Folks aren't reacting negatively because they want to be OP's friend, they're reacting negatively because OP makes a practice of lying to people about something inconsequential in order to try to provoke them as a form of test. That's not the way most normal people think about building personal relationships. We don't go around deliberately setting traps for others.
Creating a version of reality is significantly different from conjuring abject falsehoods. There is an objective reality for what (e.g.) a baby peacock should look like, and this AI slop is inherently misleading about that.
His comparison isn't totally off. At some point our global perception of a certain subject might be totally different from what it is in reality just because all images about X are the optimal, AI improved, photoshopped version. This is in fact what women mean when they say that beauty standards are becoming unrealistic: Quite literally the standard image of women is being altered. Kind of similar to how the standard image of a baby peacock is being altered.
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...
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".
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
> except specific, delineated purposes and cases which must be approved and reapproved by the Librarian of Congress every 3 years;
1201(c)(1) says:
> Nothing in this section shall affect rights, remedies, limitations, or defenses to copyright infringement, including fair use, under this title.
Wouldn't that apply to DMCA 1201(a)(1) - the part that bans circumvention of copy protection? i.e. since there's US[0] caselaw in favor of format-shifting[1], it's probably still legal to format shift DRM-encumbered material, even if it's illegal to tell people how to do that.
Regardless, you probably don't need to tell people - or at least, private citizens not fearing prosecution from Nintendo for unrelated matters - not to dump their own games, because it's extremely unlikely for anyone to ever get caught doing so. Dumping your own games and running them in an emulator leaves little evidence. In fact, that's why DMCA 1201(a)(2) has no exceptions. DMCA exists to take copying tools away from people who are not legible to copyright holders.
[0] The biggest split between US and UK copyright law is actually just format-shifting. In the UK it's not only illegal to format-shift, but a law to legalize it was struck down on the basis that copyright holders need to be paid for lost sales of the same work in a different format.
[1] RIAA v. Diamond, which notably overcame the Audio Home Recording Act, an even more draconian law on digital music recording technology that mandated specific DRM systems on all digital recordings.
What you need to understand is that Stop Killing Games and future initiatives to come are about changing the law. You arguing about current law means nothing when the whole point is to change it.
Anticircumvention laws were passed in many countries to conform to international treaties. They cannot be changed without violating international law.
If you have difficulty understanding why these treaties were signed and laws passed, perhaps ask someone who makes their living in a creative field (programming doesn't count). Ask them what computers and the internet would have done to their livelihood without DRM and the strong legal protections surrounding it.
> Forget about preservation. The Switch and its games are not yours to preserve.
That's false. I own this Switch and I own the games I purchased on it. I ripped the games and I'm playing the new Zelda on my steam deck right now.
Bureaucrats and capitalists can write silly things on paper all they want, the truth of my ownership is self evident and obvious. I haven't done anything wrong and it's incredibly cynical to argue I have.
If I get fined or go to jail for it, it's just another absurdity. I'm not going to lobotomize myself so I can live in lala land with the bureaucrats and understand their clown world ethics, let them punish me if they catch me I guess.
> 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.
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.
>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?
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.
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".
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.
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.
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.
>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.
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.
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.
No, the piracy part come in when that dumped game is distributed, and guides are made so even the most computer illiterate people are able to play Nintendo games free of charge.
Personally, I don't think an emulator or ROM dump should be banned. However, I cannot deny that these exist primarily to pirate games. In the long run, I think paying customers will feel stupid for spending money when other people aren't so they'll stop too. Eventually, it will get to a point where Nintendo can't make a profit.
I think if you love the games, which I personally do, the moral thing to do is pay so that those games can continue to be made. But that's my moral, not legal, assessment.
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.
This is not a piracy issue. Please stop framing it as such.
The primary use case is to run all your games on a single device.
Nintendo want to lock customers into their ecosystem rather than competing on game quality alone.
They know if you have a switch then you will likely buy other switch games etc. If you buy and play Mario Kart on your PC then you are much less likely to invest in the rest of the ecosystem.
We should carve out legal provisions for emulators and circumventing DRM.
Nintendo can then still go against individual people pirating software.
I don't think emulators or ROM dumps should be banned. However, it is a piracy issue because in the real world these are used almost exclusively for piracy.
I think a "know nothing" type argument is very weak.
It is absolutely a piracy issue. Nintendo are using the DMCA to fight piracy.
It is extremely cut and dried in their eyes: emulation = piracy.
Mario Kart exists on many non-Nintendo platforms legitimately already. The existence of Mario Kart in the arcade or on mobile devices brings people into the Nintendo ecosystem, not draw them out of it.
It is a waste of time to fight individuals downloading games when the tools of emulation exist out in the open. that is why Nintendo are going after emulators themselves, at the current time, emulators are the big, easy wins.
Even if that is true (and I guess for that you'd have to classify downloading abandonware as piracy): Valve founder Gabe Newell famously said that piracy is a "service issue".
So if you give emulator users the option of playing or buying legitimate copies without jumping through hoops, then piracy rates will drop.
I don't understand how you consider the Nintendo Switch to be abandonware.
Nintendo aren't taking down SNES emulators. They're not taking down GameCube emulators, they're taking down Switch emulators.
The emulation community, -- again, mostly pirates -- have zero chill. The lesson that they desperately need to learn here is this: Do not bite the hand that feeds you.
Emulating latest generation systems and games that are currently for sale for that system is biting the hand that feeds you.
You aren’t licensed to play that game on a PC or in an emulator. It doesn’t matter if you paid for the game and paid for the Nintendo Switch to play it on. If you used a hacked Switch to dump the console or you downloaded the rom, that’s piracy. It is not legal to circumvent the DMCA for fair use reasons.[1]
It is very cut and dried in the legal world, and it would take a very significant case and a few appeals which uphold a decision that changes how the DMCA is interpreted in the courts.
If you’re not in the US and not a US citizen, then I have no idea what laws apply to you or how they are interpreted.
Also it doesn’t matter if something is “abandoned.” It’s still got an owner, and pirating that thing is still against the law.
The law is what matters when discussing legal matters. Nothing else has any meaning at all. Law and precedent are the only things lawyers care about.
If Nintendo wanted to go from a company that is tolerated to a company that is beloved, they would stop this, but they don’t. They are happy to be hated if it stops piracy of their games, clearly.
Computers are primarily used for copying data, and thus by extension are perfect piracy machines. Should Nintendo go on an epic crusade to ban computers because many people use computers for piracy?
It doesn't help that the copyright system is heavily unfavorable for the common folk and society as whole. Some pirate as a workaround or in protest of the current draconian copyright rules.
Morally there is an argument to be made for recent works against piracy, but why should we care about old stuff that arguably should have already entered public domain like SNES games from the early 90s?
It is funny that when you replace EMULATORS with GUNS and PIRACY with INJURING AND KIllING, the very same people advocacing for the bans of emulators are the ones arguing that guns are for protection and not to harm others.
But all emulators user combined don't harm nearly as much humanity as a single gun owner does.
How did you reach the conclusion that there's a strong correlation between being a Corporate IP Rights Diehard and a Gun Rights Diehard? Was there some study that showed a link between supporting the individual right to own a firearm and support for banning individuals from owning software emulators? Perhaps the NRA or the 2AF file an amicus brief in support of Nintendo's fights against emulators recently? Or the other way around maybe? Did Nintendo of America file a motion in favor of striking down some firearms laws?
Yes, and in the case of older games it is incredibly difficult for a company to prove any kind of damages against an individual since they no longer make the games available for sale.
I would imagine the games don't disappear from existence the very moment a new console is released.
The reality is that emulating and dumping current games is almost exclusively used for piracy purposes. Naturally, this isn't true for something like the N64.
It also happens to be the reality. I won't entertain delusions that switch emulation is not primarily used for piracy.
I mean really, archival? The games are in every Walmart, Target, and GameStop in the country. Within a 5-mile radius of you at any given time there's dozens of games. Get real.
Pirates never openly admit they are pirating. What, everyone with an emulator is an archivist? Give me a break.
What does an emulator have to do with preservation, anyway? Nothing. You don’t need an emulator to preserve a game. You need an emulator to play a game that you can’t get the hardware for anymore, and the Switch is very much still on store shelves, so the “archiving” excuse evaporates as soon as it is uttered.
Pirates will however say they are doing all kinds of legitimate things in order to keep pirating. I include all those fools who pirate everything they play as a matter of principle, as if that is a legitimately defensible position in reality.
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.
Huh? Last I checked you can still order them off AliExpress without an issue. And I highly doubt that Nintendo would go after the thousands of people who bought one after the big MIG Switch announcements.
they're not "going after" MIG Dumper customers, I didn't say that. Remember what people actually say vs. what you imagine them saying when you want to argue with them.
Nintendo seek customer information in order to inform those customers that they are in possession of illegally obtained copyrighted material.
> Last I checked you can still order them off AliExpress without an issue.
Copyright is barely a thing in China, and is almost never enforced. And certainly the tech culture there is very much pro-copying.
That's an absurd statement, it's the same with most program, you make a copy of the data from a CD/Flash to the host machine storage, then make another copy to the RAM for execution.
Are you arguing that installing a software is akin to making an illegal copy ?
A proprietary cart has a license that doesn’t include any provisions for installation. Thus, it is only authorized to be executed directly from the cart. So in the specific case I’m talking about, as opposed to your premature extrapolation, yes. Copying the data from a cart to another system that isn’t directly executing the data from that cart is an illegal act.
> A proprietary cart has a license that doesn’t include any provisions for installation. Thus, it is only authorized to be executed directly from the cart. So in the specific case I’m talking about, as opposed to your premature extrapolation, yes.
No, the wishes of Nintendo are not law.
> Copying the data from a cart to another system that isn’t directly executing the data from that cart is an illegal act.
Not it isn't, it's explicitly stated that making a copy to run the program is not a infringement[1]
117. Limitations on exclusive rights: Computer programs
(a) Making of Additional Copy or Adaptation by Owner of Copy.— Notwithstanding the provisions of section 106, it is not an infringement for the owner of a copy of a computer program to make or authorize the making of another copy or adaptation of that computer program provided:
(1) that such a new copy or adaptation is created as an essential step in the utilization of the computer program in conjunction with a machine and that it is used in no other manner, or
(2) that such new copy or adaptation is for archival purposes only and that all archival copies are destroyed in the event that continued possession of the computer program should cease to be rightful.
That’s all well and good if you’re the owner. But you’re not the owner of a computer program that is merely licensed to you for your use. Every game comes with an End User License Agreement that explicitly unambiguously says you don’t own it. [1][2]
Also, executing a copy of a program is violating the “for archival purposes only” provision. Once it’s being executed it’s no longer archival, it’s executive.
> But you’re not the owner of a computer program that is merely licensed to you for your use.
For copyright purpose, you're still the owner of the _copy_, independently of what Nintendo say, you bought the cartridge, you're the owner of it (but not the licence right on the distribution of the game).
> Also, executing a copy of a program is violating the “for archival purposes only” provision. Once it’s being executed it’s no longer archival, it’s executive.
It is not, it's covered by the section I'm quoting.
Where did purchasers of physical copies have a chance to read that license and did the store clerk require their signature to prove that they agreed to such an EULA?
This entitled attitude is part of the problem. A game can’t simply be shipped and done anymore. It means the quality can slip, because “we’ll patch it after we ship.” It also means the author has to continue development indefinitely, which means they’re also never done.
Companies in the past making games that you would pay for once were somehow still making lots of money despite providing support for the game for a few years after launch.
The cost of a few years of support is built into the price of the software.
Oh, I am sure they'll try. The sales pitch is way too enticing for them to ignore. Imagine you're in a brick and mortar wireless store shopping for a new cell plan. A Meta user walks by, and you get caught in a frame. A facial recognition scan quickly links you to your shadow profile, and an image recognition model identifies that you are phone shopping. Meta knows who you are and pings your current carrier who quickly dispatches a phone call to you with a pre-emptive retention offer. It may sound outlandish, but all the pieces are there to do this today.
IMHO, we need strong regulation of facial recognition technology. The conversation too often focuses on law enforcement use - don't get me wrong, that is also important, but it completely ignores the risk posed by private databases.
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