Nintendo urged a court to dismiss a lawsuit demanding that it pass tariff refunds on to customers, saying that people who bought a Switch console or other products have no legal right to refunds that Nintendo is due to receive from the government.

Nintendo said in a motion to dismiss yesterday that plaintiffs are “ask[ing] this Court to invent a legal duty out of whole cloth to retroactively re-price completed sales simply because the legal landscape has changed.” Nintendo said the plaintiffs “have no legal entitlement to the tariff refunds Nintendo stands to receive.”

The lawsuit was filed in April by two customers who seek to represent a class of all US residents who bought Nintendo products from February 2025 to February 2026. California resident Gregory Hoffert and Washington resident Prashant Sharan filed the class action complaint in US District Court for the Western District of Washington, alleging unjust enrichment and a violation of the Washington Consumer Protection Act’s prohibition on unfair or deceptive acts.

“Nintendo engaged in unfair acts by: (i) raising prices due to tariffs; (ii) failing to disclose that it intended to seek tariff refunds; and (iii) retaining tariff refunds despite having passed the costs to its customers,” the lawsuit alleged. In their unjust-enrichment claim, plaintiffs said Nintendo profits were “unjustly obtained as a result of its price increases on goods subject to unlawful tariffs.” Nintendo raised prices for the original Switch console by $30 to $50 and added $5 to $10 to the prices of various Switch 2 accessories.

Nintendo told the court that “the doctrine of unjust enrichment does not apply when a party voluntarily pays a purchase price and receives a product in return.” Nintendo said plaintiffs “received exactly what they paid for: Nintendo products that Plaintiffs knowingly and voluntarily purchased at the advertised price. Nor is there anything ‘unjust’ about Nintendo retaining money that it may receive from the government as tariff refunds. The fact that Nintendo stands to receive tariff refunds does not give Plaintiffs any legal entitlement to those funds.”

cross-posted from: lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/72510659

Manga artist Inio Asano, the creator of Goodnight Punpun and Dead Dead Demon’s Dededede Destruction, recently appeared as a guest on WEEKLY OCHIAI, a talk show hosted by Japanese media artist Yoichi Ochiai. In the interview, published partly on YouTube (the full version can be watched via the News Picks platform), Asano talked about the “Unreal Engine” technique for creating his manga, and touched on why he put Mujina Into the Deep on hiatus, as well as the use of generative AI in the manga scene.

To begin with, Asano says that Mujina Into the Deep ended up turning into an action manga because he wanted to create a story where he could freely experiment with 3D-modeled environments. “Initially, it was supposed to be a simple, grounded story about this hopeless middle-aged man in a shopping street. But when I created the town in 3D, I was like, I could make a manga that’s much better suited for this – and it naturally became an action manga.”

Those who follow Asano on X might be familiar with the fact that over 90% of the backgrounds in Mujina Into the Deep were made by the mangaka himself using Unreal Engine and Blender. While he uses paid assets when he can, he also models his own when needed.

Asked about whether utilizing AI could help with streamlining the process of modeling and placing all of the individual assets on such a vast open world, Asano explains that “it’s definitely possible, but there is a very difficult problem of what extent you can use AI to.”

“Right now, publishers are not in a position where they can overtly say that they allow AI use,” Asano comments. “It’s a strange situation; You’re not allowed to use it precisely because you’re a professional.” He explains that, while there are several reasons why Mujina Into the Deep was put on a hiatus until 2027, the manga scene’s current attitude towards AI is one of them.

“In the current state of things, mangaka are not allowed to use AI. But using AI actually drives up the quality by a mile. So doesn’t that mean it would be best to not draw the manga now? Maybe they suddenly lift the ban [on AI] next year, so it might be better to start drawing after that happens. I’m currently on standby in that sense,” Asano says. Though he didn’t elaborate if or to what extent he hypothetically plans to use AI, he said that using it could significantly speed up the modeling process.

As a side note, Asano says that, while he doesn’t find any particular inspiration for his stories in other forms of media, he is passionate about video games. Apparently, all of his work after Dededede, including Mujina Into the Deep, is heavily inspired by the GTA franchise. As he explains, he creates all of his stories by creating an “open world” for them first.

People always suspected big tech was greedy, but not quite like this. Patrons of Amazon Web Services have been landed with panic-inducing monthly bills running as high as $1.5tn for subscriptions that usually cost less than the price of a cup of coffee.

From Bangalore to Bolsover, the bills have been causing alarm after a computer glitch resulted in the astronomical invoices being dispatched around the world by Jeff Bezos’s company, which provides data and cloud services to millions of customers, from students and small charities to big businesses.

“I almost had a heart attack when I received an email alert from Amazon Web Services with the billing for our charity’s school grounds audit app, which usually costs us less than a pound per month,” Dan Harvey, the head of marketing at the Hampshire-based Learning Through Landscapes told the Guardian. It was not even the end of the month and Harvey’s bill was standing at $7.8bn (£5.8bn), somewhat more than the previous month’s 43 cents.

In a dark way, this is the best possible kind of billing fuckup; unlike a 10x bump that would be noticed but not universally, this heads off into the land of the absurd.