Perhaps that it is a very lucrative gacha game. This sort of game is distributed for free and makes its money through microtransactions that amount to power boosts. Save editing would sidestep the business model. Another example of felony contempt of business model?
I am into the other Fate games and anime related culture (got Tamamo JK and Archer figurines) I’ve had the damndest time getting FGO to play on anything other than a high end smartphone. With most mobile games you can play on a tablet or side load into a NVIDIA shield or play on an emulator that runs a PC but not that. I have a box full of various bottom tier Android phones (often Android Go) but these don’t have sufficient memory.
I remember getting it to run on one of my devices once for a while but I was shocked at how bad the english translation was, worse than the average live action Chinese TV series.
To be fair Fate games are all about developing a strong emotional connection to the characters so I can definitely see somebody rolling a huge number of times if they want a character that they moe really hard for.
Currently I'm playing FGO on my Samsung Galaxy S4 Tablet, though it's definitely showing its age now. I'll probably have to upgrade it in a few more years. I could alternatively move over to playing on my Sony Xperia 5 IV, but I like playing on a big screen.
Don't agree. If you look at the opening of each section, there's prohibitions against 'the act of transferring, delivering, displaying for the purpose of transfer or delivery, exporting, or importing, a device [which allows subversion of some kind][...]' and similarly for transmission of software or the like.
All these verbs relate to some sort of commercial transaction, rather than the modification per se. My read is that you could modify it freely, or even write an article documenting the save file format and how to mess with it. It's the act of commercializing the process that makes the difference between a server ban and an arrest warrant.
It's severe, but I don't know what degree it's a waste of public resources. People like the rock-bottom crime rate. On the other hand, word is that Japanese police are not great at investigating more well-planned crime. A trend has emerged in recent years of professional criminals basing themselves abroad and using social media to recruit naïve/disaffected people for the manual labor part.
This isn't defined as theft; my comment is to point out that Japan throws resources at policing/prosecuting violations on principle rather than scale of the injury. They are deontologists rather than utilitarians.
Selling cheat devices/services is treated as a kind of unlawful commerce, because Ruining It For Everybody is socially unacceptable there.
Huh? If I own a video, I can edit it if I want. Selling the modified version would be the difficulty? But I could still hire someone to make a modification for me I think.
Not in the US. There was a company that tried selling modified (I.e. censored) versions of Hollywood films. They lost. Copyright infringement.
There was also a second attempt where people would mail in their disks, and receive an edited version back. Again, lost.
So, whether we like it or not, nope. That’s not how things work, because any editing creates a “derivative work” in the eyes of the law, and only the copyright owner is allowed to make such derivative works.
Even if you edit the film yourself, you’re making a derivative work. The only reason you won’t be sued is because the harm is $0.
Even if you were to give away your modified version, you could still be sued for harming the market for the original product.
You can’t legally make derivative works. Even in the privacy of your own home. It’s only that there’s nothing to be legally won from if you only did it at home. That’s a pragmatic distinction, not a legal one.
Actually you’re wrong on this, or painting an incomplete picture.
CleanFlix was sued because they were editing and distributing movies without studio permission, but a competing product called ClearPlay, which was a specialized DVD player that you would plug a flash drive into, and censorship was then overlayed. It was allowed to continue existing because the end user was technically the one making the edits on their copy of the movie, and the movie itself was not being redistributed.
I was talking about several different lawsuits, like the CleanFlicks and VidAngel lawsuits from 2002 and 2007ish. There’s also VidAngel v Disney as recent as 2019.
Edit for below (“too many responses”):
Irrelevant; as ClearPlay does not properly speaking edit the video; but messes with the playback timeline.
Editing the video is illegal. Messing with the timeline as the unedited film is playing? Completely permitted for accessibility, organization, and other reasons. In particular, that amazing thing called an ad blocker. Skipping 30 seconds ahead to avoid an ad is legal, but editing the ad out is not.
Sure, but the continued existence of ClearPlay indicates that your claim was incorrect. End users are allowed to make modifications to their own media, they just cannot redistribute that media in any way directly.
ETA: Clearplay doesn’t just muck with the timeline. It would overlay clothes over nudity, replace naughty words, etc. It’s actually a kind of neat bit of technology.
Ripping a page out of a book you own or slathering it in white out is not illegal, so I don't see why cutting a scene or overlaying a black bar or, for that matter, any other forms of editing would be illegal. The copy is yours. You own it.
Selling a modified copy for a profit? Yes, that would be a violation of copyright. That's the distinction being made.
Your telling me it's illegal to pay someone to illustrate my copy of a book? It's illegal to commission a translation of a book for personal use? Is it illegal to pay someone to read a book to me?
you cant make audio books, illustrations, or translations of a book without the authors permission
note that text to speech isnt considered derivative work. its considered a tool rather than creating content. so its legal for a kindle to read it to you
I think you're confused, or at least talking past GP. It's not copyright infringement to create a derivative work - e.g. by adding illustrations to a book. What's infringement is if you copy and distribute the derivative work without a license to the original. GP was asking about the former, not the latter.
Yes, but that doesn't mean it's "illegal" to create a derivative work. It just means that the original author has rights they can exert over what you make.
I dont know everything i read online says its copyright infringement to create derivative works, outside of stuff like parodies, fair use and getting permission.
That's the important bit - the things you called illegal a few comments back were obvious examples of (presumptive) fair use.
More generally, whether something is copyright infringement can be vague and subjective - so the bar for going around saying "yes, that is infringement" is not "does it meet a description I read online?". The bar is: "have courts previously ruled that a very similar case was infringement?".
There's a case where a Japanese venue commissioned an art piece, wrapped it, artists sued the venue, and the court ordered the art be restored to the original state on the ground of copyright. I think it was a couple feet tall cat statue or something.
It's somewhat of a case by case basis matter and it's rarely brought to the court, but just because you own a piece doesn't always make it all to your discretion to modify it.
Mailing in a DVD and receiving an edited copy back is clearly a process that involves the creation and distribution of an unauthorised copy. There's the philosophical justification that you're only "editing" a copy the customer has given you but it's not surprising that a judge is uninterested in that, you're writing the movie to a DVD and distributing it and nothing before that matters. Not a good argument against.
It would be interesting if they had 1) distributed a program that automatically edits the user's copy, or 2) edited VHS tapes that customers sent in by physically splicing them. I'm pretty sure the first should be legal, but I'm curious what they'd make of the second.
That’s not completely different than how Clearplay worked. It was a specialized DVD player that you plugged in a flash drive, which contained data to automatically censor the movie on the fly, e.g. putting a bra on Kate Winslet in Titanic during the painting scene.
It appears that it’s still around and does stuff on top of streaming applications.
The copyright owners are begging for a restructuring. One that would greatly increase their authority on two issues: AI use, and Internet website blocking.
Ask for a restructuring right now, and you’ll bring Japanese-style copyright to America (“fair use” doesn’t exist over there) with European-style judicial site blocking (and mass blocking of suspected piracy outlets).
If you want to see a world without fair use, check out the Japanese Wikipedia pages -- it's noticeably lacking in pictures and images than the English counterpart, likely because the latter was written by those in the U.S. It's especially ironic when there's more photos and images on the English language article for topics about Japan!
> Ask for a restructuring right now, and you’ll bring Japanese-style copyright to America (“fair use” doesn’t exist over there) with European-style judicial site blocking (and mass blocking of suspected piracy outlets).
And with a German-style enforcement procedure (i.e. all copyright infringement is criminal, but personal non-commercial use is civil) and Mexican-style copyright term (120+ years after death).
I’ll bite… let’s start by removing any software patents, they are just stupid. Then, let’s start having a look at over broad patents that don’t help anyone but megacorps to block innovation and competition. Then finally, the whole RD sob story is brought up a lot, which has a point in the original definition, but it’s used by megacorps to justify stupid high prices (see medication industry in the US for example) and block affordable medications that save lives. So I say, screw that, let the actual market speak for itself.
> let’s start by removing any software patents, they are just stupid.
100% agree and I'm primary author on 2 software patents taken out by a former employer. Software is maths. Patenting a software process makes as little sense as allowing patents on any other mathematical function.
I also think business method patents in general are crazy, because pretty much all business processes have some sense of inevitability to them that in my view should fail the "obviousness" test for patentability. It seems the tide has turned against them officially too which I think is positive overall for society.[1]
In many countries it is illegal to sell these unless you have a pharmacist's license. It's not illegal to buy them, because you can buy them from a legal seller.
This case is very similar in the asymmetry between buying and selling. You get the save game by buying the game and playing the game. That's not illegal. It's also not illegal to tamper with your own save game (if I understand other comments on this article correctly). What is illegal is to sell a save that you have tampered with.[1]
From a legal perspective it's perfectly possible to ban the sale of something without banning the purchase, just like certain things are illegal to sell or buy but not illegal to have.[2]
[1] You may well say it's crazy that this is the case, but I could sort of see both sides of this. I do think cheating in competitive multiplayer games really ruins things for other players so I could see the argument for banning anything that does that. In singleplayer games my view is "do whatever you think is fun for you" but that's just a personal perspective. My understanding is people play Pokemon against each other so you could say that cheating with a modified save harms others. I'm not sure that's important enough to justify a law but it's really not my business to say.
[2] Famous example - if you go to the Moma there is an artwork by Robert Rauschenberg that was the centre of a famous tax lawsuit for this exact reason. The artwork itself is basically a painting, but one of the things that Rauschenberg did was sort of alter paintings by sticking sculptural elements on to them and this particular one includes a dead and stuffed bald eagle. Now this was not illegal at the time, but when the bald eagle became endangered, the sale of anything that included any part of a bald eagle became illegal. So this artwork can never be sold. When Rauschenberg died, the IRS went after his estate for tax on this painting which they valued at $29million. However his family said the value of the painting was zero because it can never be legally sold (even though it's not illegal for them to own it). https://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/22/arts/design/a-catch-22-of...
> Nothing personal, but it’s a bad mental habit to make a distinction where there is no difference.
It's worth noting that disclaimers like "nothing personal" or "no offense" do not actually make the remark less personal or less offensive. If we're going to be critiquing mental habits, when you find yourself using this language, you should probably ask yourself why you feel the need to add such a disclaimer and whether the remark is really worth making. If it's so easy for someone to "misinterpret" your remarks as personal - maybe it's a valid interpretation?
I agree but the Japanese legal system is very weird. It seems like pokemon is very a lucrative business and a tough sentencing is probably only as an example to deter future violations.
The legal system sounds pretty normal. Elected officials are in their 80s. Some corporation comes to them with a bunch of mumbo jumbo not involving fax machines and a stack of money. Law enacted.
I also think that east Asia thinks that esports are as important as normal sports, at least in the sense of exporting their culture. Everyone wants to be Hollywood or the NFL, and esports are their route to that kind of international renowned, or so they think. Thus, they have a bunch of laws to make sure nothing crops up that could impact that. Pokemon isn't an esport, but if you're 80, you don't know that.
That's an absurd caricature; just checking in on TV news would have informed you that Japan's legislature has a fairly broad age distribution. Video games have been huge in Japan since the 1970s, and mechanical gambling games like pachinko well before that. I suspect most legislators have had household exposure to videogames, and any under 60 probably played growing up. Likewise Japan went wild for digital cellphones well before smartphones; there's a whole genre of literature called 'text message novels' that started in the early 2000s.
As for this case, the prohibition on selling mod tools/services is certainly to protect the game manufacturers; if there's a perception that it's easy and safe to cheat in the game then players' incentive to spend (whether via microtransactions or future releases) goes way down, and so does the publisher's revenue, and so do tax receipts. I can't help noting that Japan's game industry isn't engaging in mass layoffs over the last few years, suggesting that maybe they know what they're doing.
No manufacturer wants their product utility diluted. After market modifications that add a benefit to the user don't make the product any worse for people without the modification. but in a product which is used by people to compete for social entertainment, modifications absolutely hurt the product because wins and losses are no longer a function of skill.
> As for this case, the prohibition on selling mod tools/services is certainly to protect the game manufacturers; if there's a perception that it's easy and safe to cheat in the game then players' incentive to spend (whether via microtransactions or future releases) goes way down, and so does the publisher's revenue, and so do tax receipts. I can't help noting that Japan's game industry isn't engaging in mass layoffs over the last few years, suggesting that maybe they know what they're doing.
There is 0 chance whatever prohibition on selling mods had any impact on mass layoffs happening or not happening.
Of course, but maybe the ethos that makes the industry stable there (and presumably drives its lobbying efforts) is a good fit for the society in which it exists.
>Are the modified Pokemon being used in competitions?
Interestingly, it's pretty much standard for competitive Pokemon players to use hacked Pokemon because of the crazy time investment the game demands to train Pokemon with optimal stats and movesets legitimately. They use free methods to do this though.
Based on the law invoked it seems the idea might be that his versions of the games essentially piggy-back off the trademarks attached to Pokemon, while effectively rendering the vanilla, unmodified cartridges such that they may be perceived to be an inferior product in comparison, despite being the original product.
This seems like a stretch even under Japanese law, since the article gives the impression that he was not selling the cartridges themselves, but merely the service of taking cartridges and modifying them. But Japanese copyright law is kinda crazy. There's a reason that Japanese Wikipedia is almost totally bereft of images.
The first sentence puts it into a little bit of perspective:
"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."
Now, it's still a ridiculous story, but it's a little easier to see how this happened.
The law may seem silly/not worthwhile but at least it gives perspective there is a law saying selling modified things in a way that might make competition unfair is explicitly illegal instead of someone just deciding save edits are bad and something worth arresting for in a vacuum.
But the law is about business competition. So how is that competition becoming unfair? Just naming this law without a lot more explanation does pretty much nothing for perspective.
The perspective is seeing the law explicitly says said activity is unfair and illegal independent of whether one's ideology agrees said law is reasonable or should exist.
E.g. if there was a 2022 law calling for arrest of those holding ice cream cones upside down because of risk to the sidewalk cleanliness then knowing that gives perspective to why someone was arrested for holding an ice cream cone upside down beyond just a random arrest decision for something one thinks everyone would consider harmless. That doesn't mean it convinces you personally that the law is reasonable and, just that it was indeed an explicitly illegal activity.
> The perspective is seeing the law explicitly says said activity is unfair and illegal independent of whether one's ideology agrees said law is reasonable or should exist.
It still needs an explanation because at a surface level the crime and the name of the law have nothing to do with each other.
Until that explanation exists of how the law says it's illegal, I don't have the perspective of seeing the law explicitly say that!
I am not even in the realm of talking about whether the law makes sense.
The name of the law is neither here nor there in the end (most laws have useless names really) and you don't have to possess an explanation of why it's covered under that law to be given the perspective that it is. On that front though, and following the link to the body of the law, a shortened version might be: The saves are encrypted and proprietary. As a result modifying them to get rare items runs afoul into the "trade secrets" verbiage. Selling work based on such trade secrets then falls under the unfair competition definition and is what results in said penalties.
My stab at the likely background reasoning for having these rules (i.e. not explicitly written into the law but rather why the law might have been made) is something along the lines that the guy made money off of devaluing the rarity of IP the company was supposed to have control of distributing through their proprietary means.
It's still pretty important to me to understand some of the mechanism. What it takes to not break the law. Some potential reasonings are much more sensible than others, and the overall consequences differ.
I kind of wanted an explanation too so I looked up the law, but to be honest it’s dense and beyond me. [1]
It reads like an anti-circumvention law to me, but I’m not clear on what specifically in there would make it applicable to modified video game save data unless you can argue that modifying save data is a wrongful way to acquire to a particular game state.
I'd like to know whether this Japanese law explicitly says "selling video game save data is illegal" (seems less likely) or if there is an interpretation of the Unfair Competition Act that the alleged facts constitute counterfeiting or something.
I'm not a lawyer so I'm not an expert on the Japanese legal system but merely asserting that the law bans a specific act isn't helpful because it doesn't explain how.
It's certainly not an applicable argument to a lawyer/judge but that's wholly different than being helpful for joe schmoe reading a news article summary of the situation on the web. You don't need to replace the understanding and process of the Japanese court system with personal understanding and investigation to start understanding a news article. Same as you don't need to spend decades studying maths to get a useful takeaway from a news article talking about Andrew Wile's proof of Fermat's Last Theorem.
I'm not saying nobody can ask further questions if they want , just that arguing you can have no new understanding of the situation without an explanation to the level of a Japanese lawyer arguing the text of the law in a way you personally understand and can follow is silly. You also don't need to personally and independently validate the dude's sales transactions to be able to get the takeaway that yeah, the article is probably right that he made sales of this service and didn't just modify personal files.
I got a reasonable level of understanding from "Japanese police arrest man for tampering with Pokémon Violet save data".
Expanding that by mentioning the Unfair Competition Prevention Act gave me no additional understanding.
It's not that I can't comprehend the situation just fine as a layman, it's that the quote above did not give me any perspective I didn't already have from the headline. It was not helpful as an addition to the headline. It only introduces a new mystery.
It also comes with a message explaining the exact act of selling the modifications is explicitly covered under said law rather than some assumed problem with generic copyright law or thing that might be easily defendable against. It could be declared as being against part of the "chips and cheese law" and the lack of personally being able to tie the title of the law to how it's related would still leave that extra context beyond what the title gives.
Concluding there must be no possibility to see new information to see out of something in the face of others doing just that is not something others can help you with. Either you're interested in extracting the extra information on your own or you won't accept someone telling you it's there. Either way: yes, it's still really additional perspective to most others regardless of you see how.
As outlined in Article 3(1) of the Unfair Competition Prevention Act, the unauthorized modification of Pokémon data can potentially diminish the enjoyment derived from the game, leading to detrimental consequences for game sales.
The competition is mostly from the "make money by" part. That's money from what used to be a sole company's asset now going to 2 places rather than 1. E.g. before I could leverage the rarity aspect of the gameplay & IP however I desired (including keeping it as part of making a time investment into the product if I thought that was more valuable in the long run) but now you're selling an alternative version of the experience to people and I have to compete with getting any pokemon and stats instantly from someone else for $x when it comes to extracting the value from the IP asset with the protected saves.
I'm not saying this is a great stance, just showing how it is seen as competition in the second scenario alone.
That sounds like bullshit. You still have to buy the original product (game) to use this other thing (modified save). I guess unless the original vendor also sells something to that effect, like pay to win.
I hope modifying the save file for yourself is not illegal still.
Also less than a year ago age of consent in Japan was 13 years, talk about priorities.
You still have to buy the game, but other people may choose not to if they become aware that the player base is infested with cheaters. If it was a single-player game this would likely never have been an issue.
You're probably right. It makes me angry and bums me out.
For me, grinding 98% of the time is not enjoyable. Game are definitely better than what they once were, but let me cheat on single player games. I get it game developers, the play time will be shorter I'm fine with that.
And game devs if you don't want to add cheats then add a bunch of accessibility controls because those things are just as good as cheats.
Also just let me temporarily turn off encounters. Sometimes I don't want to fight. I just want to walk around and enjoy the world you made. But no I get an encounter every minute and I'm stuck listening to that same battle song again. Looking at you Yakuza franchise.
"Unfair Competition Prevention Act" is an antiqued piece of law first enacted in 1930s. Its original scope was trade malpractice such as corporate spying.
In 1990s, Japanese gov (somehow) decided to implement DRM protection in the framework of this law. So it ended up governing both trade secrets AND DRM.
Housing can always use becoming more affordable. Perfectly affordable housing is when an ordinary worker without a university degree can buy a decent single-bedroom apartment in just some years of saving (which sounds totally unrealistic so there always is room to improve). I've read it even is hard to rent a decent apartment in Japan because they always require huge deposits only the rich can afford easily.
There are homeless people, at least some of them not particularly happy about being homeless, also 30+ yr. old people having to live with their parents - means housing is not affordable enough.
To be fair, housing alone is a low bar. I'm sure plenty of homeless people could technically afford somewhere to live, but don't find any of their available options worth it for whatever reason. Wonder if there have been any surveys on this.
Wow I don't think I've ever seen such an America-centric comment in all my time reading here. Impressive that you are willing to jump to "defund the japanese police" despite not even knowing that housing is not a problem in Japan by any stretch of the imagination.
> Wow I don't think I've ever seen such an America-centric comment in all my time reading here.
I'm from Europe and can't imagine housing being affordable anywhere in the world besides the places where people feel happy living in stick&mud huts.
> Impressive that you are willing to jump to "defund the japanese police" despite not even knowing that housing is not a problem in Japan by any stretch of the imagination.
Because that's sort of a figurative expression. Housing problem is just a random pick relatively relevant to the most of the developed countries. Pick any other problem which could use some additional resources allocated instead if it's not the case for Japan. It probably still has some, hasn't it?
You don’t learn by talking, you learn by listening. And you’re talking too much about Japan for someone who knew nothing about the place and extrapolated that it must be like Europe.
Who would tell me anything to listen about housing in Japan if didn't say anything about it? I never ever heard about housing being more affordable in Japan than in the rest of the world until today. Now I learnt something and feel happy and grateful about this.
By the way I still doubt it's so affordable there that I myself would consider it affordable. I would after hearing the majority of people who are homeless or live with their parents saying they seriously just prefer living this way.
I consider Japan to be a great example other countries should learn from in a number of ways though.
Japan has avoided much of the housing issues we have in much in the western world, and in the English-speaking world in particular. Some factors in this is that construction is much more by-right, has sensible zoning, excludes a gnarly community process and is planned centrally instead locally which in combination avoids all issues with NIMBYs and results in a good housing supply.
Well, this is curious. I will study this. At least one useful comment, thank you.
Nevertheless, if housing is so affordable in Japan, why are there still people who don't own homes? Can an average McDonalds worker in their 20-ies just go and buy a home easily without applying for a lifetime-long mortgage?
> if housing is so affordable in Japan, why are there still people who don't own homes?
You literally have it the wrong way around. There's less incentive to own homes in countries where housing prices fall. Owning a home actually costs you money, it isn't a good investment in the absence of artificial scarcity. In Japan a house is a consumer good like a car, in fact on average the value of most houses drops to about zero in 30-40 years.
Some of the richest countries in the world have the lowest rates of personal home ownership, Switzerland, Germany, Japan among them because it isn't an investment vehicle and rent protections are good. This narrative of being desperate to own a home just doesn't make any sense.
I consider the value of owning a house is being free from having to pay rent rather than to gain on the investment. The fact a house is considered an investment (in full meaning of the term so once you own it you worry when its price falls) means it's not really affordable.
Now I feel happy there is such a place where that is this way and people live without worrying about where to live. Thank you for sharing this knowledge.
Because those things are not a problem for everyone and a reasonable tradeoff. If you want a large SFH like in the American suburbs move to the Inaka. I'd argue that your question is part of what's at the root of the housing crisis in the anglo world
I think you are reading the situation backwards. Capsule hotels and tiny apartments are not a reflection of low housing supply, they are a reflection of not having much space -- and there is not much space because so many people want to be in a certain area, basically the very dense urban centers.
There is really nothing the market can do, to make more big houses and big hotel rooms available in downtown Tokyo, but the market in Japan is actually getting a huge number of people fairly cheap stays in very dense areas and doing so much more successfully than in the USA.
I don't think there are any capsule apartments, with multiple people living together in tubes in the wall, but there are very small apartments.
Japan is a very different country than most think it is. Most seem to remember the Japan of the past when they were a technological and economic giant, set to imminently become the largest global economy. Japan today has been through 30 years of recession/stagflation. Their economy was larger 30 years ago than it is today. [1] On top of a dysfunctional economy, they also are going through severe demographic collapse. The population of Japan has decreased by more than 5 million people since 2010 [2], and that decline is accelerating. Even the population of places like Tokyo are decreasing.
As a result of these factors, Japan now has an economy closer to a developing nation than the economic superpower many of us remember. Their GDP/capita is $33,000, and average monthly wages (for workers only) is now $1900 [3], for an average annual salary of $22,800. And all of of this combines to create a direct path to really affordable housing, at least so long as you aren't living off of Japanese wages.
Why is there a demographic collapse if housing is easily affordable? Most of my friends here in the EU allocate the biggest chunk of their salary to paying rent for single-bedroom apartments, I don't dare to imagine what a horror would it be to live in one as a family with children, having no individual room for yourself and no individual rooms for them. I am fortunate to have an extra room but having kids still means giving up my home office room turning it into children bedroom. Isn't this a major factor in making decisions about whether or not to reproduce?
Sexism. Japanese women have to pick between their career and having a family, so they pick the former. There's a lot of old men running Japan that won't hire married women or expect women who get married to leave the workforce.
Korea, which has even worse demographic problems than Japan, also has significantly worse sexism in ways I'd have to link you to a three-part Moon Channel YouTube video essay to even scratch the surface of.
Immigration is also a factor: getting permanent residency in Japan is a pain in the ass. America doesn't even notice its declining birth rate because everyone wants to move here and we let them in.
> Sexism. Japanese women have to pick between their career and having a family, so they pick the former.
The same is often said about western countries but by contrary attributed to non-sexism. Conservatives love to say women don't have children because they easily choose careers as the society is not sexist enough anymore.
> There's a lot of old men running Japan that won't hire married women
Wow. This breaks anothse stereotype in me. I would expect he majority of old Japanese men to be super-wise, kind and caring in a good way, also simultaneously careless in a god (zen) way so they would do what is good and give up what is not even if a tradition demands that.
> Immigration is also a factor: getting permanent residency in Japan is a pain in the ass.
Why wouldn't they gradually enable flow of immigration from ethnically close nations? E.g. many people from Mongolia or Yakutia (a major Asian state within Russia) would probably love to immigrate to Japan and be willing to adhere to Japanese culture.
> I'd argue that nationality says the least about a person.
Absolutely sure. Nationality does not define the person. But the culture of the society a person gets raised in influences them a lot. Hence the stereotype there are just two major kinds of people in Japan: kawaii and zen :-))
> E.g. many people from Mongolia or Yakutia (a major Asian state within Russia)
Wow, yeah, racism wise Japan and Mongolia are closer than Korea or China, sure, but the split had estimated to have happened at least 40k years ago, that's couple times older than the oldest known human writings. It's just DNAs and some highly academic phonological elements that these regions share.
We are walking a narrow path between reasonable speculation and grotesque racism now. I just sort of understand the discomfort (racist - yes, unnatural and better to pretend nonexistent - hardly) numerous Japanese may feel considering inflow of people of completely different kins (European, African, whatever). Perhaps it may feel easier to deal with people which look at least a tiny bit similar and share some common cultural elements with you historically. Sure I could say China and Korea instead but these are developed countries so there probably isn't nearly as many resourceful people interested in immigration. The Chinese and Koreans probably also feel less neutral towards Japan because of the events of relatively recent history.
I'm sorry but none of that makes sense. The part that people assume immigrants would be immune to birth rate problem don't make sense in the first place, not to speak of your comment.
Solving population collapse with immigrants doesn't really work in the way many seem to think. In this case, your examples demonstrate one of the many issues to a quite extreme degree. The entire population of Yakutia is 1 million, Mongolia's about 3 million. Since 2010 Japan has lost more than 5 million people, and their rate of decline continues to accelerate. Even putting every single Mongolian and Yakut into Japan would fail to replace what they've lost just recently, let alone create a sustainable population.
Beyond this there are also many other issues. Neither of these countries speaks Japanese. And while I don't know much about Yakutia, Mongolia has an extremely high crime rate for Asia. And I think that replacing the Japanese with large number of migrants would almost certainly just destroy everything that we all want to preserve about Japan - it definitely has the most peculiar and distinct culture among developed nations. Migrants will bring their own culture, values, and ideas. That can be a good thing ('Japanese' tempura is largely a product of the Portuguese for example) , but at an excessively large scale it can also simply drown out instead of compliment the host culture.
Employment discrimination has been illegal in Japan for decades now, well before many of us were even born. Expecting women to leave the workforce is definitely not popular opinion either, unless you're talking about people who retired of age long ago.
Outlawing a common norm is not enough (often to the point of futile) to actually get rid of it. You have to somehow change the actual common view and this, more probably than not, requires a lot of time to pass. The easiest path is to use popular culture to teach the teens something is uncool (or contrary) so they adhere to this value once their generation grows up and gets in charge. AFAIK this is how modern Japanese were taught to enjoy coffee - coffee candies strategically came first.
Another arguably problematic thing I think I know about Japan (I hope I'm wrong in this as well) is their work culture strongly discourages switching jobs. Their salary is a pure function of how long did they work in the same company, it drops to the junior level once they switch (no matter how skilled they are) and nobody wants to hire old people because it's almost impossible to fire them (as well as anybody else) once hired even if they don't do the actual job nearly well enough to make sense. Am I wrong?
I'd say the common view has changed decades ago. Public opinion regarding equal employment is pretty much the same in Japan and the US.
> Another arguably problematic thing I think I know about Japan (I hope I'm wrong in this as well) is their work culture strongly discourages switching jobs.
It's not uncommon to see people switch jobs. I think public perception on that topic has changed too in the past few decades. But one thing worth noting is that as you mentioned, Japanese workers have stronger legal protections compared to the US. It's more difficult to fire someone in Japan, so people are incentivized to keep their current jobs.
> Their salary is a pure function of how long did they work in the same company
I believe this fell out of favor, but not in a good way. The move away from seniority-based wage is often used as euphemism for pay cuts. Another case of corporations not being your friends thing.
> nobody wants to hire old people because it's almost impossible to fire them
This unfortunately is a problem, at least for jobs with decent pay I think? Unless you're rich, of course.
America doesn't notice its declining birth rate because it's relatively recent. Japan's birth rate collapsed about 40 years ago. [1] By contrast the US' decline is only trending towards dangerous levels quite recently. The graph in the link includes both the US and Japan and is quite enlightening! Fertility is an extremely lagging indicator, which is why places like Japan (and soon South Korea) are essentially mirrors into the future that awaits the West at large as well, if things don't change.
Immigration isn't a solution. Japan is losing about 0.5% of their population per year - including immigration, and that rate is accelerating. It's unclear where their equilibrium point will be, other than substantially worse than that. In the US at even "just" a 1% annual decline, you'd need 3.3 million migrants per year, forever, to maintain population levels. And you don't want random uneducated individuals who don't even speak the language, or you risk destroying the very thing that motivates people to want to migrate. You want skilled, educated, English speaking individuals who are capable of and motivated to work. For some contrast in 2022 we admitted a total of about a million people, and only 270,284 of them were for employment. [2]
I didn't suggest immigration was the solution. It's a stopgap, and an accidental one, but one that happens to be working out in America's favor right now. If we had an immigration system like Japan's then we'd have demographic decline closer to Japan's than our own.
As for the statistics you cited, they're for permanent residency ("green cards"), not immigrant visas. Due to a few strange quirks of the US immigration system, the time it takes from visa to residency increases based on how many other immigrants came from the same country as you. A lot of these people are going to be Mexicans who have been legally residing in the country on one or more visas for the last 10-20 years.
I can't seem to find the visa data in this PDF, and the green card numbers are visa datum with time lag, so I'll continue nitpicking them. Almost half of the green cards granted are for immediate family members, and another 166k are other family sponsorships. The other immigration categories (e.g. refugees, diversity visa holders[0], etc) are less than a quarter of the total green card pool.
In terms of finding immigrants who are a net positive to society, family sponsorship is arguably a better basis for immigration than employment. There are a lot of employers who game the immigration system[1] to skirt around America's labor laws. Employers don't care about the people they bring in as long as they work for cheap and do what you tell them. So they're bringing people in with no support network beyond a company that deliberately wants to exploit them.
[0] For the same reason why America makes Mexicans wait 20 years to get their green card, people from countries underrepresented in the green card pool can apply for a special diversity visa that right-wingers love to complain about despite the fact that it makes the immigrant pool less Mexican
[1] Specifically the H-1B visa program.
Also, just to put all my cards on the table: my views on immigration are extremely libertarian. Immigration is one of the most dehumanizingly bureaucratic nonsense processes one can go through with a government. The reason why companies are able to abuse H-1B is because you can't switch jobs outside of other potential H-1B sponsors who are going to expect the same out of you. It's a literal immigrant underclass!
Visa data is listed under non-immigrant tables. Generally that information isn't very useful because there's a regular and massive flow of people in and out of the country. What you probably want is to see the net migration rate. That factors in all people, citizen and noncitizen, staying minus leaving. That's here. [1] And here is the total population change. [2] Worldometers has both datums combined here. [3]
If there was 0 immigration to the US, the population would still be growing at a solid rate. Demographic collapse lags fertility collapse by around 6 decades. That's the time it takes for the first generation (around ~20 years) to have poor fertility, to start dying. And at that point you start seeing stuff happen at a crazy exponential scale. Japan, for instance, is still yet to reach the final boss, since they only collapsed about 40 years ago.
The problem with network based immigration is just a subset of the problem with large scale immigration in general. Reduced standards risk creating entirely separate communities that fail to integrate, imperiling the entire system of immigration. For instance Sweden was, at one time, arguably the most immigrant friendly country in the world. But a large influx of immigrants who failed to assimilate has turned Sweden into a country where the Sweden Democrats [4] are looking to become the dominant party. Various countries throughout Europe are seeing similar outcomes, even if to lesser degrees - Geert Wilders/PVV in the Netherlands, AfD in Germany, and so on.
The reason employment visas are so limited is because ideally no company should be hiring foreign workers for jobs that could be done by a local worker. Otherwise you create a scenario where not only do you indeed create an underclass as companies just hire the cheapest most easy to exploit workers from anywhere en masse, but you also destroy your own labor force, economy, and ultimately country in the process of it as well.
Urbanized communities have let birthrates and so do highly educated ones. The (perceived?) opportunity cost of having a kid is much higher for educated professionals. This is the real reason why we are seeing population decline in the most developed countries.
It has nothing to do with housing not being affordable and everything to do with many people simply not wanting to have children. Ask Scandinavia and/or Nigeria if you want to see such a dichotomy.
Indeed. Lots of people bring in external factors for people not having kids but don't understand that the poorest of the population have many more kids than the richer portions. One may rule that to religions but still others rule it to the simple fact that kids do not bring joy to the modern world, as cruel as that may sound to many.
Imagine a perfect world where having children is not associated with adding any problems (which could require more time, money and patience) to care about in your life - everything is covered: you get a great new 10-room apartment in the best city center for free, free pass to the best school for your Children, great free babysitters, an awesome free doctor comes whenever the kid falls ill, 4-hour workday to spend time with your kids, a couple extra weeks of paid leave to travel alone together with you spouse and rest from parenting etc. How probable it is you still don't want to have children?
Very probable. Again, ask rich nations why they don't have kids while poor nations do at an exponential scale. At the end of the day, and people don't want to accept this, people simply don't want to have kids.
Okay, thank you for providing the perspective. I could never imagine it can be this way. Personally I don't have children because of one simple reason - I don't have nearly enough free time and money to have them raised reasonably well while maintaining my comfortable life level and my wife says exactly the same.
Sure, some people simply like not having them, and that demographic seems to be growing, as people start to get out of the social pressure of having kids (as was common in the past and still is in many areas of the world, where women are expected to pump out babies, and men are expected to help them do so) and think critically about what they want from their finite life. Many still want kids, yes, but many also don't want to spend 18+ years raising them.
A lot of people enjoy their career. They went to school for ~20 years to prepare for it. Having interruptions in your career of many months and suddenly having to limiting your investment in your career in addition can put your career on the backfoot especially in a competitive environment. This is why in most developed countries poor people have a lot of kids. They have no career to disrupt. They have jobs. Very wealthy people get staff that takes care of household and watched kids. Educated, middle and upper middle class has a career to lose and cannot afford comprehensive, around-the-clock staff.
There's a lot of hypotheses, but most seem to fail across one domain or another. The only I've seen consistently explains collapsing fertility across all contexts is consumerism. The modern world has introduced a completely ridiculous level of advertising everywhere. And this has really driven a boom in consumerism everywhere. What room is there for family in a world where making and consuming Product is gradually becoming the entire point in life? Children greatly constrain your time meaning less time for making Product, and also are a substantial cost themselves (above and beyond the reduction in time) meaning less ability to consume Product.
So for instance this cleanly explains the Western income to fertility curve. In particular people who are poor have far more children than those who are middle to upper income, but then once you reach the ultra wealthy then we're back to having lots of children again. Both the top in bottom are unable to participate in the Product chasing game for different reasons. The bottom are unable to afford to do so, while the top have so much money than no carrot is ever out of their reach, so they must look elsewhere for meaning and purpose.
It also explains the religion to fertility correlation. Religion not only provides a meaning and purpose in lieu of the almighty Product, but of course itself also tends to focus heavily on fertility and family. It also explains why nearly all modern correlations with regards to fertility simply completely fail when you look at the past where people of all income levels, education, and religious values were having lots of children. It's because consumerism, and its driving force of never-ending advertisement, had yet to really take much of any grip on the world.
> ...direct path to really affordable housing, at least so long as you aren't living off of Japanese wages.
Isn't the term "affordable housing" meant as "affordable by local residents"? Otherwise most of the world has affordable housing, at least so long as you are living off SF wages.
> To me this just sounds like the Japanese police has ran out of real crimes to solve
This has been true for the police in almost every developed country for decades. The function of police is to hurt people (by Stafford Beer, this is also their purpose). Since there aren't nearly enough criminals for them to hurt, they have shifted to waging a constant war against their own population, fueled by a ballooning catalog of criminal offenses that is no longer even comprehensible to most people. It's the only way they can justify their continued existence in anything resembling its current form.
There is certainly a possibility of civil liability for breach of contract or copyright infringement for violating a EULA.
In some cases, a person could even face criminal liability (e.g., hacking game servers using a modified client could be both a EULA violation and a crime).
A breach of contract is not a criminal act and I don't even think (I don't know as IANAL but it doesn't matter for this purpose) it is a tort? Copyright infringement is not enforced by EULAs. And I am certainly not claiming that if you violate an EULA your action is somehow immune from all other laws. Yet, this is still true: violating an EULA is not "illegal". If the EULA says you can only do X or you must not do Y, you absolutely are allowed to do those things, but there might be consequences such as... they ban you from their service, or they refuse to give you warrant service... not "and the law comes after you with a fine or jail time or whatever as what you did was illegal".
Defund the police isn’t an attempt to remove all police officers. The idea is to reduce their numbers so they have less time to ‘waste’ on trivial crimes.
Wouldn't it be better to have laws that make sense instead of relying on the side effect of the police force being overwhelmed and hence ignores the laws that don't make sense?
Having fewer police directly saves money so that’s a double win. Further, even reasonable laws can be twisted by a cop with to much time on there hands.
Streamlining the legal code isn’t really something individual voters can really accomplish. Look at the slow march if pot legalization and that’s something a significant majority of people supported long before the ball started rolling.
I don't believe he meant one should intentionally write false statements, just that when one makes a mistake and others correct it, that it's a good opportunity to learn.
Nevertheless, let me mention a relevant fun fact: I even remember there was a research paper (or maybe a non-academic experiment somewhere on Reddit or so, I fail to recall for sure) which says postulating something wrong publicly is way more efficient than asking a question - much more people rush to emerge passionately addressing all the flaws of your opinion in details and with references than when you ask.
Yes. It changes it entirely. Obviously? Selling or otherwise distributing was illegal, or using hacked data with an on-line service, not merely hacking your own property.
I don't think its reasonable though. I have a hard time believing that its a good use of public resources. He wasn't pirating software, he was selling a savegame file. That it was 'tampered with' doesn't really matter except when the letter of the law is used to punish people doing nothing wrong.
There were game save websites back in 2000 where people could go and download saves for their Dreamcast straight to their memory cards. People would also make homebrew games and animations for the VMUs (virtual memory unit). The memory cards were like mini Gameboys. Fun times. I couldn't imagine getting arrested for that.
These websites still exist and are enjoyed by many! GameFAQs for example, hosts a large number of saves. Most recently I downloaded a complete save file for Micro Machines V3 for the PS2, so we didn't have to grind to unlock all cars for multiplayer :)
People pointing out that this is some weird quirk of Japanese law: if there's an argument that reverse engineering the software to determine how this works is circumvention of a technical control, this would potentially be a violation of 17 U.S. Code § 1201 - https://dair-community.social/@kendraserra/11167540121678898... discusses case law around a separate kind of case, but one that could be argued here. Let's not criticise Japanese law without acknowledging that US law is also fucked up.
Those aren't the only two options. Shall we make sure to criticize the law of all 192 remaining member states of the United Nations every time one country's legal system comes into focus? Wouldn't want to leave anyone out.
While I agree that the US law on the matter is also fucked up, 17 U.S. Code § 1201 seems to be a civil violation not a criminal one. The police wouldn't arrest you and the punishment is financial and an injunction from further activities.
Every 1201 violation in the indictment is paired with a Title 18 violation, which is the section on Federal crimes. See https://www.eff.org/node/55475
At least from my reading of section 1201 alone, I don't see criminal charges mentioned, though I'm just a laymen. They seem to be able to use it in combination to charge you though, so not any better than Japan.
>Let's not criticise Japanese law without acknowledging that US law is also fucked up.
This doesn’t need done at all. This is just whataboutism. This story does not involve the USA and the discussion about other countries does not need to be derailed every time with discussion about and comparison to the USA.
Not surprising from a country that will arrest you for other non crimes such as being in possession of lockpicks (also fun fact - their police are extremely skeptical that Americans watch lockpickers on YouTube as a hobby even if said lockpicks are straight from said YouTuber's company)
That's how it is in most States. You can own/carry lockpicks, and even carry them past TSA, but if you're caught somewhere you're not supposed to be, you're now hit with possession of burglary tools.
This is also why urbex communities reccomend not bringing picks while exploring places, as they'll bring more trouble than its worth if you're caught.
I recall that being an extremely hard and fast rule on my brief foray into urban exploration.
Never ever have anything that could be construed as a weapon or burglary tool. Even if all you did was walk through an open door it makes it far too easy to build a case for breaking and entering, instead of much milder trespassing.
This applies as well to a wide variety of otherwise innocent objects. I’ve known people who’ve gotten the same for screwdrivers. Basically if you have any tool with you while doing something that the police could construe (or attempt to construe) as a burglary, then those tools are burglary tools.
In my country it's pretty common to remap and modify the ECU settings.
For €100 you can have someone remap the fuel injection system to give you more power for less fuel (VW are notorious for this, you can easily get 25% more power), or you can have environmental features disabled that will end up breaking such as EGR, DPF, AdBlue, etc.
Someone who does it is a friend of a friend, and he drives a Tesla, so I guess it's not a bad business to be in.
On balance it's probably a good thing for people to be able to modify their cars. We wouldn't want to build a world where you're beholden to the whims of car companies on pain of having your ability to own a car revoked. That would be a recipe for abuse.
If people modify their cars in dangerous or illegal ways, that's presumably already a crime they could get their license revoked for.
Probably it varies country by country, but I would guess that road safety rules have some common thresholds of parameters like emissions. And not enforce detoriation when compared to factory state. The latter is probably a natural phenomenon with wear.
Something similar happened in the late 1990's when a PlayStation memory card was being sold with pre-loaded save data for a dating sim game (Tokimeki Memorial). Konami claimed it violated the integrity of the work because selling a hacked save with all stats maxed tampered with the game's natural progression. (And they won twice, the original case and the appeal.)
That's such a weird theory of harm. They still had to buy a copy of the game, right? So the harm is that the consumer would experience the story in the way they chose instead of the way the author intended? Death of the audience I suppose?
That's a good clarification, but it does lead us back to where we started. What's the harm of violating "integrity?" That the author doesn't get to present the story in the manner they chose.
It only makes sense with the context of Japanese copyright law. Here's the actual text:
> (Right to Integrity)
> Article 20 (1) The author of a work has the right to preserve the integrity of that work and its title, and is not to be made to suffer any alteration, cut, or other modification thereto that is contrary to the author's intention.
If you distribute hacked save files, you are "cutting out" parts of the original game story, and thus violate this article.
Yes, it is ludicrous, but it's consistent, at least.
So, in that case, I wonder what would happen if someone just flooded the internet with modified save files for free. Remove the money incentive and just publish thousands of uploads around the web from outside Japan.
If the sites are hosted in Japan, then they could be taken down by Japanese courts. If the sites are hosted outside Japan, it's very likely nothing will happen.
Trying to profit off someone else's IP is the problematic part(as with any fake brand products). They don't go after every ad-supported save file repositories of curious interest.
Czechia also has this clause in the copyright law. It sucks, because you can be sued for modifying FLOSS to do something that does not sit well with the original author(s).
Last time I've seen it used was for an architect to prevent us from using garbage bags of a different color. I am not kidding you. Their interior design was very specific (and good) and this was an attempt to save costs and it looked weird, but still
The most capitalist translation for this "integrity" is sales + customer loyalty, although it's slightly more than just direct financial income. Spoiled media content sells worse shorter term, and drags down related products longer term.
I guess, "there's effectively a game in the market with our same branding and IP, allowing people to access only the scenes in our dating sim they want to, turning it into a different kind of application with deleterious associations to our brand" is a theory of harm I can grok. I don't think it would hurt short term sales in this particular case, but that could hurt the brand and thus long term sales. I have trouble parsing the rationale because it seems very anti-consumer, at least with this being my only exposure to Japanese law, but that probably wouldn't have flown in the US either.
Title should be: 36 year old man gets his life ruined for making $84 in total profit from proceeds of "crime". If he's peddling "hacked consumer products" he's already on his last leg as a 36 year old. Even if he manages to get a job by some miracle he's going to get ijime'd hard by his co-workers who will view him as a convict.
this is up there with the case where they arrested a student for some javascript code she wrote that caused never ending alert dialog popups at the library?
Neo-confucianism is just glorified gerontocracy.
> The 36-year-old allegedly took custom orders for rare Pokémon, and sold the resulting tampered data between December 2022 to March 2023, for up to 13,000 yen ($84) a time on a website that served as a marketplace for video game assets and items. He also offered deals in which six Pokémon would be created for the equivalent of roughly $30 in yen.
Yet bunch of ojiisans steal $1.7 billion as executives of a flagship Japanese company and nobody goes to jail. Some gaijin CEO 20x your struggling car company and you send HIM to jail for taking a bit of bonus as compensation!
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[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 263 ms ] threadhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fate/Grand_Order
What is significant about this one?
Tell me you know nothing about FGO without saying you know nothing about FGO.
Microtransactions in FGO are for purchasing new characters from the gacha. "Power boosting" only comes from just playing the game like everyone else.
Source: Been playing FGO Japan since 2016, and yes I'm a whale and yes I'm happy.
I remember getting it to run on one of my devices once for a while but I was shocked at how bad the english translation was, worse than the average live action Chinese TV series.
To be fair Fate games are all about developing a strong emotional connection to the characters so I can definitely see somebody rolling a huge number of times if they want a character that they moe really hard for.
All these verbs relate to some sort of commercial transaction, rather than the modification per se. My read is that you could modify it freely, or even write an article documenting the save file format and how to mess with it. It's the act of commercializing the process that makes the difference between a server ban and an arrest warrant.
https://sg.news.yahoo.com/japan-man-jailed-10-yen-theft-1159...
https://www.straitstimes.com/asia/east-asia/school-principal...
It's severe, but I don't know what degree it's a waste of public resources. People like the rock-bottom crime rate. On the other hand, word is that Japanese police are not great at investigating more well-planned crime. A trend has emerged in recent years of professional criminals basing themselves abroad and using social media to recruit naïve/disaffected people for the manual labor part.
Selling cheat devices/services is treated as a kind of unlawful commerce, because Ruining It For Everybody is socially unacceptable there.
There was also a second attempt where people would mail in their disks, and receive an edited version back. Again, lost.
So, whether we like it or not, nope. That’s not how things work, because any editing creates a “derivative work” in the eyes of the law, and only the copyright owner is allowed to make such derivative works.
Even if you edit the film yourself, you’re making a derivative work. The only reason you won’t be sued is because the harm is $0.
You can’t legally make derivative works. Even in the privacy of your own home. It’s only that there’s nothing to be legally won from if you only did it at home. That’s a pragmatic distinction, not a legal one.
CleanFlix was sued because they were editing and distributing movies without studio permission, but a competing product called ClearPlay, which was a specialized DVD player that you would plug a flash drive into, and censorship was then overlayed. It was allowed to continue existing because the end user was technically the one making the edits on their copy of the movie, and the movie itself was not being redistributed.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ClearPlay
Edit for below (“too many responses”):
Irrelevant; as ClearPlay does not properly speaking edit the video; but messes with the playback timeline.
Editing the video is illegal. Messing with the timeline as the unedited film is playing? Completely permitted for accessibility, organization, and other reasons. In particular, that amazing thing called an ad blocker. Skipping 30 seconds ahead to avoid an ad is legal, but editing the ad out is not.
ETA: Clearplay doesn’t just muck with the timeline. It would overlay clothes over nudity, replace naughty words, etc. It’s actually a kind of neat bit of technology.
I think without this act it might be considered a deriative work and illegal actually
Selling a modified copy for a profit? Yes, that would be a violation of copyright. That's the distinction being made.
those little modifications made from a consumer prob dont count. the first sale doctrine covers minor wear and tear type stuff
you cant make audio books, illustrations, or translations of a book without the authors permission
note that text to speech isnt considered derivative work. its considered a tool rather than creating content. so its legal for a kindle to read it to you
It seems to me that computers programs have more rights than humans.
so yes even at home, making art for a book you dont have permission for, and isnt seen by anyone but you, is still copyright infringement
That's the important bit - the things you called illegal a few comments back were obvious examples of (presumptive) fair use.
More generally, whether something is copyright infringement can be vague and subjective - so the bar for going around saying "yes, that is infringement" is not "does it meet a description I read online?". The bar is: "have courts previously ruled that a very similar case was infringement?".
It's somewhat of a case by case basis matter and it's rarely brought to the court, but just because you own a piece doesn't always make it all to your discretion to modify it.
It would be interesting if they had 1) distributed a program that automatically edits the user's copy, or 2) edited VHS tapes that customers sent in by physically splicing them. I'm pretty sure the first should be legal, but I'm curious what they'd make of the second.
It appears that it’s still around and does stuff on top of streaming applications.
(In the end he couldn’t legally do it in any fashion)
Yes, please. Hell, throw patents in too while you're at it.
The copyright owners are begging for a restructuring. One that would greatly increase their authority on two issues: AI use, and Internet website blocking.
Ask for a restructuring right now, and you’ll bring Japanese-style copyright to America (“fair use” doesn’t exist over there) with European-style judicial site blocking (and mass blocking of suspected piracy outlets).
If you want to see a world without fair use, check out the Japanese Wikipedia pages -- it's noticeably lacking in pictures and images than the English counterpart, likely because the latter was written by those in the U.S. It's especially ironic when there's more photos and images on the English language article for topics about Japan!
And with a German-style enforcement procedure (i.e. all copyright infringement is criminal, but personal non-commercial use is civil) and Mexican-style copyright term (120+ years after death).
How would you incentivize companies to spend years and millions in R&D, if anyone can benefit from their inventions immediately after they're done?
Patent trolls are a problem, patents themselves aren't
100% agree and I'm primary author on 2 software patents taken out by a former employer. Software is maths. Patenting a software process makes as little sense as allowing patents on any other mathematical function.
I also think business method patents in general are crazy, because pretty much all business processes have some sense of inevitability to them that in my view should fail the "obviousness" test for patentability. It seems the tide has turned against them officially too which I think is positive overall for society.[1]
[1] http://www.kilpatricktownsend.com/~/media/Files/articles/201...
Please refrain from implying that the question you're answering to was asked in bad faith. You're not "biting", you're answering a valid question.
Nothing personal, but it’s a bad mental habit to make a distinction where there is no difference.
In many countries it is illegal to sell these unless you have a pharmacist's license. It's not illegal to buy them, because you can buy them from a legal seller.
This case is very similar in the asymmetry between buying and selling. You get the save game by buying the game and playing the game. That's not illegal. It's also not illegal to tamper with your own save game (if I understand other comments on this article correctly). What is illegal is to sell a save that you have tampered with.[1]
From a legal perspective it's perfectly possible to ban the sale of something without banning the purchase, just like certain things are illegal to sell or buy but not illegal to have.[2]
[1] You may well say it's crazy that this is the case, but I could sort of see both sides of this. I do think cheating in competitive multiplayer games really ruins things for other players so I could see the argument for banning anything that does that. In singleplayer games my view is "do whatever you think is fun for you" but that's just a personal perspective. My understanding is people play Pokemon against each other so you could say that cheating with a modified save harms others. I'm not sure that's important enough to justify a law but it's really not my business to say.
[2] Famous example - if you go to the Moma there is an artwork by Robert Rauschenberg that was the centre of a famous tax lawsuit for this exact reason. The artwork itself is basically a painting, but one of the things that Rauschenberg did was sort of alter paintings by sticking sculptural elements on to them and this particular one includes a dead and stuffed bald eagle. Now this was not illegal at the time, but when the bald eagle became endangered, the sale of anything that included any part of a bald eagle became illegal. So this artwork can never be sold. When Rauschenberg died, the IRS went after his estate for tax on this painting which they valued at $29million. However his family said the value of the painting was zero because it can never be legally sold (even though it's not illegal for them to own it). https://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/22/arts/design/a-catch-22-of...
It's worth noting that disclaimers like "nothing personal" or "no offense" do not actually make the remark less personal or less offensive. If we're going to be critiquing mental habits, when you find yourself using this language, you should probably ask yourself why you feel the need to add such a disclaimer and whether the remark is really worth making. If it's so easy for someone to "misinterpret" your remarks as personal - maybe it's a valid interpretation?
Are the modified Pokemon being used in competitions? What is the harm, really?
Even if they were, the penalty should be limited to being banned from future competitions, not prison.
I also think that east Asia thinks that esports are as important as normal sports, at least in the sense of exporting their culture. Everyone wants to be Hollywood or the NFL, and esports are their route to that kind of international renowned, or so they think. Thus, they have a bunch of laws to make sure nothing crops up that could impact that. Pokemon isn't an esport, but if you're 80, you don't know that.
As for this case, the prohibition on selling mod tools/services is certainly to protect the game manufacturers; if there's a perception that it's easy and safe to cheat in the game then players' incentive to spend (whether via microtransactions or future releases) goes way down, and so does the publisher's revenue, and so do tax receipts. I can't help noting that Japan's game industry isn't engaging in mass layoffs over the last few years, suggesting that maybe they know what they're doing.
https://www.japantimes.co.jp/business/2024/04/02/japan-no-ga...
No manufacturer wants their product utility diluted. After market modifications that add a benefit to the user don't make the product any worse for people without the modification. but in a product which is used by people to compete for social entertainment, modifications absolutely hurt the product because wins and losses are no longer a function of skill.
There is 0 chance whatever prohibition on selling mods had any impact on mass layoffs happening or not happening.
Interestingly, it's pretty much standard for competitive Pokemon players to use hacked Pokemon because of the crazy time investment the game demands to train Pokemon with optimal stats and movesets legitimately. They use free methods to do this though.
This seems like a stretch even under Japanese law, since the article gives the impression that he was not selling the cartridges themselves, but merely the service of taking cartridges and modifying them. But Japanese copyright law is kinda crazy. There's a reason that Japanese Wikipedia is almost totally bereft of images.
"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."
Now, it's still a ridiculous story, but it's a little easier to see how this happened.
E.g. if there was a 2022 law calling for arrest of those holding ice cream cones upside down because of risk to the sidewalk cleanliness then knowing that gives perspective to why someone was arrested for holding an ice cream cone upside down beyond just a random arrest decision for something one thinks everyone would consider harmless. That doesn't mean it convinces you personally that the law is reasonable and, just that it was indeed an explicitly illegal activity.
It still needs an explanation because at a surface level the crime and the name of the law have nothing to do with each other.
Until that explanation exists of how the law says it's illegal, I don't have the perspective of seeing the law explicitly say that!
I am not even in the realm of talking about whether the law makes sense.
My stab at the likely background reasoning for having these rules (i.e. not explicitly written into the law but rather why the law might have been made) is something along the lines that the guy made money off of devaluing the rarity of IP the company was supposed to have control of distributing through their proprietary means.
It reads like an anti-circumvention law to me, but I’m not clear on what specifically in there would make it applicable to modified video game save data unless you can argue that modifying save data is a wrongful way to acquire to a particular game state.
[1] https://www.japaneselawtranslation.go.jp/en/laws/view/3629
https://law.stackexchange.com/questions/85973/how-to-address...
I'd like to know whether this Japanese law explicitly says "selling video game save data is illegal" (seems less likely) or if there is an interpretation of the Unfair Competition Act that the alleged facts constitute counterfeiting or something.
https://www.japaneselawtranslation.go.jp/en/laws/view/2803/e...
I'm not a lawyer so I'm not an expert on the Japanese legal system but merely asserting that the law bans a specific act isn't helpful because it doesn't explain how.
I'm not saying nobody can ask further questions if they want , just that arguing you can have no new understanding of the situation without an explanation to the level of a Japanese lawyer arguing the text of the law in a way you personally understand and can follow is silly. You also don't need to personally and independently validate the dude's sales transactions to be able to get the takeaway that yeah, the article is probably right that he made sales of this service and didn't just modify personal files.
Expanding that by mentioning the Unfair Competition Prevention Act gave me no additional understanding.
It's not that I can't comprehend the situation just fine as a layman, it's that the quote above did not give me any perspective I didn't already have from the headline. It was not helpful as an addition to the headline. It only introduces a new mystery.
Concluding there must be no possibility to see new information to see out of something in the face of others doing just that is not something others can help you with. Either you're interested in extracting the extra information on your own or you won't accept someone telling you it's there. Either way: yes, it's still really additional perspective to most others regardless of you see how.
Unfair competition: you make money out of sabotaging the perfectly good game I wrote, reducing the enjoyment for players who don't cheat
I'm not saying this is a great stance, just showing how it is seen as competition in the second scenario alone.
I hope modifying the save file for yourself is not illegal still.
Also less than a year ago age of consent in Japan was 13 years, talk about priorities.
If you read past the clickbait title, however, you’ll find that the individual prefectures have had stricter age of consent laws for many years. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ages_of_consent_in_Asia
Did you know that the United States still has NO age of consent law at all? It’s true, there is no federal law that addresses the subject. (Each state has its own law.) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ages_of_consent_in_the_Unite...
That's a lot like saying the united states has no age of consent. It was higher in every prefecture, with some variations.
For me, grinding 98% of the time is not enjoyable. Game are definitely better than what they once were, but let me cheat on single player games. I get it game developers, the play time will be shorter I'm fine with that.
And game devs if you don't want to add cheats then add a bunch of accessibility controls because those things are just as good as cheats.
Also just let me temporarily turn off encounters. Sometimes I don't want to fight. I just want to walk around and enjoy the world you made. But no I get an encounter every minute and I'm stuck listening to that same battle song again. Looking at you Yakuza franchise.
That law is basically Japanese version of DMCA.
"Unfair Competition Prevention Act" is an antiqued piece of law first enacted in 1930s. Its original scope was trade malpractice such as corporate spying.
In 1990s, Japanese gov (somehow) decided to implement DRM protection in the framework of this law. So it ended up governing both trade secrets AND DRM.
There are homeless people, at least some of them not particularly happy about being homeless, also 30+ yr. old people having to live with their parents - means housing is not affordable enough.
Are you thinking about South Korea? Deposit in Japan is maybe 1-2 months of rent.
You must not be living in Japan then
I'm from Europe and can't imagine housing being affordable anywhere in the world besides the places where people feel happy living in stick&mud huts.
> Impressive that you are willing to jump to "defund the japanese police" despite not even knowing that housing is not a problem in Japan by any stretch of the imagination.
Because that's sort of a figurative expression. Housing problem is just a random pick relatively relevant to the most of the developed countries. Pick any other problem which could use some additional resources allocated instead if it's not the case for Japan. It probably still has some, hasn't it?
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/11/opinion/editorials/tokyo-...
By the way I still doubt it's so affordable there that I myself would consider it affordable. I would after hearing the majority of people who are homeless or live with their parents saying they seriously just prefer living this way.
I consider Japan to be a great example other countries should learn from in a number of ways though.
A great article on zoning to get started on this: https://devonzuegel.com/north-american-vs-japanese-zoning
Nevertheless, if housing is so affordable in Japan, why are there still people who don't own homes? Can an average McDonalds worker in their 20-ies just go and buy a home easily without applying for a lifetime-long mortgage?
You literally have it the wrong way around. There's less incentive to own homes in countries where housing prices fall. Owning a home actually costs you money, it isn't a good investment in the absence of artificial scarcity. In Japan a house is a consumer good like a car, in fact on average the value of most houses drops to about zero in 30-40 years.
Some of the richest countries in the world have the lowest rates of personal home ownership, Switzerland, Germany, Japan among them because it isn't an investment vehicle and rent protections are good. This narrative of being desperate to own a home just doesn't make any sense.
Mostly because they don't need or want their own house and/or they spend their money on other stuff.
> Can an average McDonalds worker in their 20-ies just go and buy a home easily
The median McDonalds worker in Japan is 17 and lives with their parents. And maybe 3/4 of the ones who aren't teens are freeters.
If you don't make a lot of money you can certainly buy something but it won't be the nicest or in the best location.
> without applying for a lifetime-long mortgage?
Many people buy with cash, many get nicer homes with 35-year mortgages at super low interest rates.
There is really nothing the market can do, to make more big houses and big hotel rooms available in downtown Tokyo, but the market in Japan is actually getting a huge number of people fairly cheap stays in very dense areas and doing so much more successfully than in the USA.
I don't think there are any capsule apartments, with multiple people living together in tubes in the wall, but there are very small apartments.
As a result of these factors, Japan now has an economy closer to a developing nation than the economic superpower many of us remember. Their GDP/capita is $33,000, and average monthly wages (for workers only) is now $1900 [3], for an average annual salary of $22,800. And all of of this combines to create a direct path to really affordable housing, at least so long as you aren't living off of Japanese wages.
[1] - https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.MKTP.CD?location...
[2] - https://www.worldometers.info/world-population/japan-populat...
[3] - https://english.kyodonews.net/news/2024/04/6ef60043f2cf-japa...
Korea, which has even worse demographic problems than Japan, also has significantly worse sexism in ways I'd have to link you to a three-part Moon Channel YouTube video essay to even scratch the surface of.
Immigration is also a factor: getting permanent residency in Japan is a pain in the ass. America doesn't even notice its declining birth rate because everyone wants to move here and we let them in.
The same is often said about western countries but by contrary attributed to non-sexism. Conservatives love to say women don't have children because they easily choose careers as the society is not sexist enough anymore.
> There's a lot of old men running Japan that won't hire married women
Wow. This breaks anothse stereotype in me. I would expect he majority of old Japanese men to be super-wise, kind and caring in a good way, also simultaneously careless in a god (zen) way so they would do what is good and give up what is not even if a tradition demands that.
> Immigration is also a factor: getting permanent residency in Japan is a pain in the ass.
Why wouldn't they gradually enable flow of immigration from ethnically close nations? E.g. many people from Mongolia or Yakutia (a major Asian state within Russia) would probably love to immigrate to Japan and be willing to adhere to Japanese culture.
I'd argue that nationality says the least about a person. Some people are nice and some are painful to deal with. It's the same everywhere.
> Why wouldn't they gradually enable flow of immigration from ethnically close nations?
Conservative government and lack of competent liberal opposition.
Absolutely sure. Nationality does not define the person. But the culture of the society a person gets raised in influences them a lot. Hence the stereotype there are just two major kinds of people in Japan: kawaii and zen :-))
Wow, yeah, racism wise Japan and Mongolia are closer than Korea or China, sure, but the split had estimated to have happened at least 40k years ago, that's couple times older than the oldest known human writings. It's just DNAs and some highly academic phonological elements that these regions share.
Beyond this there are also many other issues. Neither of these countries speaks Japanese. And while I don't know much about Yakutia, Mongolia has an extremely high crime rate for Asia. And I think that replacing the Japanese with large number of migrants would almost certainly just destroy everything that we all want to preserve about Japan - it definitely has the most peculiar and distinct culture among developed nations. Migrants will bring their own culture, values, and ideas. That can be a good thing ('Japanese' tempura is largely a product of the Portuguese for example) , but at an excessively large scale it can also simply drown out instead of compliment the host culture.
Another arguably problematic thing I think I know about Japan (I hope I'm wrong in this as well) is their work culture strongly discourages switching jobs. Their salary is a pure function of how long did they work in the same company, it drops to the junior level once they switch (no matter how skilled they are) and nobody wants to hire old people because it's almost impossible to fire them (as well as anybody else) once hired even if they don't do the actual job nearly well enough to make sense. Am I wrong?
> Another arguably problematic thing I think I know about Japan (I hope I'm wrong in this as well) is their work culture strongly discourages switching jobs.
It's not uncommon to see people switch jobs. I think public perception on that topic has changed too in the past few decades. But one thing worth noting is that as you mentioned, Japanese workers have stronger legal protections compared to the US. It's more difficult to fire someone in Japan, so people are incentivized to keep their current jobs.
> Their salary is a pure function of how long did they work in the same company
I believe this fell out of favor, but not in a good way. The move away from seniority-based wage is often used as euphemism for pay cuts. Another case of corporations not being your friends thing.
> nobody wants to hire old people because it's almost impossible to fire them
This unfortunately is a problem, at least for jobs with decent pay I think? Unless you're rich, of course.
Immigration isn't a solution. Japan is losing about 0.5% of their population per year - including immigration, and that rate is accelerating. It's unclear where their equilibrium point will be, other than substantially worse than that. In the US at even "just" a 1% annual decline, you'd need 3.3 million migrants per year, forever, to maintain population levels. And you don't want random uneducated individuals who don't even speak the language, or you risk destroying the very thing that motivates people to want to migrate. You want skilled, educated, English speaking individuals who are capable of and motivated to work. For some contrast in 2022 we admitted a total of about a million people, and only 270,284 of them were for employment. [2]
[1] - https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.DYN.TFRT.IN?contextu...
[2] - https://www.dhs.gov/sites/default/files/2024-02/2023_0818_pl... (page 18)
As for the statistics you cited, they're for permanent residency ("green cards"), not immigrant visas. Due to a few strange quirks of the US immigration system, the time it takes from visa to residency increases based on how many other immigrants came from the same country as you. A lot of these people are going to be Mexicans who have been legally residing in the country on one or more visas for the last 10-20 years.
I can't seem to find the visa data in this PDF, and the green card numbers are visa datum with time lag, so I'll continue nitpicking them. Almost half of the green cards granted are for immediate family members, and another 166k are other family sponsorships. The other immigration categories (e.g. refugees, diversity visa holders[0], etc) are less than a quarter of the total green card pool.
In terms of finding immigrants who are a net positive to society, family sponsorship is arguably a better basis for immigration than employment. There are a lot of employers who game the immigration system[1] to skirt around America's labor laws. Employers don't care about the people they bring in as long as they work for cheap and do what you tell them. So they're bringing people in with no support network beyond a company that deliberately wants to exploit them.
[0] For the same reason why America makes Mexicans wait 20 years to get their green card, people from countries underrepresented in the green card pool can apply for a special diversity visa that right-wingers love to complain about despite the fact that it makes the immigrant pool less Mexican
[1] Specifically the H-1B visa program.
Also, just to put all my cards on the table: my views on immigration are extremely libertarian. Immigration is one of the most dehumanizingly bureaucratic nonsense processes one can go through with a government. The reason why companies are able to abuse H-1B is because you can't switch jobs outside of other potential H-1B sponsors who are going to expect the same out of you. It's a literal immigrant underclass!
If there was 0 immigration to the US, the population would still be growing at a solid rate. Demographic collapse lags fertility collapse by around 6 decades. That's the time it takes for the first generation (around ~20 years) to have poor fertility, to start dying. And at that point you start seeing stuff happen at a crazy exponential scale. Japan, for instance, is still yet to reach the final boss, since they only collapsed about 40 years ago.
The problem with network based immigration is just a subset of the problem with large scale immigration in general. Reduced standards risk creating entirely separate communities that fail to integrate, imperiling the entire system of immigration. For instance Sweden was, at one time, arguably the most immigrant friendly country in the world. But a large influx of immigrants who failed to assimilate has turned Sweden into a country where the Sweden Democrats [4] are looking to become the dominant party. Various countries throughout Europe are seeing similar outcomes, even if to lesser degrees - Geert Wilders/PVV in the Netherlands, AfD in Germany, and so on.
The reason employment visas are so limited is because ideally no company should be hiring foreign workers for jobs that could be done by a local worker. Otherwise you create a scenario where not only do you indeed create an underclass as companies just hire the cheapest most easy to exploit workers from anywhere en masse, but you also destroy your own labor force, economy, and ultimately country in the process of it as well.
[1] - https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/SMPOPNETMUSA
[2] - https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/B230RC0A052NBEA
[3] - https://www.worldometers.info/world-population/us-population...
[4] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sweden_Democrats
The drop in births began ~40 years ago, it's only now becoming visible in the total population count.
So for instance this cleanly explains the Western income to fertility curve. In particular people who are poor have far more children than those who are middle to upper income, but then once you reach the ultra wealthy then we're back to having lots of children again. Both the top in bottom are unable to participate in the Product chasing game for different reasons. The bottom are unable to afford to do so, while the top have so much money than no carrot is ever out of their reach, so they must look elsewhere for meaning and purpose.
It also explains the religion to fertility correlation. Religion not only provides a meaning and purpose in lieu of the almighty Product, but of course itself also tends to focus heavily on fertility and family. It also explains why nearly all modern correlations with regards to fertility simply completely fail when you look at the past where people of all income levels, education, and religious values were having lots of children. It's because consumerism, and its driving force of never-ending advertisement, had yet to really take much of any grip on the world.
Isn't the term "affordable housing" meant as "affordable by local residents"? Otherwise most of the world has affordable housing, at least so long as you are living off SF wages.
That's an incredibly insulting way of describing someone, let alone whole populations, don't you think?
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
This has been true for the police in almost every developed country for decades. The function of police is to hurt people (by Stafford Beer, this is also their purpose). Since there aren't nearly enough criminals for them to hurt, they have shifted to waging a constant war against their own population, fueled by a ballooning catalog of criminal offenses that is no longer even comprehensible to most people. It's the only way they can justify their continued existence in anything resembling its current form.
In some cases, a person could even face criminal liability (e.g., hacking game servers using a modified client could be both a EULA violation and a crime).
Unless you’re insinuating that because Japan is a low crime country it doesn’t need a police force?
Streamlining the legal code isn’t really something individual voters can really accomplish. Look at the slow march if pot legalization and that’s something a significant majority of people supported long before the ball started rolling.
Of all the examples to pick ;) that one's super wrong for Japan.
Unlike many other countries, Japanese houses aren't treated as an investment.
So they don't have widely unaffordable housing, unlike what's happening elsewhere.
There's a bunch of info about this online if you're interested. Random example here:
https://www.businessinsider.com/japan-abandoned-houses-renov...
This is among the best ways to learn things: just say something and read people people explaining how that is wrong :-)
Nevertheless, let me mention a relevant fun fact: I even remember there was a research paper (or maybe a non-academic experiment somewhere on Reddit or so, I fail to recall for sure) which says postulating something wrong publicly is way more efficient than asking a question - much more people rush to emerge passionately addressing all the flaws of your opinion in details and with references than when you ask.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
One particular company, Cyber Gadget, even used to sell commercial save game editor apps, and they had to pull them after this law was introduced.
At least from my reading of section 1201 alone, I don't see criminal charges mentioned, though I'm just a laymen. They seem to be able to use it in combination to charge you though, so not any better than Japan.
This doesn’t need done at all. This is just whataboutism. This story does not involve the USA and the discussion about other countries does not need to be derailed every time with discussion about and comparison to the USA.
>Its worth noting that the raw last for Pokemon — ...
there's also some duplicated lines (the headline makes an appearance without a space after a period, for instance) and some repetition.
Not sure if AI or a hastily written article by someone unfamiliar with words. Not sure what the TCG has to do with save files, either.
Yeah, I'm still not sure what is meant in that sentence
This is actually pretty clear cut.
This is also why urbex communities reccomend not bringing picks while exploring places, as they'll bring more trouble than its worth if you're caught.
Never ever have anything that could be construed as a weapon or burglary tool. Even if all you did was walk through an open door it makes it far too easy to build a case for breaking and entering, instead of much milder trespassing.
For €100 you can have someone remap the fuel injection system to give you more power for less fuel (VW are notorious for this, you can easily get 25% more power), or you can have environmental features disabled that will end up breaking such as EGR, DPF, AdBlue, etc.
Someone who does it is a friend of a friend, and he drives a Tesla, so I guess it's not a bad business to be in.
If people modify their cars in dangerous or illegal ways, that's presumably already a crime they could get their license revoked for.
https://ja.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E3%81%A8%E3%81%8D%E3%82%81%...
http://gaming.moe/?p=2938
> (Right to Integrity)
> Article 20 (1) The author of a work has the right to preserve the integrity of that work and its title, and is not to be made to suffer any alteration, cut, or other modification thereto that is contrary to the author's intention.
If you distribute hacked save files, you are "cutting out" parts of the original game story, and thus violate this article.
Yes, it is ludicrous, but it's consistent, at least.
Last time I've seen it used was for an architect to prevent us from using garbage bags of a different color. I am not kidding you. Their interior design was very specific (and good) and this was an attempt to save costs and it looked weird, but still
this is up there with the case where they arrested a student for some javascript code she wrote that caused never ending alert dialog popups at the library?
Neo-confucianism is just glorified gerontocracy.
> The 36-year-old allegedly took custom orders for rare Pokémon, and sold the resulting tampered data between December 2022 to March 2023, for up to 13,000 yen ($84) a time on a website that served as a marketplace for video game assets and items. He also offered deals in which six Pokémon would be created for the equivalent of roughly $30 in yen.
Yet bunch of ojiisans steal $1.7 billion as executives of a flagship Japanese company and nobody goes to jail. Some gaijin CEO 20x your struggling car company and you send HIM to jail for taking a bit of bonus as compensation!
Unreal.