Oh, how the turn tables. In a move that can only be described as cosmic karma, a hacker names Gary Bowser, yes you read that right. A man named after an iconic Nintendo villain was arrested on piracy and cybercrime charges. He now has to pay the Japanese gaming giant a whopping $10 million after Nintendo filed a civil suit against him. He was already scheduled to pay another massive fine of $4.5 million. Talk about a really bad situation! Gary Bowser now faces up to 10 years in prison for the infractions. If only he made peace with a certain Italian plumber who could break him out!
Bowser was supposedly a part of a hacker group known as Team Xecutor who hacked the Nintendo Switch and 3DS and allowed users to play their ROMs on each console. They sold devices that were “illegal circumvention devices”. We don’t encourage piracy but to really lay the law down on a hacker just goes to show that Nintendo is not playing around. The company takes its intellectual property very seriously.
Gary Bowser and another hacker called Max Louarn were previously charged with serious crimes like wire fraud and conspiracy to commit money laundering. These are felonies and if he’s found guilty, Bowser could be looking at about 20 years behind bars. That’s a hell of a price to pay for pirating a few vidya here and there. Looking at things from Nintendo’s point of view, it’s also understandable as Nintendo isn’t some tech giant that has a video game division. They’re a full-fledged video game company. They don’t produce TVs, software, PCs etc. They concentrate only on games and it’s understandable why it is so protective of its IP.
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