Back in February, Gary Bowser—who in most media reports has been described as a ‘hacker’—was sentenced to 40 months in prison for his role in selling cheat and modification devices for Nintendo hardware. Being a court case, most of the reporting dealt only with names on a page and cold facts, but a transcript of Bowser’s sentencing hearing has just been released, giving us all a reminder that this was a very human case where the motivations, actions and outcomes were more complex than has mostly been reported.
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The transcript—first reported by Axios— records everything that was said at Bowser’s sentencing, including statements by his lawyer, representatives from the United States Attorney’s Office and Department of Justice, Nintendo’s General Counsel, and the judge himself.
I’m not going to reprint the entire thing here, but there were a number of passages that I think paint this case in a more human light than we’d have otherwise been able to see through the lens of “Crime + Verdict” reporting. I thought these were worth sharing.
This is Anand Patel from the Department of Justice, pointing out how much Bowser made during his time with the hacking group Team Xecuter after his previous business had gone bust:
These are comments from Bowser’s lawyer, explaining the kind of conditions he has been detained in since he was first arrested, and which Nintendo were only so keen to send out a congratulatory press release boasting about back in February:
Bowser’s lawyer also took the opportunity to remind everyone that, while the defendant was commonly known now as a “hacker” thanks to news reports covering the case, his exact role with Team Xecuter was actually as a salesman and support guy:
Bowser himself also took the stand, mostly to apologise to developers and publishers for his actions, but also to provide some further background as to what his 16 months in custody had been like:
This is Nintendo’s General Counsel Ajay Singh, repeating the same fallacy you always see in piracy cases—the false equivalence that every pirated game equals a lost sale, which is simply not true—before getting to the real meat of Nintendo’s pursuit: he claims that Team Xecuter, the group Bowser was part of, had been such a pain in Nintendo’s ass that the company had to release entirely new models of hardware, which seems like a much more likely motivating factor in this lawsuit than the games themselves:
And finally, here is the judge sentencing Bowser, saying that he’s somehow going hard on the defendant (by “sending a message”) while also simultaneously going easy on him (by saying under “normal circumstances” he would be sent to prison for “five years”):
