Both physical and digital Switch games include what Nintendo calls technological protection measures, or TPMs. As Nintendo itself explains in one of those takedown notices, “When a game is started on the Nintendo Switch console a Game TPM is decrypted using cryptographic keys that are protected by Console TPMs. The games themselves can then be decrypted by the decrypted Game TPMs so the game can be played.”
The DMCA includes a section that says “no person shall circumvent a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title.” In other words, any attempt to bypass DRM is a violation of copyright law no matter the intent - or at least, that’s how Nintendo interprets the law, and that argument has been very effective at getting hosts like GitHub to take down software like Lockpick and SigPatch-Updater.
Love to live in a society where private property is real and personal property is not.
Yep, basically their strategy is intimidation by being rich when the people deving these things aren’t. The legal costs are nothing for them and decimating for their opponents.
Shameful practice, but super common in the modern world.
“When a game is started on the Nintendo Switch console a Game TPM is decrypted using cryptographic keys that are protected by Console TPMs. The games themselves can then be decrypted by the decrypted Game TPMs so the game can be played.”
Love to live in a society where private property is real and personal property is not.
Their strategy isn’t really the legal arguments, it’s simply scare tactics because no one wants to go against Nintendo in court.
Yep, basically their strategy is intimidation by being rich when the people deving these things aren’t. The legal costs are nothing for them and decimating for their opponents.
Shameful practice, but super common in the modern world.
‘We operate in that space between what the law says and our opponent’s access to what the law says…’
hmm, perhaps it’s time for
“When a game is started on the Nintendo Switch console a Game TPM is decrypted using cryptographic keys that are protected by Console TPMs. The games themselves can then be decrypted by the decrypted Game TPMs so the game can be played.”
Statements dreamed up by the utterly deranged.
It’s called a “Key Encryption Key” or KEK (yes, really)
It’s not exactly a new concept in cryptography.
https://csrc.nist.gov/glossary/term/key_encryption_key
Cory Doctorow quotes someone else whose name I forget who calls this “criminal contempt of business model”.