The Rise & Fall of a Windows Phone Marketplace Scammer

The name Jesse Dudley should be no stranger to the Windows Phone community by now. I mean, WPCentral has been writing about this Marketplace scammer since September. But residue assured y'all won't be seeing another post on this subject; I've pulled all of his illegal NES games off the Marketplace. Game over, Dudley.

Read what went down, after the break.

Thou Shalt Not Steal

Back when yous were a little child, you may remember Mom or Dad teaching y'all not to take things that don't belong to you. (This teaching was oft reinforced via The Chugalug.) Copyright law at its core is exactly that. Jesse Dudley missed this pedagogy though and decided it was okay to steal a bunch of NES games, emulator code, and turn it on the Market for a profit.

Dudley'southward NES games on the Market place comprised of the following stolen and therefore copyright infringing components:

• Logo
• NES Emulator (failed SharpNES attribution)
• Digital re-create of retail NES game (ROM).

One widely held myth is that video game ROMs are legal to make and/or utilise if you ain the original cartridge. In the United States, this is completely untrue and has been since 1983, equally established in the case of Atari v. JS&A in 1983.

My initial attempts to get these games off the Marketplace, through Nintendo and Microsoft, failed. And without owning any of the stolen content, my hands were legally tied. I near gave up.

Tin I Has Copyright?

Having struck out with both Nintendo and Microsoft, I decided to focus on the emulator itself. Farther enquiry revealed Dudley didn't just fail to attribute SharpNES developers per the BSD license – he lifted a modified re-create of SharpNES code from XDA Developers member Steven Hartgers (fiinix)!

Knowing Hartgers was active on XDA Programmer, I knew getting a hold of him would be easy. Only a few emails in, I discovered he was in another country. And I knew availing U.S. Copyrights beyond country borders would introduce a agglomeration of legal complexities. But subsequently more than research, I confirmed copyrights – like any property – can be transferred in part and/or in whole. Hartgers trusted I wouldn't have his work and build a Fortune 500 visitor from his assets, so he signed the transfer paperwork and boom – I was the legal copyright holder for all of Hartger'southward SharpNES code changes.

Hither Comes The Pain Train, Choo Choooo!

At present with the power of the derivative SharpNES code copyright in paw, I felt like a kid with a new fix of paper-thin boxes. I now possessed the power to avail myself of my newly acquired rights under specific U.Southward. Copyright police force. Yep, I'one thousand talking about that infamously bad-ass Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA).

The DMCA is a copyright law that includes many provisions, such as those that make it illegal to circumvent copyrighted piece of work protections (east.g. DRM). Just it besides has safeguards in place to protect websites and service providers from copyright infringing lawsuits based on user submitted content.

For example, Twitter solicits millions if non billions of tweets from users around the globe. Information technology'southward inevitable that its users illegally tweet copyrighted content. To avert the onslaught of folks looking to sue the pants off of Twitter for housing that fabric, Twitter implemented the requirements listed in the DMCA to qualify for protection. One of these requirements is to expeditiously respond to copyright owner requests to take downwardly infringing content. These requests are often referred to as "take down notices".

Per the Windows Phone Market place FAQ, I had to draft a takedown observe and fire it off to Microsoft'south designed DMCA agent. I did just that.

Having sent notices before, I kept my eye glued on the Marketplace, waiting for the applications to go poof. Instead, I received an e-mail from Microsoft nine hours after, request me to make full out some cockamamie Microsoft Discussion form...

The Slow Moving Microsoft Machine

Figure: A snippet of the 4 page Content Infringement Complaint form I had to complete.

Instead of interim immediately on my DMCA take down observe, Microsoft sidelined me to fill out paperwork to reformat my official request. The four folio class used those pesky data fields and was designed to report 1 application at a fourth dimension. With xiv applications to report, I refused to fill out the form 14 times. So afterward a back and forth exchange with Microsoft, they agreed that I could squeeze all xiv applications onto one class. Reluctantly, I filled out the paperwork and sent it in.

I waited impatiently. Days and days had gone by. Nothing seemed to be happening. But finally, a week afterwards, Microsoft pulled Dudley's applications from the Marketplace. I jumped up from my chair and yelled at my monitor in a Rainn Wilson-like vocalization: "Shut upwards, crime!"

(The team really screwed up and missed one of the applications in my paperwork. And they allow enough fourth dimension expire allowing Dudley to wiggle another infringing game onto the Market. A quick follow up with more paperwork, all the same, fixed that problem.)

Aftermath

Having successfully stopped the illegal sale and distribution of Hartger'south and Nintendo'due south difficult work, I feel pretty good well-nigh myself right at present. But the process was Ikaruga-hard and I'k nonetheless concerned that Jesse Dudley kept the money he stole from others. I'll continue working with Microsoft on improving this process, but do know it does piece of work – if you're persistent enough.

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Source: https://www.windowscentral.com/rise-and-fall-jesse-dudley

Posted by: ransoneachich.blogspot.com

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