to me that such things are punishable.

~~~
AntiRush
There are multiple cases in the United States regarding game hacks.

Some of the more famous involve Blizzard, with the biggest example being a
suit against the creators of WowGlider, a bot for World of Warcraft
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MDY_Industries,_LLC_v._Blizzar...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MDY_Industries,_LLC_v._Blizzard_Entertainment,_Inc.))

~~~
jessespears
Fascinating: The Court of Appeals ruled that for a software licensee's
violation of a contract to constitute copyright infringement, there must be a
nexus between the license condition and the licensor’s exclusive rights of
copyright. However ... that a finding of circumvention under the Digital
Millennium Copyright Act does not require a nexus between circumvention and
actual copyright infringement.

The DMCA's anti-circumvention section appears to be the only thing that
preserved parts of the original finding. Perhaps the next time this law is up
for review, some less onerous terms can be placed for reverse engineering for
the purpose of interoperability.

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wingerlang
Slight NSFW warning on the ads, despite using adBlock.

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milcron
It's due to d1rk0nonkgiwed.cloudfront.net

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beedogs
How on earth is this a _criminal_ offense? Copyright law should never, ever be
that powerful.

~~~
Zelmor
In japan they are. People have gone to jail for double digit years and have
been ordered to pay millions of yens in damages for file sharing. From
wikipedia straight:

>Unlike most other countries, filesharing copyrighted content is not just a
civil offense, but a criminal one, with penalties of up to ten years for
uploading and penalties of up to two years for downloading.

I've done my fair share of trying to get vintage animation via Winny some
10-12 years ago. At one time a Galaxy Express 999 uploader just disappeared.
Later on there were reports of his trial, sentenced to jail for uploading
videos of cartoons that aired between 1978-81. That is, 25 years ago at the
time of the events.

Also see Nintendo's case against M2 and R3 card manufacturers that are now
basically illegal in the country. You could be stopped by police on the street
and retained if they saw you with a Nintendo DS and a non-standard game
cartridge.

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rbanffy
How long has it been crazy like this?

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Zelmor
About 20 years, as far as I can tell. There is also a high level of Internet
service provider cooperation. [http://www.zdnet.com/article/japans-isps-agree-
to-ban-p2p-pi...](http://www.zdnet.com/article/japans-isps-agree-to-
ban-p2p-pirates/)

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level3
For those wondering what the offense is, the news reports specifically
indicate _public distribution_ of a program to circumvent copyright
protection. Japanese copyright law does make circumvention itself illegal, but
in general you won't be bothered until you try to make your tools widely
available.

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Illniyar
How is this defined as breaking copyright law? Did the cheat contain code from
the original game?

~~~
smitherfield
Speculatively, I think the reasons here are threefold:

1\. Japan has the world's oldest population, which means there's a pretty high
level of unfamiliarity with and suspicion of many modern technologies. Fax
machines remain more popular than email, for example.

2\. Video games are a much larger and more mainstream part of Japanese culture
than they are in America, and consequently they're seen as "serious business"
to a much greater degree than they are here. It could be that hacking a game
in order to cheat is viewed similarly to how we'd view cheating at gambling or
professional sports. (Especially if the game is played competitively, and/or
the cheat is intended to get around in-app purchases).

3\. Very, very strong cultural emphasis on honesty and following the rules.
Japan is consistently, by a wide margin, the world's most honest and law-
abiding country, and those who aren't are viewed quite harshly. Like all
things, this can be taken to extremes.

~~~
Zelmor
>the world's most honest and law-abiding country

Based on the experience of female friends: don't believe everything you hear
about Japan. If you are a gaijin being mugged or harrassed by Japanese men,
even police will question your word when describing the villain. They will
honestly ask if you have "not just seen him wrong, because Japanese people
don't do such things. Must have been a foreigner."

Also, witnesses reject to help, look away and mind their own business.
Sometimes not even moving away on a train, just sitting there while a woman
gets harrassed, mugged or raped. These women do not always report such crimes
due to the shame of something like this happening to them, and other people
not even helping. The logic goes so that they themselves must have deserved
it, since noone came to their aid. For more, see schoolgirl gangs beating and
raping single bullied targets in public places like restaurants. People just
sit and look away. Some take videos and pictures to post online.

In court, the judges do not question the legitimacy of police findings and
accusations, so if the police presents evidence that would accuse of you
wrongly but which is half-assed or plain wrong, judges take those evidences at
face value. The onus is on you to prove thee two biased parties wrong.

Don't believe Japanese stereotypes without a couple years spent in a big city
there.

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smitherfield
Yes, there's also a lot of xenophobia, but that's not relevant to this case.

~~~
Zelmor
I get triggered whenever Japan is mentioned as an honest and law abiding
country with zen buddhist tradition. Makes people think the fence is made of
sausages yonder. The reality of the social situation is far worse than what
Westerners perceive.

~~~
Joof
The ideal of being honest and law-abiding fits with your story. There is
pressure for them to be perceived this way, whether or not it is true.

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michaelbuddy
I remember when I thought crime was about bad guys actually hurting people.
The more frivolous the world and its economy gets, the more frivolous the
reasons for taking away somebody's freedom.

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PhasmaFelis
Is this a single-player game, or multiplayer?

(Also, I was sure I remembered a game by the same name from the '90s, which I
thought was a trivia quiz game with a D&D-ish theme. A brief search hasn't
turned up any evidence, though. Anyone else remember that?)

~~~
plorkyeran
Until about a year ago it was single-player with a tacked-on social component,
but there's now co-op and a competitive ranking mode with prizes for the top
1% of players (and mostly irrelevant prizes for lower buckets).

If you stay out of the ranking dungeons it's hard to argue that a hack
negatively impacts other players, but making the game easier does means you're
less likely to pay them money to progress faster.

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chillacy
Imo this is what they should have expected by having game state on the client
side.

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alttab
Puzzles and Dragons makes money from monster eggs and other power ups. If you
can supe up your monsters, you have no need to pay them.

It's copyright because they see the ability to update monster stats as
proprietary technology. Only they can do that and users of this software are
stealing from the developers and ruining the game for themselves.

At least, that seems to be what's going on.

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okoksowhatis
Anyone should be able to code any piece of software, any time, and offer it
free for download, without it being illegal.

