7 ms·

There have been tools built to do this, which Nintendo abused IP law to shut down.

by devmor 2y ago

sim7c00 2y ago
isnt this basically piracy enabling technology? its good n all that people take the stance they will only use it for their legitimately owned copies but thats not the reality. people dump stuff and spread it around, and others play illegal copies. its much more rare for people to use such tech legitimately than the other clearly illegal case...
- DrillShopper 2y ago
  Ope, we'd better ban CD burners, Xerox machines, 3D printers, EPROM burners, VCRs, and DAT tape decks because they're pIrAcY eNaBlInG tEcHnOlOgY!!!!!! That's not how any of this works.
  - roywiggins 2y ago
    It's how the DMCA works though, if the media has any DRM on it.
    - DrillShopper 2y ago
      No it's not. You can't just say "SOME PEOPLE ARE USING THIS FOR PIRACY SO NOBODY SHOULD BE ALLOWED TO USE THIS LEGALLY". That's _not_ how it works and there are many court cases on point here. The legal uses as well as the plausible fair uses need to be evaluated before you can say "nope, this has gotta go".
      - roywiggins 2y ago
        Well maybe, if you have the time and the money to make a fair use defense in court...
      - stzsch 2y ago
        Nintendo's latest legal argument against emulators does rest on the DMCA's anti-circumvention provision. The letter from Nintendo to Valve in the Dolphin case makes it pretty clear.
        matheusmoreira 2y ago
        That's just Nintendo's opinion on the matter. This letter is just them asking Valve politely to please take down the emulator. Until this stuff actually goes to court and an actual judge decides on it, nobody knows what the truth is. Who am I kidding? Even when the truth is known, they'll still abuse the expense associated with the legal system to bully people into submission. Sony sued a commercial emulator developer decades ago. They made the asinine argument that the screenshots they used was copyright infringement. The judge said it was just comparative advertising instead, and that it was actually good for consumers. Nevertheless you still see these monopolists take down emulator screenshots of their games as if they had the right to do it. They know they won't fight back.
      - bitwize 2y ago
        > That's _not_ how it works and there are many court cases on point here. Those court cases were overridden by Congress... when they passed the DMCA. Under the DMCA, IT IS A CRIME to: 1) circumvent an "effective" copyright measure for any purpose, except specific, delineated purposes and cases which must be approved and reapproved by the Librarian of Congress every 3 years; 2) traffic in the means or technology to so circumvent a copy protection measure, with no exceptions. The definition of "effective" is so weak that it applies to anything, even a bit of JavaScript that intercepts right click so you can't "Save Image As". It basically means, would the copy protection measure prevent copying "during the normal course of its operation". I.e., if it's buggy, employs weak crypto, or is otherwise trivially defeated, too bad. You can still catch federal time for breaking it. In order for a Switch emulator to work properly, the copy protection on the game must be defeated. So even if you dump it yourself and a court somehow rules that copy to be fair use, YOU ARE STILL COMMITTING A CRIME by the very act of dumping it. Therefore, it is illegal to run a Switch emulator to play legitimate Switch games, irrespective of whether those games are "legal" copies or not. And a court may rule that Switch emulators are illegal to distribute as well, since they only have illegal uses. I am not a lawyer, so I recommend you find yourself a good one if you want to mess around with Switch emulation. Best bet is to not get involved with it at all. Forget about preservation. The Switch and its games are not yours to preserve.
        roywiggins 2y ago
        If an emulator isn't actually enabling the circumvention (the DRM has already been circumvented) it does seem a serious stretch to apply it to them. I wouldn't want to have to pay lawyers to litigate that, mind you...
        Space5000 2y ago
        How does an after fact of someone's supposed illegal activity become itself illegal in a case like this? Especially in Brazil if I'm assuming correctly. I never heard of a case declaring a non-circumvent tool to be illegal just because it may indirectly rely on people dumping it first. If so, then even project64 would be illegal too as bypassing a physical cartridge was ruled to also bypass copy protection. Also the tool was in another specific country, which I heard doesn't have copy protection laws so the idea that it itself becomes illegal because of the actions in another country sounds even more silly. I am not a lawyer by the way.
      - johnnyanmac 2y ago
        > You can't just say "SOME PEOPLE ARE USING THIS FOR PIRACY SO NOBODY SHOULD BE ALLOWED TO USE THIS LEGALLY" That is in fact how many court cases are resolved. >The legal uses as well as the plausible fair uses need to be evaluated before you can say "nope, this has gotta go". what "fair uses" do we really have to stand on? "I can play Nintendo games better on my PC"? Are you a university or organization trying to preserve software? At the end of the day, video games as a whole are not a societal need. So it becomes hard to make some argument against having IP owners not clamp down on entertainment intended to make money.
        roywiggins 2y ago
        The LoC can issue exemptions, sort of, but it has to be renewed every three years, and they don't actually apply to circumvention devices themselves, only to users. https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/10/victory-users-librarian-congress-renews-and-expands-protections-fair-uses https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/10/victory-users-libraria... https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/11/new-dmca-ss1201-exemption-video-games-closer-look https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/11/new-dmca-ss1201-exempt...
        BobaFloutist 2y ago
        >what "fair uses" do we really have to stand on? "I can play Nintendo games better on my PC"? Are you a university or organization trying to preserve software? "I own it and I want to" is more than enough.
  - wilsonnb3 2y ago
    It is not the entirety of how it works but determining the primary intended use case of a technology is part of how it works.
    - repelsteeltje 2y ago
      Sure, but primary intent is open to interpretation too. Dig down deep enough and you'll find the very core of computers is about making copies. Colloquially we speak about moving data across memory or transferring it over a network swap a buffer to disk, but that's not what happens. We make copies and often, but not always, abandon the original. So it's always been kind of hair splitting to discern between different kinds of copying. Piracy and fair use, owning a software vs having a license to use it - it's a gray area.
      - johnnyanmac 2y ago
        >primary intent is open to interpretation too. and I wager about a million kids, people who can't afford games, or just self-righteous pirates are the ones who engage in copying data. Primary intent can be warped by consumer usage, even if the original ideals were noble (see: Bitcoin). That's probably why some philantropist doesn't want to try and challenge matters like DMCA. It may only make things worse.
    - deknos 2y ago
      with scanner and printer i printed material for my school colleagues in the german version of highschool, because they could not afford some of the specialized books. i do not say, piracy is always okay, but the intended use is VERY MUCH open to debate, depending on the view point and the money. and even more volatile, if much money can influence the societal debate and the law system. many people are very much we-trust-authority-and-companies-to-do-nothing-wrong.
      - johnnyanmac 2y ago
        >i do not say, piracy is always okay, but the intended use is VERY MUCH open to debate, depending on the view point and the money. I completely agree with this POV. But it also seems like we always get an influx of users who want to unironically destroy (not simply readjust) the idea of IP and copyright everytime topics like this occur. So it can be hard to navigate a discussion like this where some people have such radical mindsests to begin with (and usually not anything resembling a model for their plan) >many people are very much we-trust-authority-and-companies-to-do-nothing-wrong. yes, I get that a lot just because I want to simply limit copyright terms down to its original 14/14 terms instead of the absurd 95 years or soemthing, or remove it entirely. 28 years happens to be most of a traditional career, so it seems fair for creators to benefit from their creation for assumedly the rest of their career and a bit into retirement before throwing it out for the public for others to iterate on. The general idea of "well companies can pay to license it out" hasn't worked out to well in hindsight. Lots of companies will happily sit on projects for years, decades, because sometimes denying others of a project is better than giving it out. I'd also be interested in some sort of "use it or lose it" clause of maybe 10 years or so to prove you have an actual proudct in production before an IP goes into the public domain. It'd also solve those weird licensing hells we run into as companies shut down, but I also see a few obvious loopholes to close.
  - pjmlp 2y ago
    That is exactly why on some countries there is an additional copy tax on that stuff.
    - anthk 2y ago
      Spain and Portugal. We hate the Spanish RIAA a lot (SGAE, sociedad general de autores y editores, I think it doesn't need a translation).
      - pjmlp 2y ago
        And France, Germany, and a couple of others.
      - calgoo 2y ago
        In a way, to me, this makes it “more legal” to rip copyright material as I’m forced to pay for it on every HD, usb, etc. i understand it’s not, but if you are going to force me to pay a tax on any storage device, then I might as well get my value out of it.
  - johnnyanmac 2y ago
    Is it a coincidence every one of those pieces of tech have been under controversy? Yes, companies have been against easily copying their works for decades, and the laws are wishy washy until someone angry enough to challenge it rises up. But odds are, if you have that kind of money you benefit from keeping it vauge.
  - sim7c00 2y ago
    don't forget debuggers, disassemblers and hexdump tools ;) ... I don't disagree with you, but if you look at how the law is interpreted, and used 'succesfully' by lawyers. I do think I am right. I think further it's mainly a case of, like other people suggested, circumventing active protections, and also how its 'most commonly used'. For emulators, the most common use is not the creators and hobbyist trying to keep stuff alive. The most common use is people downloading the stuff who never owned a console or said games, and them playing stuff. For CD burners you might claim the same, but there's no protections circumvented by the majority users. CD's can just be copied, there's no protection mechanisms. There's warning labels not to distribute copies though, which is against the law. The act of making a copy isn't included in such notices. It's usually something around distributing illegal copies as far as i've seen them. Not "making copies".
- naikrovek 2y ago
  If people used emulators for homebrew there wouldn’t be much of a fuss about it. But they don’t, they use emulators for piracy. It doesn’t matter if it has legitimate uses if 50%+ of the information online is about piracy and game dumping. Nintendo is gonna care and they’re gonna try to stop these things, so long as their primary use is piracy. It doesn’t matter that there are legitimate and legal use cases. There are zero people writing homebrew of any real value for any console platform newer than the SNES as far as I’m aware. There are lots and lots of toy applications in homebrew stores but nothing serious. LOTS of detailed and useful info about how to pirate games, though.
  - boolemancer 2y ago
    > and game dumping. Your argument is that legally purchasing a game and playing that in an emulator is piracy?
    - naikrovek 2y ago
      No, my argument is that the information on the web is about how to pirate games, no matter how it is couched in the tool documentation. The case for homebrew is in the homebrew software that is available, and all of the homebrew software that I have ever seen is absolute shite. Toy programs and simple SDK test tools, nothing of value other than the 3rd party SDKs themselves. It does not matter if you make a legitimate backup copy of a cart you own for safekeeping, emulation of legitimately owned copies of retail games is not an exemption of the DMCA. It doesn’t matter if you own a copy of the game, making a copy for any reason is not in accordance with the DMCA, as far as I’m aware. Exemptions to the DMCA are granted every few years, and some exemptions are rescinded at the same time. Copying game cartridges has never been an exemption. And even if it was, you can’t put your copy back onto a legitimate blank cartridge to regain playability if the original is destroyed. It’s a shitty situation to be sure, and it is wholly unfair. Blame gamers who are “morally opposed” to paying for games that they play. There are a lot of them, and they play a lot of games, and are often popular streamers on YouTube and Twitch. If people stopped pirating games so much, the homebrew and legitimate use people would have a solid defense and maybe even support in government, but the amount of piracy that goes on absolutely dwarfs legitimate uses of unlocked hardware. I personally am fascinated with Nintendo hardware and the choices made when they design their systems, and despite repeated efforts to get a Switch dev kit, I have been denied approval time and time again. I have no interest in piracy, I have interest in hardware platforms. But I am in the extremely small minority with that focus. If piracy slows somewhat dramatically, Nintendo won’t be able to do this with impunity like they do today. They will simply not have a leg to stand on when they say emulators are purely piracy mechanisms. But today, they really are. How many new games come out for the SNES every year? How many SNES emulators are there under active development? Are you going to say that all of those emulators and all of that time spent making them and perfecting them, making them cycle-perfect is done so that 1-2 games can come out every 1-2 years? EMULATORS ARE PRIMARILY USED FOR PIRACY. Until that changes, Nintendo will keep doing this.
- boltzmann-brain 2y ago
  You better not have a tool in your pocket that lets you make unregulated digital copies of any copyrighted document, movie, or song
roywiggins 2y ago
Selling a tool designed to circumvent DRM, even to make backups, seems straightforwardly illegal under the DMCA? I'm not sure that counts as an abuse of the law... Using it to shut down emulators that don't help you circumvent DRM does seem like an abuse, though.

There have been tools built to do this, which Nintendo abused IP law to shut down.

by devmor 2y ago

There have been tools built to do this, which Nintendo abused IP law to shut down.

isnt this basically piracy enabling technology? its good n all that people take the stance they will only use it for their legitimately owned copies but thats not the reality. people dump stuff and spread it around, and others play illegal copies. its much more rare for people to use such tech legitimately than the other clearly illegal case...

DrillShopper 2y ago
Ope, we'd better ban CD burners, Xerox machines, 3D printers, EPROM burners, VCRs, and DAT tape decks because they're pIrAcY eNaBlInG tEcHnOlOgY!!!!!! That's not how any of this works.
- roywiggins 2y ago
  It's how the DMCA works though, if the media has any DRM on it.
  - DrillShopper 2y ago
    No it's not. You can't just say "SOME PEOPLE ARE USING THIS FOR PIRACY SO NOBODY SHOULD BE ALLOWED TO USE THIS LEGALLY". That's _not_ how it works and there are many court cases on point here. The legal uses as well as the plausible fair uses need to be evaluated before you can say "nope, this has gotta go".
    - roywiggins 2y ago
      Well maybe, if you have the time and the money to make a fair use defense in court...
    - stzsch 2y ago
      Nintendo's latest legal argument against emulators does rest on the DMCA's anti-circumvention provision. The letter from Nintendo to Valve in the Dolphin case makes it pretty clear.
      - matheusmoreira 2y ago
        That's just Nintendo's opinion on the matter. This letter is just them asking Valve politely to please take down the emulator. Until this stuff actually goes to court and an actual judge decides on it, nobody knows what the truth is. Who am I kidding? Even when the truth is known, they'll still abuse the expense associated with the legal system to bully people into submission. Sony sued a commercial emulator developer decades ago. They made the asinine argument that the screenshots they used was copyright infringement. The judge said it was just comparative advertising instead, and that it was actually good for consumers. Nevertheless you still see these monopolists take down emulator screenshots of their games as if they had the right to do it. They know they won't fight back.
    - bitwize 2y ago
      > That's _not_ how it works and there are many court cases on point here. Those court cases were overridden by Congress... when they passed the DMCA. Under the DMCA, IT IS A CRIME to: 1) circumvent an "effective" copyright measure for any purpose, except specific, delineated purposes and cases which must be approved and reapproved by the Librarian of Congress every 3 years; 2) traffic in the means or technology to so circumvent a copy protection measure, with no exceptions. The definition of "effective" is so weak that it applies to anything, even a bit of JavaScript that intercepts right click so you can't "Save Image As". It basically means, would the copy protection measure prevent copying "during the normal course of its operation". I.e., if it's buggy, employs weak crypto, or is otherwise trivially defeated, too bad. You can still catch federal time for breaking it. In order for a Switch emulator to work properly, the copy protection on the game must be defeated. So even if you dump it yourself and a court somehow rules that copy to be fair use, YOU ARE STILL COMMITTING A CRIME by the very act of dumping it. Therefore, it is illegal to run a Switch emulator to play legitimate Switch games, irrespective of whether those games are "legal" copies or not. And a court may rule that Switch emulators are illegal to distribute as well, since they only have illegal uses. I am not a lawyer, so I recommend you find yourself a good one if you want to mess around with Switch emulation. Best bet is to not get involved with it at all. Forget about preservation. The Switch and its games are not yours to preserve.
      - roywiggins 2y ago
        If an emulator isn't actually enabling the circumvention (the DRM has already been circumvented) it does seem a serious stretch to apply it to them. I wouldn't want to have to pay lawyers to litigate that, mind you...
      - Space5000 2y ago
        How does an after fact of someone's supposed illegal activity become itself illegal in a case like this? Especially in Brazil if I'm assuming correctly. I never heard of a case declaring a non-circumvent tool to be illegal just because it may indirectly rely on people dumping it first. If so, then even project64 would be illegal too as bypassing a physical cartridge was ruled to also bypass copy protection. Also the tool was in another specific country, which I heard doesn't have copy protection laws so the idea that it itself becomes illegal because of the actions in another country sounds even more silly. I am not a lawyer by the way.
    - johnnyanmac 2y ago
      > You can't just say "SOME PEOPLE ARE USING THIS FOR PIRACY SO NOBODY SHOULD BE ALLOWED TO USE THIS LEGALLY" That is in fact how many court cases are resolved. >The legal uses as well as the plausible fair uses need to be evaluated before you can say "nope, this has gotta go". what "fair uses" do we really have to stand on? "I can play Nintendo games better on my PC"? Are you a university or organization trying to preserve software? At the end of the day, video games as a whole are not a societal need. So it becomes hard to make some argument against having IP owners not clamp down on entertainment intended to make money.
      - roywiggins 2y ago
        The LoC can issue exemptions, sort of, but it has to be renewed every three years, and they don't actually apply to circumvention devices themselves, only to users. https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/10/victory-users-librarian-congress-renews-and-expands-protections-fair-uses https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/10/victory-users-libraria... https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/11/new-dmca-ss1201-exemption-video-games-closer-look https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/11/new-dmca-ss1201-exempt...
      - BobaFloutist 2y ago
        >what "fair uses" do we really have to stand on? "I can play Nintendo games better on my PC"? Are you a university or organization trying to preserve software? "I own it and I want to" is more than enough.
- wilsonnb3 2y ago
  It is not the entirety of how it works but determining the primary intended use case of a technology is part of how it works.
  - repelsteeltje 2y ago
    Sure, but primary intent is open to interpretation too. Dig down deep enough and you'll find the very core of computers is about making copies. Colloquially we speak about moving data across memory or transferring it over a network swap a buffer to disk, but that's not what happens. We make copies and often, but not always, abandon the original. So it's always been kind of hair splitting to discern between different kinds of copying. Piracy and fair use, owning a software vs having a license to use it - it's a gray area.
    - johnnyanmac 2y ago
      >primary intent is open to interpretation too. and I wager about a million kids, people who can't afford games, or just self-righteous pirates are the ones who engage in copying data. Primary intent can be warped by consumer usage, even if the original ideals were noble (see: Bitcoin). That's probably why some philantropist doesn't want to try and challenge matters like DMCA. It may only make things worse.
  - deknos 2y ago
    with scanner and printer i printed material for my school colleagues in the german version of highschool, because they could not afford some of the specialized books. i do not say, piracy is always okay, but the intended use is VERY MUCH open to debate, depending on the view point and the money. and even more volatile, if much money can influence the societal debate and the law system. many people are very much we-trust-authority-and-companies-to-do-nothing-wrong.
    - johnnyanmac 2y ago
      >i do not say, piracy is always okay, but the intended use is VERY MUCH open to debate, depending on the view point and the money. I completely agree with this POV. But it also seems like we always get an influx of users who want to unironically destroy (not simply readjust) the idea of IP and copyright everytime topics like this occur. So it can be hard to navigate a discussion like this where some people have such radical mindsests to begin with (and usually not anything resembling a model for their plan) >many people are very much we-trust-authority-and-companies-to-do-nothing-wrong. yes, I get that a lot just because I want to simply limit copyright terms down to its original 14/14 terms instead of the absurd 95 years or soemthing, or remove it entirely. 28 years happens to be most of a traditional career, so it seems fair for creators to benefit from their creation for assumedly the rest of their career and a bit into retirement before throwing it out for the public for others to iterate on. The general idea of "well companies can pay to license it out" hasn't worked out to well in hindsight. Lots of companies will happily sit on projects for years, decades, because sometimes denying others of a project is better than giving it out. I'd also be interested in some sort of "use it or lose it" clause of maybe 10 years or so to prove you have an actual proudct in production before an IP goes into the public domain. It'd also solve those weird licensing hells we run into as companies shut down, but I also see a few obvious loopholes to close.
- pjmlp 2y ago
  That is exactly why on some countries there is an additional copy tax on that stuff.
  - anthk 2y ago
    Spain and Portugal. We hate the Spanish RIAA a lot (SGAE, sociedad general de autores y editores, I think it doesn't need a translation).
    - pjmlp 2y ago
      And France, Germany, and a couple of others.
    - calgoo 2y ago
      In a way, to me, this makes it “more legal” to rip copyright material as I’m forced to pay for it on every HD, usb, etc. i understand it’s not, but if you are going to force me to pay a tax on any storage device, then I might as well get my value out of it.
- johnnyanmac 2y ago
  Is it a coincidence every one of those pieces of tech have been under controversy? Yes, companies have been against easily copying their works for decades, and the laws are wishy washy until someone angry enough to challenge it rises up. But odds are, if you have that kind of money you benefit from keeping it vauge.
- sim7c00 2y ago
  don't forget debuggers, disassemblers and hexdump tools ;) ... I don't disagree with you, but if you look at how the law is interpreted, and used 'succesfully' by lawyers. I do think I am right. I think further it's mainly a case of, like other people suggested, circumventing active protections, and also how its 'most commonly used'. For emulators, the most common use is not the creators and hobbyist trying to keep stuff alive. The most common use is people downloading the stuff who never owned a console or said games, and them playing stuff. For CD burners you might claim the same, but there's no protections circumvented by the majority users. CD's can just be copied, there's no protection mechanisms. There's warning labels not to distribute copies though, which is against the law. The act of making a copy isn't included in such notices. It's usually something around distributing illegal copies as far as i've seen them. Not "making copies".
naikrovek 2y ago
If people used emulators for homebrew there wouldn’t be much of a fuss about it. But they don’t, they use emulators for piracy. It doesn’t matter if it has legitimate uses if 50%+ of the information online is about piracy and game dumping. Nintendo is gonna care and they’re gonna try to stop these things, so long as their primary use is piracy. It doesn’t matter that there are legitimate and legal use cases. There are zero people writing homebrew of any real value for any console platform newer than the SNES as far as I’m aware. There are lots and lots of toy applications in homebrew stores but nothing serious. LOTS of detailed and useful info about how to pirate games, though.
- boolemancer 2y ago
  > and game dumping. Your argument is that legally purchasing a game and playing that in an emulator is piracy?
  - naikrovek 2y ago
    No, my argument is that the information on the web is about how to pirate games, no matter how it is couched in the tool documentation. The case for homebrew is in the homebrew software that is available, and all of the homebrew software that I have ever seen is absolute shite. Toy programs and simple SDK test tools, nothing of value other than the 3rd party SDKs themselves. It does not matter if you make a legitimate backup copy of a cart you own for safekeeping, emulation of legitimately owned copies of retail games is not an exemption of the DMCA. It doesn’t matter if you own a copy of the game, making a copy for any reason is not in accordance with the DMCA, as far as I’m aware. Exemptions to the DMCA are granted every few years, and some exemptions are rescinded at the same time. Copying game cartridges has never been an exemption. And even if it was, you can’t put your copy back onto a legitimate blank cartridge to regain playability if the original is destroyed. It’s a shitty situation to be sure, and it is wholly unfair. Blame gamers who are “morally opposed” to paying for games that they play. There are a lot of them, and they play a lot of games, and are often popular streamers on YouTube and Twitch. If people stopped pirating games so much, the homebrew and legitimate use people would have a solid defense and maybe even support in government, but the amount of piracy that goes on absolutely dwarfs legitimate uses of unlocked hardware. I personally am fascinated with Nintendo hardware and the choices made when they design their systems, and despite repeated efforts to get a Switch dev kit, I have been denied approval time and time again. I have no interest in piracy, I have interest in hardware platforms. But I am in the extremely small minority with that focus. If piracy slows somewhat dramatically, Nintendo won’t be able to do this with impunity like they do today. They will simply not have a leg to stand on when they say emulators are purely piracy mechanisms. But today, they really are. How many new games come out for the SNES every year? How many SNES emulators are there under active development? Are you going to say that all of those emulators and all of that time spent making them and perfecting them, making them cycle-perfect is done so that 1-2 games can come out every 1-2 years? EMULATORS ARE PRIMARILY USED FOR PIRACY. Until that changes, Nintendo will keep doing this.
boltzmann-brain 2y ago
You better not have a tool in your pocket that lets you make unregulated digital copies of any copyrighted document, movie, or song

roywiggins 2y ago

Selling a tool designed to circumvent DRM, even to make backups, seems straightforwardly illegal under the DMCA? I'm not sure that counts as an abuse of the law... Using it to shut down emulators that don't help you circumvent DRM does seem like an abuse, though.