An ex-Pokémon lawyer has shared a triumphant story in which he tracked down and course-corrected a young leaker by calling his mom and telling her what he was up to.
Don McGowan used to be the general counsel at Destiny studio and Sony subsidiary Bungie, but before that he was The Pokémon Company's chief legal officer for more than 10 years. McGowan gave an insightful interview to Bloomberg in which he shared some of his experiences chasing down leakers for major video game companies.
My favorite story he shared was about a child leaker named Andrew, who seemingly innocently strayed from the light under the internet's shadow before a conversation between McGowan and his mom struck the fear of Nintendo's legal team into his heart.
"Back when I was at Pokémon, some kid figured out how to extract the images from the card game," McGowan recalled. "He found an icon from the developer and said 'Holy s***, I found a new Pokémon.' This kid included his email, and because of the way Pokémon did account creation, when we got the child's account, we got the parent information, which included a phone number.
"So I called his mom and said, 'Listen, I wanted to tell you some things that Andrew is doing on the computer.' She says, 'So you’re saying he hacked your game.' And I hear in the background: 'I didn’t hack anything!' I start describing it more technically. She says, 'Is this a problem?' I say, 'Hacking software, that’s a federal crime, but I don’t want that to be the conversation. Why don’t we make it a conversation about the good and bad things he can do with a computer?'
Meanwhile, Andrew was live-tweeting about the situation and said, in this order, "'Pokémon just called my house,' 'What the hell is a general counsel?' and, 'I now know what I did was wrong, and I’ll never do it again.' Which was fantastic. Absolutely baked my legend in at Pokémon for like five years."
An older and wiser Andrew might've known how fiercely protective The Pokémon Company is over its IP, but in hindsight I hope he sees this as the blessing that it really was. After all, if he were only a few years older and dealing with a less forgiving lawyer, he could've landed himself in some very serious trouble. Instead, he got a valuable lesson and we got this hilarious story at his expense.
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