He pled guilty to the anti-circumvention part of the DMCA. Any attempt to bypass DRM is illegal, save for a number of exemptions listed by the Library of Congress every two years. So yes, your reverse engineering would be illegal.

How can that be possible? What if I made the worlds worst DRM and then sued everyone who bypassed it? How can bypassing DRM even be illegal? If someone owns their hardware then you can do any hardware or software modifications you want to it.

You may want to support the EFF in their challenge to this law: https://www.eff.org/press/releases/eff-asks-appeals-court-ru...

The difference I think is that the lock on your front door is on your front door. Whereas I think even if there's no other copyright violation, it's still illegal to break DRM.

Picking the lock involves trespassing your property. Breaking the DRM is illegal regardless of if it's trespassing on anyone's property.

Regardless of the merit of the rest of the argument, the quality of the DRM doesn't really matter for the same reason the quality of the lock of my front door doesn't matter. Most locks are shit that can be picked by a toddler in a minute. Their goal is mostly to make sure that if you open the door, you meant to.

I believe the wording used is "effective technological protection measure". So it's presumably up to the courts to decide whether the DRM was "effective" in the first place. (I am not a lawyer etc. etc.). I suspect it largely comes down to intent. To make an analogy, you'd still be on the hook for breaking-and-entering, even if your victim's front door was made of cardboard.

> How can bypassing DRM even be illegal?

Same way anything else can be illegal, they made a law saying so.

The law includes a definition of that term

>a 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 bypassing trivial DRM is still a crime.

Iirc there is case precedence for Adobe successfully invoking the DMCA with a ROT13 protection system. That’s the software equivalence off a child’s decoder ring and can be done in BASH built in (`tr`)

Because the law is absurd, unconstitutional, immoral and harmful. Nonetheless, it's still enforced.

> Because the law is [..] unconstitutional

I agree with you on all the other bits, but I'm curious as to why you believe it's unconstitutional. Not trolling here; I don't think I've heard constitutionality arguments against the DMCA, and I'm curious if there's something there.

Not GP, but I assume they mean that publishing DRM circumvention tools is or should be protected expression/speech (as is publishing any other type of software or code).

PS: thanks djb (c.f. Bernstein v USA)

The main way in which DMCA 1201 is unconstitutional is that it violates the first amendment. The EFF is litigating a case to this effect right now.

Unfortunately, the Supreme Court's one big proponent against copyright overreach is leaving the court soon.

I get your incredulity, but that's the law as it stands now.

> If someone owns their hardware then you can do any hardware or software modifications you want to it.

In practice, this isn't something you'd get in trouble for. But if you were to distribute tools and how-tos to help others modify their hardware, that's the bit that really gets you in trouble. I believe there's a carve-out for tools that have significant non-infringing uses, but I'm not sure how well that defense usually holds up.

But yeah, overall it's stupid, and disgusting that this has been the law of the land for over two decades now.

Under the anticircumvention clause of the DMCA, if I xor every 7th byte of 8 byte blocks with the value in the 8th, and you figure that out, and then wrote a program that (un)did the xor, you'd be in violation of the DMCA.

Doesn't matter outside of that, the law is poorly written, any means or attempt to break the circumvention is a violation.

> What if I made the worlds worst DRM and then sued everyone who bypassed it?

That was exactly the case with YouTube's DRM (video URL is encrypted with a key that is embedded in the javascript for the web page) and was the basis for the takedown against youtube-dl. I am not sure what the court would rule, because in that case everyone from GitHub to Google told the RIAA to pound sand and people didn't get sued.

"What if I made the worlds worst DRM and then sued everyone who bypassed it?"

Any damages would be eaten up by lawyer's fees. The legal fees are (arguably?) worth it to protect a whole system's games from being freely available but the lawsuit itself would not be profitable.

> "What if I made the worlds worst DRM and then sued everyone who bypassed it?"

Sklyarov was taken to court, and ~I believe is still in jail~, for bypassing Adobe's use of the amazingly secure ROT13 cypher.

EDIT: Charges were dropped a year later, because of the insanity of charging someone for using such an insecure mechanism. But only after both the EFF and Adobe came out in support of Sklyarov.

[0] https://www.zdnet.com/article/dimitry-sklyarov-enemy-or-frie...

Don't plaintiffs usually also sue to recover attorney/court fees from the defendant if they win? And that usually is granted?

Almost none of the plaintiffs would ever pay. Like this case, Nintendo is supposed to get ~5 times the amount of money they claim he made. How would he ever pay that, more so while in prison?

It's an interesting story, I used to be part of the modding community so I can lend some insight here.

In the early days of Switch hacking, there were mostly people just poking and prodding at different parts of the console to see if it would spit out interesting stuff. Fairly rudimentary stuff, like checking for secret Amiibo with custom NFC tags, hacking together Joycon drivers and even opening the device to play with the exposed hardware: all of it perfectly legal. Eventually though, someone found the secret switch on the bookshelf (shorting out one of the physical controller connector pins if you're curious), and the community was off to the races to design a custom bootloader/firmware like they did on the 3DS and Wii.

This is where the problems start, as I'm sure most people here would know. Messing with software is a dangerous thing (legally speaking), and so effectively 2 camps were formed:

- Team Xecuter, a close-knit circle of devs who intended to hack the Switch come Hell or hard-modding. They had no stipulations against using leaked code, directly profiting off their customerbase or inflaming their community, when it came down to it.

- Team Atmosphère, an open-source project that went with the "slow and steady" approach, attempting to find an ethical softmodding solution that could easily be applied to any Switch without fear of legal repercussion.

Both of these teams would fight each other viciously over the course of 2 or 3 years. Team Xecuter was first to figure out game piracy, but Atmosphere had a working warmboot before Xecuter did. Atmosphere was able to install games locally before Xecuter could, but Xecuter figured out booting from attached storage before Atmosphere did. The groups traded blows like this continually until, like Napoleon looking out on the Mediterranean, there were no more features to conquer. Xecuter had an easy-to-install commercial hardmod that was almost exclusively designed for piracy, while Atmosphere had polished off a more difficult but rewarding softmod, with emulation and homebrew capabilities (and eventually piracy, too).

So, what was Team Xecuter's crime? Putting the signing keys in the hardmods they sent out. With every successive Switch firmware update, Nintendo would issue a new list of attestation keys that came with each game purchase. To allow unsigned games to be booted, TX packed in these keys (and offered them on a monthly basis afterwards to hardmod owners), which really sent Nintendo off, leading to arrests like the one mentioned here. Atmosphere remains thankfully untouched today, and even though the odds looked stacked against them, they have delivered the most polished Nintendo Switch modding experience you could ask for. It's quite wonderful stuff, especially if you've ever wondered "how would this Python script run on Switch...?"

...oh, and the Switch modding community was absolutely insane for those few competitive years. There were a few other noteworthy community villains like Blawar, but that's a story for a different time.

You’re giving TX way too much credit here. Most of what they were selling was GPL-violating rebranded Atmosphere code with piracy tools preinstalled. They were screwing over the open-source hacker community and Nintendo at the same time. They probably don’t deserve a prison sentence this harsh, but I’m not particularly sympathetic toward them.

Hah, I largely feel the same way towards them. It's a real "play stupid games, win stupid prizes" situation, but even as someone who loved the Atmosphère project, I think TX deserves at least some credit for being competitive. Yes, they cheated and cut corners (and eventually paid the price), but that doesn't make them monsters. Bowser's arrest is fair, and while it is sad that team is facing health troubles, that's something they should have considered before taking a multinational corporation head-on.

All of this could be seen from miles away from the beginning though. Thoughtfully-built software tends to live longer than hastily made products, Atmosphère had already won the second TX decided to step in the ring.

I said in a previous discussion

> Nintendo have had a conflicted stance about community projects over the years. From threatening UltraHLE (early Nintendo 64 emulator) developers back in the late 90s to largely ignoring the Wii exploits and homebrew scene in the mid-to-late 2000s to attempting to hire private investigators to identify and implicate 3DS homebrew developers in 'illegal' activities.

Ultimately I think if Xecuter did not have their product so closely intertwined with enablement of piracy and distribution of copyrighted content it would leave Nintendo less legal ammo to use against them and potentially make it not worth pursuing.

Important to note the RCM exploit only works for the first revision of Switch units. This does not justify other potential crimes Xecuter may have done but certain previous mod-chips for certain previous consoles have been open-source in a clean-room design not including copyrighted content by the original vendors thus potentially removing issues of copyright infringement. Sad the Switch scene could not be the same.

Great insight - better than the article.

I believe they were selling software packages that ran due to the modchips that were advertised to enable piracy.

Had they not shipped code-signing patches and advertised this as a way to private games, I'm curious if the defense would have been easier. What'd they get him on -- the DMCA?

"Conspiracy to Circumvent Technological Measures and to Traffic in Circumvention Devices"