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News "The man who owes Nintendo $14m: Gary Bowser and gaming’s most infamous piracy case"

Sounds sad, but if I remember correctly, he was already in the 3DS hacking scene active. And magically, Team Xecuter came back from the dead with their Mig Switch and the website "reporting" first about it was also registered to GaryOPA.com. Of course, Bowser claims he was hacked. Poor guy.

Now \s off: Someone made several millions with the SXOS stuff alone! Of course Gary Bowser could be just an idealistic hippie programmer, who never earned much. He was just the idealist who hates closed systems and the people in the shadow made millions. But if this is the case, these people are surprising me to not apply the Epstein protocol on him.
 
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Finding the words I want to say is proving difficult.

I do have a great deal of sympathy for Gary Bowser even before reading this article; the rest of Team Xecutor should have had the book thrown at them as well given they had stronger involvement with piracy, and it's damn near heartbreaking that for a man in his 50s with the chronic illnesses this will be his life for the remainder of his years for catching all the charges because he couldn't afford to fight them. Yes, piracy bad, but damn for someone who wasn't even taunting Nintendo for pirating their shit on social media like other groups seem to so, let alone someone who isn't actively SWATting streamers, did the punishment here really fit the crime?

Average US salary is a little less than $60K, so we'll round up. To pay off $14m would take 233 years and 4 months, assuming you're not spending any of it yourself. So...what are we doing here? $3m, and that would still take 50 years of not spending any of a $60K salary assuming he's even healthy enough to live, let alone work, that long. It's to prove a point, but like...this is still a single human's life being targetted and buried.

idk, there's making an example out of someone, but also just appears unnecessarily cruel in some ways.
 
It's just insane that a guy with Bowser in his name becomes the NoA President and this guy who got destroyed by Nintendo's ruthless litigation also happens to have Bowser in his name. The actual odds of this happening must be wild lol.
 
MadMarvainy said:
It's just insane that a guy with Bowser in his name becomes the NoA President and this guy who got destroyed by Nintendo's ruthless litigation also happens to have Bowser in his name. The actual odds of this happening must be wild lol.
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Sometimes it feels like we're living in a timeline where the creators of the timeline is making fun of us being bewildered about real life events that are stranger than what fiction writers can come up with.
 
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Please refrain from referring to people with medical conditions seeking to utilize disability payments and other assistance as “parasites.” - Barley Able, VolcanicDynamo, meatbag
Brofield said:
Finding the words I want to say is proving difficult.

I do have a great deal of sympathy for Gary Bowser even before reading this article; the rest of Team Xecutor should have had the book thrown at them as well given they had stronger involvement with piracy, and it's damn near heartbreaking that for a man in his 50s with the chronic illnesses this will be his life for the remainder of his years for catching all the charges because he couldn't afford to fight them. Yes, piracy bad, but damn for someone who wasn't even taunting Nintendo for pirating their shit on social media like other groups seem to so, let alone someone who isn't actively SWATting streamers, did the punishment here really fit the crime?

Average US salary is a little less than $60K, so we'll round up. To pay off $14m would take 233 years and 4 months, assuming you're not spending any of it yourself. So...what are we doing here? $3m, and that would still take 50 years of not spending any of a $60K salary assuming he's even healthy enough to live, let alone work, that long. It's to prove a point, but like...this is still a single human's life being targetted and buried.

idk, there's making an example out of someone, but also just appears unnecessarily cruel in some ways.
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He's not being buried. He's on a payment system where he pays 30% of his income after expenses (rent, etc.), which he's stated works out to something in the hundred dollar range per month. He also limits himself to working odd jobs and relying on disability because he feels he deserves to be an executive, not a grunt employee. Everything in that piece points to him being a remorseless, entitled parasite.

I'm not celebrating Gary being punished, but I'm not going to lose any sleep over his situation, either.
 
Forks said:
It's so funny to see so many people act like they've never heard of wage garnishments before. I'd take that over another prison sentence any day and so would you.
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I have heard of wage garnishments. My point is $14 million is this grand showboating and for what? $1 million would still be enough to keep him destitute no matter what job he takes, and it's not as though they're gonna get all the money they lost from piracy from one single human.
 
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tbh I'll never be a fan of people being punished for life rather than looking for ways to rehabilite them.

it's been shown time and time again that you don't stop people from committing crimes by dishing harsher and harsher punishments but rather by helping them to actually contribute to society in a positive way.

Also please don't reply with extreme, pointless examples which won't change my mind. I also don't believe in capital punishment or a prison system that treats people like animals.
 
Preface: I am familiar with Gary from the homebrew scene and the bullshit arguments he caused in the name of TX.

It's hard for me to find empathy for him and the lionization he gets from the gaming community as a whole because "Nintendo doesn't let me pirate their old games"/"old Nintendo games are too expensive for me to buy" is very annoying to say the least.

I mean this in the most sincere way possible - Gary played with fire and got burned. Back when he was with TX, he wasn't just some vague "small fry". Sure, for the actual manufacturing process and development, he probably was. But in terms of who they send to interact with the homebrew scene, to legitimize the presence of TX? Yeah that was GaryOPA. Poorly spelled forum post after forum post - this guy was the actual face of Team Xecutor. A neverending stream of lies, horrible scene beef (I'm not joking; Gary has done some shit that would make him a persona non grata on any self respecting community not filled with the sycophantic hacks like piracy communities tend to get filled up with), paying off scene communities to host his piracy tools (even though they have rules against it - a big part of TX/GATEWAYs branding was alledgedly just enabling homebrew. It's a lie. The mig switch is the prime example; it's literally only useful for pirating) and other nonsense.

I think the wage garnishing is a bit extreme - from my perspective, he should just've been able to file for bankruptcy and that should have been it; give Nintendo what they should be able to get (because unlike a lot of piracy cases, Gary's behavior directly cost Nintendo a visible sum of money - the "nice" thing about a flashcard is that it's sold for a price we can almost 1:1 convert to a loss). That in mind - everything I know about Gary's history points to him effectively having been unable to earn his money without problems ever since he became an adult.

Not even for any specific reason - for some reason he's been getting in trouble with just making an honest living since the 80s. He had a decent computer parts and repair shop but wrecked his reputation by not delivering orders and not responding to people, getting him blacklisted by computer enthusiasts. Dude got arrested for peddling fake DVDs in his computer repair shop in 2008, after which he reached out to GATEWAY (TX's old name, they also made the 3DS flashcard - we know they're the same because the software they both use rely on the same obfuscation and anti-DRM nonsense - yes a piracy joint that has DRM on their tools, the irony is very funny) and fled to the Dominican Republic. He's more than earned his jailtime for this case and going by a rough estimate of TX's turnover, he got off on the light side.

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That said, the big fry is Max Louarn, someone who has been on the run from the feds for even longer than Gary has been. Last I heard he's hiding out in France (he was able to buy off the Dominician authorities and hitch a ride to France, where his girlfriend lives; France doesn't want to extract him because they're afraid the US might apply the death penalty, although I don't think it'd apply in this case? It's also just the French government being the French government - they don't like handing over criminals and prefer to use them as diplomacy chips), and the judge who gave Gary his jailtime specifically noted that the reason that his conviction is so harsh is because they want to get Max Louarn and if Gary is let off easily, Max would not get the much harsher conviction that's coming to him. (And believe me - Max Louarn does deserve the jailtime if he ever gets arrested, although I have my doubts it will ever happen barring a massive fuck up or his case getting moved to France.)
 
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Adulfzen said:
tbh I'll never be a fan of people being punished for life rather than looking for ways to rehabilite them.

it's been shown time and time again that you don't stop people from committing crimes by dishing harsher and harsher punishments but rather by helping them to actually contribute to society in a positive way.

Also please don't reply with extreme, pointless examples which won't change my mind. I also don't believe in capital punishment or a prison system that treats people like animals.
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This is a white collar crime so it's a bit different. Rehabilitation is relatively straightforward for like petty theft or manslaughter. Normally, the solution would be redistribution the unearned wealth but since his cohorts seem to be untouchable, the bill is all on him. Like what are we trying to rehabilitate when he kind of kept skirting the law for like 15 years. The more damaging part was the federal government deciding he broke the law and thus as a criminal that spent a year in jail, he can't find normal work. The civil case judging him to responsible for the $14 million is kind of much but generally what I think would be charged if a company circumvented illegally the security protections on a popular device and sold that method.
 
astrogamer said:
his cohorts seem to be untouchable
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For clarity, the cohorts in his particular case are a guy from Hong Kong who vanished the moment he caught wind the authorities were after him (specifically, it appears his job was to strike a deal with the chinese factories manufacturing the flashcards) and Max Louarn, a guy who has been on the run from the feds since the mid-90s and who is the main person keeping the entire joint together.

The latter we do know exactly where he is; it's just unlikely he's ever going to be handed over to the US authorities.
 
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