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Comment by monocasa | Hacker News Reader

I'm not sure they're necessarily claiming the keys are copywritten (which honestly would be a terrible strategy), but instead that yuzu's ability to injest keys and encrypted copywritten works (decrypting them on the fly as needed like a switch would) constitutes a circumvention device banned by 17 US § 1201.

https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/1201

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For the keys to be considered to fall under the DCMA, they'd have to be copyrighted.

Not under 1201. They can form a copyright circumvention device without being subject to copyright themselves as long as they're used to protect an actual copywritten work (in this case the encrypted game images).

I'm going to assume the encryption is not custom. If it is "off-the-shelf" then they'll have a real hard time proving that without making every browser on the internet a "copyright circumvention device."

But regardless, if they "distribute" (ie, can be freely read off the device without special tools) the keys in the clear, it isn't used to protect anything.

They use AES, but a pretty custom key derivation scheme to get to the AES keys for a specific game given the game's metadata and pre shared root keys installed on the switch at manufacturing time. Yuzu implements that key derivation scheme so that you don't have to track down per game version keys.

A browser does not have the code to decrypt a switch ROM.

It sounds like even then, you'd have to agree to (or read) an EULA to know that this is some magical thing. It is certainly possible to implement something without ever doing either.

1201 doesn't require signing a contract or agreeing to an EULA.

Then how do you know there’s copyrighted content there and you aren’t just building something compatible?

It's soft; like a lot of legal concepts, there isn't a black and white test.

At the end of the day it's what can be proven to a jury.

In this case for instance, I don't think there's a decent legal strategy for Yuzu wrt "we didn't know the encryption on switch ROMs was a 1201 protected device".

> we didn't know the encryption on switch ROMs was a 1201 protected device

I didn't know that, and I'm a software engineer. Good luck convincing a jury :)

Doesn't this use case fall squarely in the realm of the exception for the purposes of interoperability?

That exception comes with a balance of (a)(2), which discusses commercial implications.

So with Yuzu's patreon funds, it's very grey at the moment, which is probably why Nintendo decided to take aim.

I don't think that's the case. The games are copyrighted. The keys only need to constitute an effective anti-circumvention scheme (any technological measure that “effectively controls access” to a work) to be illegal to code for.

If the keys are that readily available ... I don't think it is "effective" by any definition of the word.

'Effectively' has a different meaning than y'all are reading. It's not effectively as in 'an effective, well constructed lock', but instead as in 'for all intents and purposes'.

The law doesn't say 'it's illegal to break a lock until it's been broken'.

A door without a lock or sign saying "keep out" is not "effective for all intents and purposes." Further, you can buy a switch and never agree to any EULA or other contracts.

> A door without a lock or sign saying "keep out" is not "effective for all intents and purposes."

But picking a crappy lock on a door you're not supposed to open is still a crime, regardless of how crappy the lock is.

> Further, you can buy a switch and never agree to any EULA or other contracts.

1201 doesn't require you to sign any conracts or agree to any EULAs. It's treated more like trespass.

The DMCA definition

>>...technological measure "effectively controls access to a work" if the measure, in the ordinary course of its operation, requires the application of information, or a process or a treatment, with the authority of the copyright owner, to gain access to the work.

So, a website fits that definition. Sounds like browsers should be sued.

>So, a website fits that definition

What DRM is a browser bypassing? As if you control some that is being bypassed by a browser, you're free to sue.

Have you seen user agent strings?

Every browser pretends to be all the browsers before it to get around restrictions on who can see/render content.

Your point is as nonsensical as the user agent strings themselves.

It's not copy protection. It may change the structure and content of the page that is sent but that is not copy protection.

> It's not copy protection. It may change the structure and content of the page that is sent but that is not copy protection.

It is though!

Often news websites use the user agent to detect e.g. the google crawler, and allow google to index the contents of news articles; but then throw up a paywall when anyone with a normal browser shows up.

I recall some news websites tried to threaten people making browser extensions with the DMCA/CFAA as they considered it working around their copy protection to illegally gain access to their content.

>recall some news websites tried to threaten people making browser extensions with the DMCA/CFAA as they considered it working around their copy protection to illegally gain access to their content.

Source? I spent two minutes looking and failed to find anything like that, hardly an exhaustive search though.

Hard to argue a user agent could be DRM though, considering it's a string I the user send to the website.

You might be right, I was connecting this with the Dolphin case which was making the argument that the keys are copyrightable. Essentially this is an extension of that, which is arguing that any circumvention is a violation of 17 US § 1201.

That ability can be used as interoperaton in order to emulate the Switch properly for personal needs.

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