1mo ago

YouTuber faces jail time for showing off Android-based gaming handhelds - Ars Technica

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YouTuber faces jail time for showing off Android-based gaming handhelds

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1mo ago

YouTuber faces jail time for showing off Android-based gaming handhelds

arstechnica.com /gadgets/2025/07/youtuber-faces-jail-time-for-showing-off-android-based-gaming-handhelds/

20 comments

The problem is the game ROMs on these devices, which are not entirely legal.
In what part are they legal?
- I think a lot of abandonware is legal? Devices like this usually support few dozens old consoles, which you can't even buy, and you can't buy games for them. Stuff like commodore64, old nintendo, etc. And you upload stuff there via USB usually. So the problem I guess is to see where the line draws, because some of those ancient games are legal to pirate now while others are still illegal because their right holder is still in business even though they effectively are abandoned and impossible to buy.
  
  The legality of abandonware is disputed. Traditionally, even if the IP is unavailable, it doesn't make it legal to distribute. Copyright law is also defined jurisdictionaly. I'm not defending copyright, but it is important to understand risks when accessing this.
  Now, in the States, I didn't believe receiving or even playing this game system would be illegal, but people have been jailed for making and distributing such devices. Our corporate overlords also have no qualms about squelching content based on perceived copyright violations.
  This influencer is in Italy, and the laws seem to be heavily against owning such system.
  
  We're talking about devices like the R36S, which come with an SD-Card with the full NES, SNES and MegaDrive library and several hundreds of MAME games, N64, PS1, PSP and so on. Those things are really incredible - they cost almost nothing (like 35€) and give you a really crazy value for your money. Buy them before authorities catch up, but yeah, there is nothing legal about them and many games that come with them are not abandoned.
  
  Those are good reasons when considering ethics of piracy in general but not legality. For me ethics angle is thrown out of the window the moment profit is involved however and I’m pretty sure that guy was doing videos for ad money.
- Possibly some of them are legal/open source and others are not?
  
  Those are entirely legal while the article implies there is some legal gray area involved.
  I know it’s cool to dunk on Nintendo and sometimes it’s an actual moral obligation but I prefer not to lose sight of facts. There’s lots of bad PR against Nintendo lately, mostly based on unverified claims of anonymous people. It gets tiring that ~~journalists~~ mediaworkers care only about clicks.
Someone mentioned this before but the headlines for this story is very misleading. Now ArsTechnica have added "android-based" like that makes a difference...
- They do A-B headlines, so it's probable that you've seen the B headline previously. The URL for the story is from the A headline, which includes "android-based", so that was always part of the A headline.
  You're absolutely right that the headline is misleading, though. The issue is ROMs, not "gaming handhelds"
  
  Besides the fact many of them are Linux based…
Wouldn't this be a civil case, not a criminal one?
- Italian law allows for up to three years in jail for "promotion of pirated copyrighted materials." Italy generally has some fucked up laws, like ISPs required to block DNS addresses by request of Copyright holders for blocking of illegal live sports in very short time frames, and those blocks are not even required to be listed somewhere, which has already caused some issues like when they blocked a cloudflare ip, causing completely innocent sites and services suddenly being blocked in the whole country. Recently they demanded that google Poison their DNS servers using that same law.
  Italy is the MPAA's wet dream manifest
  E: i forgot that they also managed to block the entire google drive domain in italy because there were some downloads there lol
  E2: i was not completely up to date: In January, the Court of Milan found that Cloudflare's CDN, DNS server, and WARP VPN were facilitating piracy. The court threatened Cloudflare with fines of up to 10,000 euros per day if it did not begin blocking the sites.
  
  They may as well block the entire internet since there's pirated content everywhere. They should especially focus on blocking AI sites, those are IP theft machines.
YouTuber faces jail time for ~~showing off Android-based gaming handhelds~~ promoting pirated copyrighted materials
Wow fk italiy

20 comments