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.
Suppose I’m playing an 80’s RPG on real legal hardware and I’m tired of grinding for XP. I use a cart reader to dump the save file, apply a patch I downloaded from the web and finish the game. I don’t even have to access any copyrighted data to do this!
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it’s SAVE FILES. the base game has to use them. they can’t do anything on their own.
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Even if we agree with copyright law as is, that’s hardly a valid analogy. Save files alone are not a complete game.
Suppose I’m playing an 80’s RPG on real legal hardware and I’m tired of grinding for XP. I use a cart reader to dump the save file, apply a patch I downloaded from the web and finish the game. I don’t even have to access any copyrighted data to do this!
Unless you think data that amounts to
{ "rtc": 1713006754, "savestates": [ { "name": " Red", "xp": 1760, "pokemon": [ { "species": 115, "name": "Fluff", "hp": 24 }, { "species": 92, "name": "Bonk", "hp": 11 } ] } ] }(abriged example in JSON-y format) is copyright-protected, that is. And making a personal backup copy of software is legal (in the US) anyway.
Unironically, yes. Copyright law should be completely removed. It was not created to protect artists. It was created to protect shareholder interests.
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