3 Count: Bowser’s Finale

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1: Xecutor Video Game Piracy Group Member Gets 3-Year Sentence

First off today, The Associated Press reports that Gary Bowser, a man who pleaded guilty to his role in the Team Xecutor piracy group, has been sentenced to forty months in prison.

Bowser, who lived in Dominican Republic, was arrested in September 2020 and deported to the United States to face charges. His group specialized in modifying Nintendo game consoles and selling pirated copies of Nintendo games to customers. In the group, Bowser was widely reported to be a high-ranking manager and served as a liaison between the group’s customers and their actual hackers.

Two other members of the group have been charged but have not been apprehended. Bowser, as part of his plea deal, also agreed to pay $4.5 million in restitution to Nintendo.

2: RIAA Wins $83 Million in Piracy Damages From YouTube Rippers

Next up today, Ernesto Van der Sar at Torrentfreak writes that the RIAA has secured an $83 million dollar judgement against YouTube ripping sites after the sites in question failed to turn over logs and other evidence to the court.

The lawsuit targeted the owner of two separate YouTube ripping sites. That owner, Tofig Kurbanov, is a Russian national that attempted to litigate the case early on but, when told to hand over server logs as evidence, went silent. As such, the court had previously entered a default judgment against Kurbanov.

Now that default judgment bears fruit as the judge has agreed with the RIAA and handed down an $83 million judgment against him. The judge also granted a sweeping set of injunctions that bars the sites from circumventing any technological protections. Both of their sites began to block American visitors last year but continue to operate in other countries.

3: NFT Marketplace Suspends Most Sales, Citing ‘Rampant’ Fakes and Plagiarism

Finally today, Reuters reports that the NFT platform Cent has stopped nearly all buying and selling of NFTs siting heavy concerns over copyright and plagiarism issues on the service.

Cent rose to fame as being one of the first major marketplaces for NFTs, being the one where Jack Dorsey sold the NFT for the first tweet ever made. Though the NFT marketplace has proved lucrative, it has also become a haven for piracy and plagiarism with OpenSea, the largest marketplace, admitting that 80% of all uploaded NFTs are likely infringing.

Cent has said that they are hoping to reopen their marketplace and may introduce centralized controls as a short-term measure to do so. If they do, they say it will be just a stop gap as they investigate decentralized controls in the future.

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