When Piracy Had a Kiosk at the Mall: Power Player Super Joy III

“You wouldn’t download a car, would you, fuckers?”

Okay, I would. Hell, I will the second someone makes it possible. But it turns out that the meme phrase came from a real anti-piracy ad campaign that tried to guilt-trip an entire generation. The original line was, “You wouldn’t steal a car.” Slapped onto a thousand DVDs like a pre-movie sermon, it played in the shadows of living rooms and late-night rentals. You wouldn’t steal a handbag. You wouldn’t steal a TV. You wouldn’t steal a movie.

You wouldn’t steal the socks from your best friend’s sister, then sniff ‘em and jerk off into them.

Except you would. Maybe. Well, at least I did. No kink-shame!

Apparently Yonatan Cohen didn’t really give to much credit to the feels of the anti-piracy campaign from the early 2000’s either. He went off and decided that a mall kiosk was the perfect place to go full Robin Hood.

Unfortunately for him, “The Man” doesn’t really love Robin Hood. In December 2004, the FBI raided two kiosks at the Mall of America in Minnesota and storage units tied to Cohen’s business, Perfect Deal LLC. They weren’t looking for drugs or guns.

They were hunting knockoff Nintendos. Specifically, the Power Player Super Joy III, a bootleg console shaped like a janky N64 controller, preloaded with 76 barely-legal NES games and marketed with subtle claims like “76,000 games in one!”

Cohen bought the knockoff rigs wholesale out of China for around $7 to $9 apiece. Then he flipped them in U.S. malls for $30 to $70. Pure capitalism, but not the suit-and-boardroom kind. This was capitalism with a folding table and a kiosk, a one-man supply chain trying to make rent while corporate America clutched its pearls.

It wasn’t subtle, but it was profitable. Each console contained copyrighted titles from Nintendo’s golden years, and selling them made Cohen a target.

The government didn’t just slap a fine on him. They made him an example. In April 2005, Cohen pleaded guilty to criminal copyright infringement. By November, he was sentenced to five years in federal prison, lost hundreds of thousands in property, and got the added humiliation of having to run mall magazine ads warning others about the crime of piracy. He had to pay for the ads as part of his restitution. His mug was in the ad. His crime laid out like a cautionary tale. It was digital pillory.

But here’s where the story gets a little warped. Cohen wasn’t a hacker. He wasn’t running around cracking encryption or spreading ransomware. He was selling plastic boxes full of 8-bit joy. Ancient (at the time) ROMs of Super Mario, Duck Hunt, Contra. The kind of stuff that’s been cloned, remixed, and uploaded to archive.org a thousand times over these days. Back then though, Nintendo’s legal team treated it like digital arson. (Actually Nintendo still does that, they go hard on pirates.) The feds rolled in like it was national security.

Nine days after Cohen’s guilty plea, the FBI busted four Chinese nationals connected to a much larger piracy ring and seized 60,000 more Power Player units from warehouses in New York and New Jersey. But Cohen was already cooked. He kind of became the poster child for IP enforcement.

What made him vulnerable was scale and visibility. He wasn’t hiding in darknet forums. He was out in the open, selling knockoff joypads to middle-class shoppers hunting for last-minute Christmas gifts. A digital gray-market peddler in the age of moral panic.

Was it legal? No. Was it theft? Well, that’s the real question.

In the same era, game companies were battling over clones. Games like Zuma versus Puzzloop, lawsuits about lookalike mechanics and half-borrowed sprites. A lawyer named Gregory Boyd wrote that copyright law covers not just the idea of a game but the way it looks, plays, and feels.

Which is fine on paper. But when you apply that hammer to a guy selling 20-year-old games out of a folding table in a mall, it starts to feel a little like overkill.

Cohen didn’t invent piracy. He didn’t build the Super Joy III. He just sold it. But he was the one in arm’s reach, and the ad campaign was already rolling. You wouldn’t steal a car, remember?

What he did wrong, more than anything, was give people access. Unauthorized, unlicensed, dirt-cheap access. The same thing millions of us were doing in silence with LimeWire, torrents, and burned CDs. He just did it where the FBI could see him.

Five years. For selling childhood. For selling nostalgia.

That’s the part no one wants to talk about. This wasn’t about protecting code. It was about protecting control. Yonatan Cohen broke the unwritten rule of the digital age: you can steal, but you better not get caught making it easy for others. Unless you’re on Wall Street.

And yeah, maybe he wouldn’t steal a car. But he’d damn sure sell you Mario on a knockoff controller. And for a lot of kids in 2004, that was close enough to magic.

Sources, for those who still believe in paper trails or give a shit:

Wikipedia, bitches!

BootlegGames Wiki: Power Player Super Joy III

Vintage Computing: EGM Advertisement: Sell Famiclones, Go to Prison