Retro gaming YouTuber faces jail time for reviewing gaming handhelds

37 Comments

  1. peoples888

    TLDR: Italian YouTuber has police raid his home because they suspected he may have a handheld device that uses micro SD cards, which often ship with pirated games saved to it.

    YouTuber is confident he did nothing wrong, but won’t know the charges or outcome until the investigation is complete.

  2. meowlicious1

    Gotta say this is a load of horse shit. Sue the manufacturers, dont ruin 3 years of some guy’s life when emulation brands will continue to pop up over and over again.

  3. He is facing a harsh punishment for piracy if proven guilty. But until there is evidence of the crime, the guy is innocent for now.

    He is going to need a lawyer to proof he has no criminal intention or else he will be going to Jail

  4. TheCelestialDawn

    I’m sure the companies lost a lot of revenue in lost GBA game sales because of this wretched piracy

    The only crime here is how fucking stupid the Italian police and government is. I hope their lives are ruined for similarly petty reasons they try to ruin lives of others. Fuck em. Soulless ghouls through and through.

  5. DeepDepths6

    He’s not facing jail time, he’s just under investigation because he’s buying a lot of these chinese illegal devices (that contain pirated games) and they thought he was reselling them. Realistically they’ll just confiscate the devices and that’s it.

  6. Italy when the government helps a war criminal with an ICC warrant escape and uses spyware to spy on journalists that are critical of the government -> I sleep

    Italy when a youtuber MAY have infringed on copyright issues -> Send the SWAT squad

  7. grovethrone

    Meanwhile this guy would’ve been hailed a hero in Brazil, not really maybe. Here if you aren’t selling pirated content we don’t care. What a world.

  8. Clicker_Reacher

    Arresting the YouTuber is such a lazy and ridiculous way to battle piracy. If Italy were serious about tackling piracy, they’d start by making it illegal for those products to enter the country.

  9. > According to the video, officials are not required to disclose what exactly the charges are or who has brought them until the initial investigation is complete under Italian law.

    Italy is a fascist state again? Didn’t turn out so well the last time, just saying.

  10. What in the literal fuck??? So the guy just bought a bunch of Chinese handhelds and reviewed them- is it a crime to own them????

    What the fuck fault is it of this guy if they DID ship with pirated games? That’s not illegal to be sent something! They need to go after the manufacturers then, not the guy that it just got sent to him! 

    And so fucking WHAT if he sells those units after he reviews them??? What, you can’t sell a used bicycle in Italy? Get fuckin real, man…

    What a stupid, shitty country. At least US is only going after people pirating for profit…

  11. babaroga73

    “Better make sure that you don’t tell which country it is happening in, bot before 10th sentence into the article”

  12. imagine going to jail over a rom of fire emblem gba. i’d be furious if my tax dollars paid for this shit.

  13. KennethHaight

    Italian law seems scary. Just read motor racing engineer Adrian Newey’s book. The legal circus following Ayrton Senna’s death was insane.

    “The defendants stood trial in 1997. Before the verdict, the prosecutor asked to drop the charges against everyone except Williams’ [Patrick Head](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patrick_Head) and [Adrian Newey](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adrian_Newey), for whom he recommended suspended one-year sentences.[^([156])](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ayrton_Senna#cite_note-:10-159)[^([153])](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ayrton_Senna#cite_note-:12-156) Head and Newey were acquitted,[^([156])](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ayrton_Senna#cite_note-:10-159) and an appeals court upheld the acquittals in 1999.[^([154])](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ayrton_Senna#cite_note-autogenerated2005-157) However, the [Supreme Court of Cassation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supreme_Court_of_Cassation_(Italy)) ordered a retrial to clarify facts about the steering column breakage and other potential causes of the accident.[^([157])](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ayrton_Senna#cite_note-160) In 2005, a court found that the steering column was poorly modified and that its breakage on track caused Senna’s accident.[^([158])](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ayrton_Senna#cite_note-:5-161) Newey was acquitted, as he was not responsible for the modifications.[^([158])](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ayrton_Senna#cite_note-:5-161) Head was found culpable, but was protected from prosecution by the statute of limitations.[^([154])](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ayrton_Senna#cite_note-autogenerated2005-157)[^([158])](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ayrton_Senna#cite_note-:5-161) He appealed anyway to clear his name, but his appeal was rejected in 2007.[^([158])](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ayrton_Senna#cite_note-:5-161)”

  14. “Retro gaming YouTuber faces jail time for reviewing gaming handhelds” = “Youtuber is under investigation over suspicion of pirating games”

  15. bowietheswdmn

    How will those GBA developers survive otherwise?

  16. RexHaxival

    Historically, the Italian government never cared a dime about piracy in genera (unless it involved football pay TVs)l, this is quite unheard of.

  17. gingerisla

    Second only to the time German police raided some guy’s house because he called a politician a dick on Twitter.

  18. Celestialntrovert

    I mean its not like the Police have anything better to do

  19. SatoriAnkh

    I follow him since his early videos and it breaks my heart seeing him in this situation. He is such a good and genuine man.

  20. DigitalRoman486

    The fact that they went “He has that thing which sometimes ships with copyright material on so potentially he has some copyright material” not only feels like a flimsy reason for a warrant but also sounds like a competitor reported his channel or tried to swat him or something.

    Otherwise why are the Police not bashing down the door of every person who has a plex server or the 1000 others who review this device?

    Complete overreach.

  21. Everyone involved in the prosecution needs their web traffic sniffed for torrent activity.

  22. I don’t know how to feel here. This is muddy. On the one hand, he seems to have actually broken the law … on the other, not telling him the charges until the “investigation is complete” imho absolutely reeks of Stasi measures.

  23. HotShotOverBumbleBee

    Go after murderers or people playing video games.

  24. BuddhasPasties

    Fascist shit happening in Italy of all places? Woah…..

  25. marsrover15

    Wow first italy let Jeff bezos rent Venice for his wedding and now this, must be learning about incompetence from the US government.

  26. The most absurd thing is that Amazon sells these consoles freely in Italy, including the SDs full of pirated games, but they contest the “promotion to sell pirated content” to a simple Youtuber? They should have arrested Bezos, if anything, but politicians are too spineless

  27. Raiding a house because they thought he had pirated games?

  28. -TheBlackSwordsman-

    I bought an anbernic device recently and can confirm the stock micro SD shipped with thousands of pirated games on it. Even big name ones like the first resident evil.

    If you look this up, pretty much all info points to this being false. But its true

  29. IndividualMurky6474

    Time to download every nintendo thing known to man and start an underground usb network.

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