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Nintendo hacker Gary Bowser, who was sentenced to 40 months in jail for piracy and received a hefty fine of close to $15 million for his involvement in the hacking group Team Xecutor, has now been released from prison. Having served several months of his sentence, Bowser has been released early in part due to good behavior and time already served, but he is still legally obligated to pay Nintendo $10 million for his role in allowing Switch owners to hack their systems so that pirated games could be played on them.
As part of the consent judgment that Bowser agreed to, Nintendo will be allowed to take “25-30%” of his gross monthly income. Of the $10 million that Bowser owes Nintendo, he has only been able to pay $175 so far from his earnings while he was in prison. “I’ve been making payments of $25 per month, which they’ve been taking from my income because I had a job in federal prison. So far I paid $175,” Bowser told Torrentfreak.
When Bowser was first sentenced, Nintendo’s lawyer Ajay Singh said in a court transcript (via Axios) that the company wanted to “send a message” to other Switch hackers. “This is a very significant moment for us. It’s the purchase of video games that sustains Nintendo and the Nintendo ecosystem, and it is the games that make the people smile. It’s for that reason that we do all we can to prevent games on Nintendo systems from being stolen,” Singh said to Axios last year.
Nintendo is notorious for going after hackers and software pirates of its video games, and in a more recent example, the company won a court case against Dstorage, a website operator that hosted pirated games on its cloud-storage site. The Paris Court of Appeals ruled in favor of Nintendo and has ordered Dstorage to pay over $480,000 in compensation to Nintendo, as well as $27,285 in legal fees.
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