Just when I thought Nintendo was opening up with their App Store on the switch (which it seems has a … very liberal policy with regards to what they will accept)… they pull something like this 
Same old same old 
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I am just going to leave this here.
Basically, it is not illegal in the USA to rip media that you own for private or personal use. Key words are “Not Illegal” “Media that you own” and “Personal/Private use”.
It is considered copyright infringement to do so without expressed permission of the IP/Copyright holder. The IP holder then has the right to pursue you in the court of law.
Due to the DMCA, it is illegal to break any encryption or DRM in order to distribute said media but there is nothing the prohibits making a bit for bit perfect copy as a backup for personal use when you own the original. Remember the days of DeCSS and libdvdCSS? where it was illegal to watch DVDs that you owned on GNU/Linux because you were breaking DRM to do so?
One was illegal because it used a compromised key to decrypt and then play the DVDs. The other was a clean room reverse engineering of CSS and turned into a library that could be invoked by other applications to performed a bruteforce hack of all possible keys to decrypt the DVD. IE, you can make an iso of the disk with the DRM intact and decrypt parts of the bitstream on demand.
Maybe the event holders can get around the issue is they patch the code in flight instead of making a change to the actual disk image. It worked in libdvdcss’s case as there has not been any legal challenge in the USA that has held water.
Also, don’t give money to bad actors and don’t pirate their stuff. If no one is interested in their wares, they will either change or go out of business. It is really like the drug trade.
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Expecting all individuals in society to conform to a set of behaviors that eliminates an industry, even though enforcement of said behaviors (i.e., drug war) was proven to be an abysmal failure.
So if we’re going to compare this situation to the drug trade, Nintendo is essentially engaging in the DRM equivalent of a drug war. They’re not making the product available that they’re attempting to police the “illicit” use of.
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What about making the tournament underground? As in setting up streaming services through TOR and handling all transactions (entry fees, payouts for winners, etc.) in bitcoin? Nintendo can’t C&D an organization they can’t find.
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I doubt it, what makes the scene grow is the publicity, taking it underground would stifle the growth.
We will have to see what nintendo does about ludwig’s charity tourney
Correct if there is no DRM, if there is DRM you are bypassing copy protection thus breaking copyright law
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the way i like to look at this problem is the same as i look at mugen.
its legal to play legal to mod legal to edit. but not legal to sell.
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Feel free to look at it however you want but it doesn’t change the legality.
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I view speed limits as guidelines. Doesn’t change the fact that the officer is within his rights to give me a ticket for doing 70 in a 65, even though 70 is a perfectly safe speed.
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This just isn’t true though. There have been relatively few cases to test the law in either direction. Best case scenario you could say “it’s probably illegal” but saying anything in this front with any more certainty than that is unknowable at this point. (Also, it’s an oddly aggressive interpretation of the law that seems myth-based).
In either regard, US copyright law DOES distinguish between access controls and copy controls. DRM is too generic and definitely an incorrect statement. It is illegal to distribute tools to facilitate copy control circumvention, but it is not illegal to develop your own means to circumvent copy control. To reiterate, bypassing copy protection is DEFINITELY not illegal. That’s not something either side of the copyright fight are in dispute about…
That being said, there are a LOT of gray areas surounding expanded scope of activities. For example, US copyright law has generally been interpreted to allow format shifting. If one were to circumvent copy protection (legally) to format-shift media from Blu-ray to VHS (for personal use, discontinuing use of the original medium such that there’s only one copy being accessed) then how access controls are considered (i.e., now you could play the media on devices you previously couldn’t) hasn’t ever been tested in court. Because there’s a logical disconnect between the two rules it could be argued equally well for either side of that debate. Literally in this situation the case law will be developed by the circumstances of which judges happen to hear cases on the matter first.
As for whether Gamecube game DRM is considered access control which would make it illegal to play an ISO has also never been tested one way or another. It would be reasonable to interpret the law such that you were acting within the intent of the DMCA by making a personal iso of a game you own. I’m sure it’s also possible to develop an argument for why it’s not legal. But since neither of those arguments have been tested, it’s not okay to go saying blanket statements as you are in fact falling into the whole … “believe what you want, it doesn’t make it true”.
In summary:
1.) Nintendo is a shameless company and this is despicable and foolish.
2.) Copyright law is not as trivially simple as “bypassing DRM is illegal”
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That is not exactly black and white. What you are arguing normally applies to Software DRM. That does not exactly (through legal precedent) apply to physical DRM. IE if I put the disc in my PC and it is able to copy the disc with no hacks, that is legal (based off of precedent). In the case of SMASH, the anti-copy protection prevents you from playing a non-licensed disk in your game cube through physical means. There is nothing that needs to be done to the disc to play it in an emulator. That is where the grey area is with the case that we are talking about.
If they modify the code in flight, then they are not breaking DRM as they are not modifying the original image (which has no drm), they are modifying code in execution which is not [by precedent] illegal and becomes a platform ownership issue. Nintendo has the right to prevent you from running unapproved code on their manufactured device, but there is nothing that allows them to enforce that on another platform that you own as far as legality, except for enforcing their copyright; using this for a public tournament. Because the DRM is not in software, it is physical, and can be bypassed without using any code modification, the DMCA becomes shaky.
Does that make sense? I don’t know if that is really clear because the DMCA is very vague and actual legal precedent sometimes disagrees with the DMCA (unsurprisingly).
@mutation666 I am not disagreeing with you on the grounds that Nintendo has the right to do what they are doing, but what I am saying is that what is being argued here does not stand up in court. Nintendo HAS to defend their copyright or lose it but that does not make what the event organizers exactly illegal. Because this was a tournament and not a private use/fair use case, that is what Nintendo can pursue. Arguing that running an image that does not require breaking and DRM CODE on a device that Nintendo does not manufacture and does not own would not be breaking any law [per se due to precedent] and more than likely, Nintendo would lose that battle in court due to precedent.
But as I said before, stop supporting bad actors. There are many other fighting games makers that would welcome them with open arms. Nintendo has been pretty anti-consumer ever sense they stopped participating in the “Console Wars”. They have used litigation to cement the footholds that they have in the mobile space because that is the only profitable sector that they are actually dominating. Also they are exhibiting a pretty stubborn, old school Japanese, behavior.
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Wow that is so childish on Nintendo’s part.
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Indeed
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Leffen’s response to joycons and splatoon controversy
2020, the year of Nintendo’s meltdown? Hopefully they just go the way of Sega and get out of the hardware business.
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I fundimentally do not understand why people even expect any different from Nintendo at this point. It’s pretty clear they’re the epitome of a shit company, so why support them?
kills sacred cow and begins to make hamburgers in front of worshippers
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The consumers don’t really care about the competitive community.
Nintendo keeps gaslighting the competitive communities with the hope that the company has plans to support circuits, but when Nintendo runs/supports tournaments, the company consistently does the bare minimum to contribute. While performing the bare minimum, the company has demands for advertising as if they were contributing significant capital. In fact most they give is a $20 eshop gift card for first place.
As seen here
At this point the communities just want Nintendo to get out of the way and let communities host/broadcast their own tournaments without the worry the stream getting shut down