Italian police have made several arrests in connection with counterfeit game consoles. In other words, the cheap counterfeit consoles you see on online stores are filled with hundreds of ROMs of classic games.
Video game emulation is a gray area when it comes to legality. In terms of game preservation, it’s important for making classic video games playable in the modern era, but it also falls into the technicalities of license theft if you acquired the file to emulate without owning the game first.
Regardless, some companies have taken to making counterfeit game consoles loaded with hundreds of emulated games and selling them for cheap. These can be found fairly easily with a quick search on sites like Amazon.
And, according to a AFP reportNine people have been arrested in Italy in connection with video game consoles like these, which were illegally imported from China and sold in Europe.
“Around 12,000 consoles on which more than 47 million pirated video games were illegally stored were seized, with an estimated value of more than 47.5 million euros ($52.5 million),” police told AFP.
That $52 million figure may seem like a stretch, but it all depends on how the nine people arrested are prosecuted. The 12,000 consoles likely represent a small fraction of that estimate, with the majority being related to pirated software.
Depending on how the legal proceedings unfold, this case could be a landmark in terms of the legality of emulation and how cases surrounding it are adjudicated.
That said, part of the reason for the arrest was that the consoles in question did not meet European safety standards, which sets this arrest apart from other countries where systems like these are sold.
Linus’s Tech Tips I made an entire video exploring these kinds of consoles, which come from AliExpress. There are so many of these counterfeit consoles that it would be difficult to determine the model type or price of the consoles involved in the scandal, but the quality of these consoles varies wildly.
As we write, systems like those that led to Italy’s bankruptcy are legal and still widely available for sale in several other countries.
