Copyright laws were established when it became cheap to "copy" creative works, so creativity would continue to be stimulated by guaranteeing rewards for a set time (idea was not to guarantee getting filthy rich, just to make sure creation happens by keeping the authors fairly compensated).
Digital "sales" are attempts to trick customers into thinking they are buying a copy when they are only getting a license, but this is unrelated to Nintendo killing emulators with an army of lawyers.
And Nintendo isnt going after you if you make a copy. Only if you try to package it and sell it en masse. Which seems to be a reasonable protection of copyright.
Regardles, it's not like any of us created a Nintendo Switch emulator, so we don't have much grounds here. Someone else distributed a tool that can be argued as used to bypass copyright and they are taking the heat for it.
Ryujinx wasn't being sold, it was being given away for free.
> Someone else distributed a tool that can be argued as used to bypass copyright
By this logic your entire computer is a tool to bypass copyright. An emulator is just a virtual machine, it doesn't contain any games or other copyrighted material. They are legal, despite Nintendo's mafioso scare tactics.
>your entire computer is a tool to bypass copyright
Reducto ad absurdum doesn't really work here. There are specific scopes and use cases taken into consideration when considering what tools or works are bypassing copyright. I cant claim Yuzu is the same as VMware in their use cases (especially when VMware had to work with Microsoft to have that be allowed. And why it can't legally distribute Mac OS Tom's freely).
Good to see you want virtual machines to be illegal.
pathetic, weaselly appeal to authority. try thinking for yourself, it's fun
That is the logic of copyright monopolists.
Free computing is subversive. It has the power to wipe out their entire business model like it was nothing. They don't want that. That's why they sign deals with the likes of Intel and AMD so that our processors come pwned straight off the factory.
"Our" computers haven't been ours for a long time now. They hide secrets from us. They have "protected video paths", "remote attestation", "platform keys", etc. These are all tools the monopolists use to make "our" computers do their bidding. Run all programs, except the ones that affect our bottom line. We want to copy but monopolists say no, and our computers obey.
But IP law says nothing about interaction with already-existing copies. This just isn't about copyright at all.
> But IP law says nothing about interaction with already-existing copies.
…because it requires a separate copy.
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 ?
It's even on the Wii U.
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.
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.
1. https://www.nintendo.com/sg/support/switch/eula/usage_policy... 2. https://en-americas-support.nintendo.com/app/answers/detail/...
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.
> 1. https://www.nintendo.com/sg/support/switch/eula/usage_policy... 2. https://en-americas-support.nintendo.com/app/answers/detail/...
Nintendo wishes and words are not law.
Sure those are just flying around where anyone can grab one.
If you have a 1st hardware generation Switch you have all the dumping hardware you require anyway.
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 not how any of this works.
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.
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 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.
The legal uses as well as the plausible fair uses need to be evaluated before you can say "nope, this has gotta go".
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.
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.
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.
I am not a lawyer by the way.
I wouldn't want to have to pay lawyers to litigate that, mind you...
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.
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.
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.
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.
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/10/victory-users-libraria...
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/11/new-dmca-ss1201-exempt...
"I own it and I want to" is more than enough.
But odds are, if you have that kind of money you benefit from keeping it vauge.
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".
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.
Your argument is that legally purchasing a game and playing that in an emulator is piracy?
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.
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.
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 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?
Emulators are primarily used to play games that are no longer available on hardware that no longer exists.
That is preservation, not piracy.
:)
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.
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.
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.
Everyone who is not an IP owner knows that.
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.
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.
I am emulating Zelda Breath of the Wild to play it at higher resolution. I already own the cart and the console.
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.
1: https://copyrightresource.uw.edu/copyright-law/dmca/#excepti...
I live in the EU, where consumers are authorized by Directive 2009/24/EC to reproduce and translate computer programs on other systems in order to achieve interoperability.
But even in the US there is the Sony v. Connectix precedent that creation of interoperable products is compliant with the DMCA and the anti-circumvention provisions do not apply to them.
I don't? My comment was on the primary use of emulation.
And Nintendo Switch is not the predominant console that is emulated. In fact Switch emulation runs only on relatively modern systems, not on Android and not on the myriad of cheap emulation hardware that is sold on AliExpress.
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.
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.
Using it to shut down emulators that don't help you circumvent DRM does seem like an abuse, though.
it arose from a legitimate answer to material scarcity, but it's nonesense in the digital space
people who advocate for IP and DRM and all such thing are in the end advocating for scarcity.
You either must be able to fund it through ads, host it on platform which make piracy effectively impossible and/or impractical like Apple's App Store, YouTube etc. or be independently wealthy and just do it as a hobby?
e.g. screw all the authors who are writing books, Amazon should just be able to distribute (or sell for some "convenience" fee) books to everyone who has a Kindle without paying anything to them? That (which would be the logical outcome of nothing having no IP protection) certainly sounds like a reasonable opinion..
Not everything revolves around software.
Also even then OSS generally seems to only be universally successful in areas where software is a "cost centre" i.e. companies are willing to invest into it when it makes it cheaper for them run their business than building/buying proprietary stuff or they build their products on top of it (A but almost never when it's the actual end product targeted at consumers.
And if we extend the definition of software to video games, OS is not even a thing there (besides middleware of course which falls into the previous category).
I would. Many people who contribute to FOSS either already or proceeded to work on proprietary technology which makes money. Like Nintendo. The FOSS work in good times is a passion hobby, not a means to live.
It'd be nice, but charity for most ventures has never ventured to be a way for the charity giver to sustain a liveable wage. If it could do that then I'd be more on board for FOSS being a model to follow. Instead, just like when you list a couch on Craigslist, you want to charge even a small price (and maybe not even collect the money) just to filter out the most unhinged customers who somehow become even more unhinged over literal free stuff.
On another level, we could pivot to UBI instead of dedicating ressource to enforce fake scarcity.
So what? Not everyone wants to engage in all of the PR/marketing stuff that's necessary to make any money from that and it would still generally result in significantly lower revenue.
> On another level, we could pivot to UBI instead of dedicating
And fund it how exactly? Even if that were sustainable why do you think that content creators should be fully content living of UBI + a few pennies in donations while people working in most other industries should be able to money the same way they previously did?
IP protection (even if often implemented in a suboptimal way which of course should be improved) have been one of the primaries force behind human progress over that last 300+ years.
That's not a difference, PR/Marketing is already used to profit over IP work.
> Even if that were sustainable why do you think that content creators should be fully content living of UBI + a few pennies in donations while people working in most other industries should be able to money the same way they previously did?
This is assuming creators are fully content on how stuff work now, and I'm betting that's not the case for the vast majority, most of them cannot make end meets with the current system, regardless of how hard they work on their book/song/game/etc, and they have to have a side job just to put food on the table.
> IP protection (even if often implemented in a suboptimal way which of course should be improved) have been one of the primaries force behind human progress over that last 300+ years.
That's a bold claim. Most of, if not all, human progress on this period is directly attributable to the use of fossil fuel, from the steam engine to the modern use of it, and how it empowered us to do so much more with less human-hour.
The alternative option would have meant that individuals would have had to spend significant amounts of time and resources to "invent" new products, and the only ones to profit would be the companies that had the capacity to manufacture them (while keeping all of the profits for themselves). Does that seem like an environment that's highly conducive to innovation?
> they did it because they needed a telephone,
There is a pretty extensive section named "The race to the patent office" on Graham Bell's Wikipedia page.
Do you think Watt would have successful at building his steam engine had there been no patents that allowed him to attract investors? Or he would have just spent all of his live working as an engineer or a surveyor because he couldn't have afford the significant capital required to develop the engine?
people invent stuff and put it out in the public domain every day, not everyone is a robber baron. look at youtube or hackaday one day, maybe you'll learn something.
The work necessary to properly answer this question is a team of 100+ domain experts working for at least 5 years. There's no way you're getting a good answer to this question in a comment thread on a website for programmers. Why even ask that question - what value do you expect out of the responses?
It is all fine and well to say "We should have public rail" but with out any idea of how it should be implemented and what it will take to get there, the idea falls flat on it's face. You have to be able to support it with funding increases and possibly eminent domain.
If you advocate for healthcare reform, great! So do I! And since you have no preference about how and what shape the reforms should take, you agree with me that we should abolish all health insurance companies! That would definitely reform the system but you might not like the outcome.
A large number of our current issues come from law and policy that was passed to address issues of the day with no understanding of how or why things were happening. Let's not continue that trend.
Why even make that argument in the first place then? It's the equivalent (following your logic) of saying that "it would be nice if we were living in an utopian society with no material scarcity" which doesn't mean much unless you can at least provide some explanation of how we should get there.
> The work necessary to properly answer this question is a team of 100+ domain experts working for at least 5 years.
I don't think we live in a video game where you can just spend "research points" to develop new economic systems that somehow magically improve economic productivity and solve complex socio-economical problems?
Making an argument doesn't require to describe every step to it, if I told you could use your GPS to navigate to work, you're not gonna ask me how to launch a satellite in space.
> It's the equivalent (following your logic) of saying that "it would be nice if we were living in an utopian society with no material scarcity"
Copyright have nothing to do with material scarcity, neither does UBI, that is about money, a man made social construct, not a material thing.
I would like eco-friendly flying cars to exist so that I could avoid traffic in the morning, I think that would solve all the mass transit and infrastructure problems in major cities.
No clue how to build one but I'm sure that 500 experts should be able to accomplish it if they really tried it. Until they do that nobody is allowed to question the validity of this universal solution to all transportation related problems that humanity is facing.
I keep hearing this, but I have yet to see one person truly live off of donations. Patreon is backed by expecting services in return, so most Patreons are definitely not donations.
It is probably possible, but only for people making funds that are already at points many would call "wealthy".
>we could pivot to UBI instead of dedicating ressource to enforce fake scarcity.
I'm all for UBI. But I don't even see that in much talks in the US, just a few tests by private companies (how very American). Might as well have short term ways to survive while just blueskying entire economic models.
Sure, same logic as "people steal when it's easy to do so"
>music piracy almost disappeared when convenient streaming services appeared
Too much to go into now, but Spotify is definately next on the list of enshittification. It's very easy to "end piracy" when your plan is to capture the market with unsustainable business models and clamp down later when money is tight.
>Make something as easy as pirating and people will pay for it.
We're kind of seeing that right now with Gamepass. And all that does is make me fear for the end of games preservation as we speak. But I suppose that's the market demand, so it is what it is.
We already saw what happened with the mobile scene with this. apps are essentially "free" so it's easier than piracy to jump in. I'm not sure if that's an ideal model either.
Also phones can emulate and there's some interesting homebrew they can thus run like micromages.
Would they still pay for it if all the content could be posted ( by 3rd parties ) on platforms like YouTube and viewed for free (besides the ad revenue which would be going to Google rather than to the author and/or companies that produced the content in the first place)? Of course that question doesn't make a lot of sense since most of that content wouldn't exist in the first place...
(I wasn't talk about piracy but rather responding to a comment advocating the total abolition of IP laws)
If in some hypothetical future you can't turn a profit because everyone is pirating it, these games will either:
1. stop existing
2. be lower quality
3. follow the steps of free mobile games - full of ads, microtransactions, etc.
Plenty of ways for artist to monetize. Selling a copy of the art is one way, very cherished by publishers. Creators for the most part don't make money off copy distribution of their art. That was the case with physical copies, still the case with online distribution.
The good old "let's protect the artists" is a fallacy. It's only to protect publishers and distributors. These IP laws, at least their interpretation acts against the public interest, creators included.
Other forms of monetisation of art? Performance, training and teaching, patronage, custom requests, etc.
Ask Taylor Swift where most of her money is coming from, that's not from Spotify.
>The good old "let's protect the artists" is a fallacy. It's only to protect publishers and distributors.
Who do you think is the first to be cut when publishers/distributors are low on money? It's not like they need that money to live. They can shut down the business and still retire comfortably.
>Ask Taylor Swift where most of her money is coming from
okay.
>Swift's income streams include revenue from her concert tour ticket sales, music catalog, streaming deals and record sales. She also owns numerous pricey properties across the U.S. Both Bloomberg and Forbes pin her net worth at an estimated $1.1 billion on the low end, based on analyses of her fortune.
so... either she's really good in real estate or she command enough power to get a fair cut from stuff 99.9% of artists barely get anything out of.
Never thought about comparing Swift to the typical music market but I was expecting something a little bit more surprising.
What a nonsensical, bad-faith, mis-representation of GP. At this point you might as well start talking about hot air balloons, another thing that wasn't mentioned in GP. If this is what you're going to be doing, you shouldn't be on this website at all. Your comments particularly stand out as always being on the wrong side of the conversation, no matter what point is brought up. It's obvious you just want to be a contrarian for no sake at all.
To be fair the same could be said about any comment in this thread advocating the complete abolition (as opposed to reform) of IP laws. Ofcourse, Maybe they are not directly "bad-faith", just not thought through at all and/or extremely ideological.
Can you elaborate? I haven't seen a single coherent logical argument explaining why why IP laws should be abolished (instead of reformed) in this entire thread and/or why and how would that benefit creators?
e.g. how many successful fiction authors don't make money off copy distribution of their "art"?
Regardless I don't see how is this a legitimate argument (even if it were accurate), authors/creators should be free to chose their monetization model themselves.
> These IP laws, at least their interpretation acts against the public interest, creators included.
On the whole I certainly don't agree at all (obviously the current system is not perfect and need to be improved. Also could you explain how exactly they act against creators interests?
> Performance, training and teaching, patronage, custom requests, etc.
Yes, let's go back to the middle ages when when you could only be an artist/writer/etc. if you found a rich patron willing to support you
If musicians can create and distribute their content on their own (for free) and sustain themselves entirely from donations and/or performances they are completely free to do that. What does that have to do with IP law?
Donations are exactly that, a rich patron willing to support you.
So you're basically getting upset over some made up reality where currently musicians don't need support from rich people, but that reality only exists in your head.
First I was never talking about musicians specifically, secondly modern (Patreon/etc.) style donation model is in my opinion overall much better that being dependent on a small number of rich donors. However that seems besides the point, authors/creators are free to chose how they distribute their content and what business model they want to adopt (obviously different models work better in different industries).
You are somehow implying that denying them that choice would improve something? Can you explain?
> like that's not the case today, which is either duplicitous or just naiive.
Really? Most successful authors are musicians are dependent on 1 or 2 individual patron? Not thousands or even millions of people willing to pay for their content (in some form)?
For instance, here's discussion about a blog post titled So you want to compete with or replace open source https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40993787
With no copyright, it would be akin to using permissive BSD-style licensing, which is by no means everyone's preference.
I presume you don't hold that IP is an obsolete idea of a bygone century, as ysofunny put it.
This argument extends to any purchased media, to any program.
I don't see much point in making the theoretical argument of "nothing is unhackable". The point of protection isn't to make some absolute defense, it's to mitigate low effort thieves. Any house can bypass a lock by using a cheap hammer on a window, but I'd still call a house lock a "lock".
I was thinking they were metaphorical.
Again: ianal. But this is kind of a fundamental right. If you own something, it's yours to do with privately as you wish. If you don't own the copyright, then you can't redistribute.
the issue at play here would be whether the emulator publishers/developers have the right to publish what is almost certainly an infringing piece of software, which courts have repeatedly determined they do not.
Adding in the DMCAs anti-circumvention provisions and the fact that you have to violate them to emulate a modern console, the whole thing becomes very nuanced and tightly linked to copyright infringement despite not directly infringing.
That merely explains why Nintendo doesn't like them, not why anyone should care that they don't like them.
Cars may be used to commit bank robberies, yet banks have no rights over cars.
I don't think it has been tested in courts yet but the general idea is that you have to violate the DMCA to use a switch emulator, so people making switch emulators are making tools to help people circumvent the switch's copy protection.
Which is also a violation of the DMCA.
Like I said, it is nuanced.
> Cars may be used to commit bank robberies, yet banks have no rights over cars
Sure, but if said car had specific bank-robbing help built in, like say some magic device that immediately opens a bank safe, then the bank probably could sue.
At least until Nintendo manages to overturn Sony v. Connectix, given recent SCOTUS trends.
Emulating a console that already exists just feels wrong. Even if technically in the right.
And it's hard to ignore, even when the emulator is in the right, 100% legal, 99.99% of people will simply be pirating their roms.
Nintendo: Put your games on steam. Let me buy them without killing the planet.
Apple: License your damn operating system for running on non-apple hardware. Hell, just let me legally run it in an virtual machine so I can test my scripts on your OS without killing the planet.
You are right about Apple though, simply allowing people to install their OS on other hardware for personal use would not impact their market strategy in any significant way.
[0] Which they could have sold as first-party PC accessories, further capitalizing on the PC market
you mean the success of a decade of unpaid labor which has the free time to reverse engineer and iterate on the tech with no regards for regulation, business demands, and a higher quality bar compared to some FOSS-ish tech?
I'd hope a forum like this would understand that the things and time you get for hobby projects is far different from working for a business. It couldn't work because Nintendo has a much larger target on its head for the tech being used compared to a small group of hackers with little to no money to sue for.
it's all C++, dude. Most of the time it's all based on engines that already run on Windows. So what are you telling me, programmers are unable to port minor amounts code over to a different, vastly more powerful architecture? This sounds like some sort of incompetence olympics.
You can run a Wii game on not a Wii. But if you're not standing in your living room with a Wii remote, then you're not playing the game as it was intended. You might have a shitty experience and that reflects badly on Nintendo.
Same for something like a DS. Yes, you can emulate a DS on something that is not "dual screen". But the form factor, dual screen, and stylus is integral to the game's experience.
Nintendo isn't like Microsoft or Sony. Thier games really lean into the hardware and rely on it, and it does genuinely allow for a unique experience.
To your parent; >Well if we're going to dive into morality, requiring me to produce additional pollution and e-waste to run your program when I have a perfectly capable turing machine already is unconscionable.
No one is requiring you to buy Apple OS or Nintendo games.
This is not obvious to me - I would be interested in reading more about the ethical considerations here, if you or anyone else has any good links.
- Apple has a report for the environmental impact of an iphone, 81% of the carbon emissions is from the production of the device [0]
- In addition to the whole global warming thing, there's the health impact [1].
So here I am, typing this message out on a perfectly capable universal turing machine. But in order to run <nintendo game> I have to incur that 81% carbon emissions again to buy a different universal turing machine from Nintendo. One that will, after a few years, get thrown into the back of a closet where it will accumulate dust until one day I haul it down to electronics recycling where it can continue its journey poisoning the children.
Its a simple matter of 1 device is less bad than 2.
[0] https://www.apple.com/environment/pdf/products/iphone/iPhone_13_PER_Sept2021.pdf
[1] https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/electronic-waste-(e-waste)The waste of all 150m Nintendo Switches in production isn't eve a fraction of the actual worst environmental impacts of current society.
>Nintendo: Put your games on steam.
Why is it only now that it's "consiousable" to tell a business how to operate? Especially in conjunction to yet another, private, business?
If I don't like a business or their model, I simply don't deal with them. As I have with Apple for all my life. Neither Nintendo nor Apple are monopolies in their respective markets.
You should be able to buy a switch compatible device from e.g. Asus if you're not satisfied with Nintendo's hardware. Tying media to the device is just as absurd as requiring Sony speakers to listen to music from artists that signed with them or requiring a Disney television to watch sports.
And I want Sony to not ignore its entire back catalog that made them successful in the first place instead of seeing one IP bomb and saying "well we have no IPs". But I don't have anymore control over that than you do.
Life is all about compromises. That's why multiple teams of ex-Sony devs chose to make their own IP instead of playing hardball with Sony
feelings aren't real, you can do whatever you want in this life! :)
There’s IP protections and then there’s whatever this is.
Even intimidating ROM sites out of existence only means they'll get distributed elsewhere. It's much harder to run an open source dev project in secret than it is to seed a huge library of ROMS over BT.
Why does the location of the company matter? They have branches in america and Europe even if it does somehow matter.
> should be dictating what I do or don't do with a cartridge or disc I paid for with my own money and which is in my possession
You can't ignore the entire idea of intellectual property just because you have a physical disc or cartridge in your possession. There are arguments to be made against IP but this is just lazy.