this post was submitted on 28 Feb 2024
356 points (97.8% liked)
Technology
59398 readers
2548 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Yes there is, you could press it and put in a cocktail !
Seriously though you can very legaly copy the bios from your own officially bought switch, copy your legaly bought cartridge, and use them to play the emulator. All of which is legal, just like you could buy spare parts and build your own switch, and copy the bios from a legaly bought one. I'm not going to pretend people do that, but it is possible to use it in a legal manner.
Nintendo is taking a new approach to this one, claiming it's a copyright protection circumvention product. There isn't any precedent for this yet, and it isn't protected by the interoperability exception in the DMCA.
This is actually a very scary and very important one to follow, and if Nintendo can successfully convince a judge that the primary purpose of emulators like Yuzu (which decrypt games on the fly) is circumvention, it's going to open the floodgates against emulators for any systems newer than the PS2.
How possible would it be, if this lawsuit does work, that yuzu devs could remove the decryption portion of the code and only work on pre-decrypted roms?
I don't have enough knowledge about the exact technical details behind the Switch's DRM, so I can't really say. Modern DRM involves multiple layers of cryptography, which makes it difficult to reason around unless you know exactly how it works.
If they win this one, I guarantee that workaround won't be feasible for future consoles. Nintendo could simply make on-the-fly ROM decryption part of the Switch 2/3 firmware to make it impossible to fully decrypt without actually running the game.