tronblr and also maybe us-court-systemblr I read that ed dillinger would do around five years in prison for stealing and claiming ownership of kevin flynn’s work. okay cool that’s not my question.
how long would it take for his case to be heard? where would he most likely be staying while waiting? jail? or since he’s not a violent threat is he just chillin
edit he is arrested or whatevs at the end of the movie so 1982 but starts dillinger systems in 1985 so three-ish years in prison?
Because of how many plotholes in continuity there are when you try to take everything as canon, I generally treat each movie as its own separate work (except when I’m *Inspired* to write something that connects them, lol) so I don’t know how I’d make sense of the 1982 to 1985 thing
But, just going by the 1982 movie canon, he would have to deal with charges not only for videogame plagiarism but also running a program that committed sabotage and theft from multiple other powerful corporations and was also planning to attack military targets including the damn Pentagon
…and I don’t know the usual sentence for that kind of thing, but, if we’re gonna assume he only did about three years for that, then the possibilities are probably:
1. He was able to conceal the fact that those crimes happened
2. He was able to convince the court that he was not in control of what the MCP was doing
Or
3. He had strong enough power (via his wealth and connections) to influence the courts and get himself a shorter sentence
All of those are the sort of things that rich people frequently manage to do when accused of crimes, so it could be any of those or a combination.