The Rise & Fall of a Windows Phone Marketplace Scammer

Game over, Dudley.

The proper name Jesse Dudley should be no stranger to the Windows Phone community by now. I hateful, WPCentral has been writing about this Marketplace scammer since September. Only rest 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.

Chiliad Shalt Not Steal

Back when you lot were a picayune child, you may call up Mom or Dad teaching you lot not to accept things that don't belong to you. (This teaching was frequently reinforced via The Chugalug.) Copyright law at its core is exactly that. Jesse Dudley missed this pedagogy though and decided information technology was okay to steal a bunch of NES games, emulator code, and turn it on the Marketplace for a profit.

Dudley's NES games on the Marketplace comprised of the following stolen and therefore copyright infringing components:

Logo
NES Emulator (failed SharpNES attribution)
Digital copy of retail NES game (ROM).

One widely held myth is that video game ROMs are legal to make and/or use if y'all own the original cartridge. In the United States, this is completely untrue and has been since 1983, as established in the instance 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 nearly gave upward.

Can I Has Copyright?

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

Knowing Hartgers was active on XDA Developer, I knew getting a agree of him would be piece of cake. Only a few emails in, I discovered he was in another country. And I knew availing U.S. Copyrights across country borders would introduce a bunch of legal complexities. But afterward more research, I confirmed copyrights – like whatever property – can be transferred in part and/or in whole. Hartgers trusted I wouldn't accept his work and build a Fortune 500 company from his avails, and so he signed the transfer paperwork and smash – I was the legal copyright holder for all of Hartger'south SharpNES code changes.

Here Comes The Hurting Railroad train, Choo Choooo!

Now with the power of the derivative SharpNES code copyright in paw, I felt similar a kid with a new gear up of paper-thin boxes. I now possessed the ability to avail myself of my newly acquired rights under specific U.Due south. Copyright law. Yep, I'one thousand talking about that infamously bad-ass Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA).

The DMCA is a copyright police that includes many provisions, such every bit those that make it illegal to circumvent copyrighted work protections (e.g. DRM). Only it also has safeguards in place to protect websites and service providers from copyright infringing lawsuits based on user submitted content.

For case, Twitter solicits millions if not billions of tweets from users around the globe. Information technology's inevitable that its users illegally tweet copyrighted content. To avoid the onslaught of folks looking to sue the pants off of Twitter for housing that material, Twitter implemented the requirements listed in the DMCA to authorize for protection. 1 of these requirements is to expeditiously reply to copyright owner requests to take down infringing content. These requests are oft referred to equally "take down notices".

Per the Windows Phone Marketplace FAQ, I had to draft a takedown notice and fire it off to Microsoft's designed DMCA agent. I did just that.

Having sent notices before, I kept my eye glued on the Market place, waiting for the applications to go poof. Instead, I received an email from Microsoft nine hours later, asking me to fill out some cockamamie Microsoft Word form...

The Tedious Moving Microsoft Machine

Yay, paperwork.

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

Instead of acting immediately on my DMCA take down detect, Microsoft sidelined me to fill out paperwork to reformat my official request. The four page form used those pesky data fields and was designed to written report one awarding at a time. With 14 applications to report, I refused to fill out the form 14 times. And so later a back and forth substitution with Microsoft, they agreed that I could squeeze all xiv applications onto one form. Reluctantly, I filled out the paperwork and sent it in.

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

(The team actually screwed up and missed one of the applications in my paperwork. And they let enough time expire assuasive Dudley to wiggle some other infringing game onto the Market place. A quick follow up with more paperwork, even so, stock-still that problem.)

Aftermath

Having successfully stopped the illegal auction and distribution of Hartger's and Nintendo'due south hard work, I feel pretty good about myself correct now. But the process was Ikaruga-difficult and I'1000 still concerned that Jesse Dudley kept the coin he stole from others. I'll continue working with Microsoft on improving this process, but do know it does work – if you're persistent enough.

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