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Comment by charcircuit | Hacker News Reader

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This firmware is code, and code is speech[0]. Any law making speech illegal is unconstitutional. I'm puzzled as to why the DMCA (or this part of it) hasn't been overturned yet.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Junger_v._Daley

It hasn't been overturned for the same reason copyright hasn't been despite it restricting people's speech.

In other words, this is a law that still ought to be overturned by a better Supreme Court.

The legality is subject to the court’s opinion, and a court is not compelled to interpret the situation the same way you do. Their job is to interpret written laws using their opinions and available case law, and also to pass human judgments on laws that aren’t encoded in machine-parseable structures (such as fair use rights). Declaring this particular instance illegal this early requires more case law references than you’ve provided.

We all do illegal things all the time, I’m fine knowing that this one goes in the “bad” pile. I’m sure something terrible will happen to me soon.

It's not just you who you are affecting, but also all the people who worked on the game, Nintendo and Microsoft, and even the entire video game industry by doing things like this.

Yeah, Nintendo AND Microsoft of all companies really do deserve all the pity they can get, seeing as they’re such pro-consumer, fan-friendly, not-at-all monopolistic, completely altruistic entities. Right?

Nintendo and Microsoft have enabled a ton of value to be created in the video game market and they should be highly respected.

For that they are. But for everything else they’ve pulled (and continue to pull to this day) they deserve scorn, ridicule and, perhaps most importantly, financial troubles.

Microsoft likes to dig its own graves and bury its own products through series of baffling anti-consumer decisions, and given the state of Xbox currently, there’s not much left of it to bury anyways.

But Nintendo? They deserve every single attack aimed at them. Go look up some of the tactics they continue to employ (some dating back to the 80s, mind you) to stop game preservation, meddle with fan games, and just all around do everything they can to ensure the only way to play a Nintendo game is by paying full price for it (regardless of the game’s age and quality of emulation).

Nintendo and Microsoft do not deserve pity.

Nintendo is not trying to stop game preservation. In fact they maintain a large archive themselves. What they do rather is people committing copyright infringement. Also if you look at the fan games in questions you will notice they will be ones that also committed copyright infringement or patent instrument.

Continuing to play discontinued games and sharing that joy with new people and generations seems like a good way of strengthening an industry

Well, yes I guess, but will it create short-term value for shareholders? Mountains of it if possible?

And there are legal ways to do so like buying the discontinued game physically.

"legal" ways don't align - there's not enough profit in it.

Then there must not actually be much benefit to the industry in doing whatever you are expecting.

We already had copyright law for that. We didn't need to make some code illegal, too.

The world already tried that. In response to continuing violations things were made more restrictive.

Ok then lets get rid of copyright as well since corporations are clearly not sticking to the deal.

Won't someone think of the multi billion dollar corporations?!

If peop- THIEEEVES can just download old games forever, how will these companies make money by selling new games? Or reselling the old games in their half-baked emulation offerings!

Truly the author behind this software deserves a special place in hell for creating such an evil!

(Obligatory reminder the above is to be taken as hyperbolic sarcasm. The very idea that someone would jump to defend corporations against software designed for cultural preservation is saddening)

> Or reselling the old games in their half-baked emulation offerings!

You mean other people's emulators that they have badly packaged together with the game. Emulators from precisely the groups that also develop these kind of compatibility patches to get to the data.

You don't have to try so hard to convince me, I was already on board with the patched firmware.

Oh no!

Is it actually breaking DRM? Or is it just creating a 1:1 copy of a proprietary format?

> Game consoles that are supported include the original Xbox, Xbox 360, GameCube, Wii, and Dreamcast. Physical media from other consoles, such as PlayStation 3, 4, 5, and the Xbox One/Series consoles, technically work, but the content on physical media for these consoles is encrypted.

Breaking encryption is definitely “illegal” - but backing up a binary format is not. I can backup my GBA cartridges ROMs for personal archival use if I have a device that can read them.

I would consider changing the format of a disc to prevent it from being copied by a regular drive to be considered a protection measure. The content is still encrypted so if not the disc, it would be the emulator decrypting it which would be the problem.

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