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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: April 12th, 2024

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  • The problem is that the DMCA is a flawed piece of legislature that hamstrings fair use in a couple of really key ways.

    Obligatory IANAL, but my read on the (admittedly very legalese) section 1201 (https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/1201) is that it lists a very few exemptions for what is allowable under the DMCA with regard to bypassing copyright protection mechanisms, and archival copies of personal media are not in that list of exemptions. Archival use of computer programs is covered under section 117 (https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/117) and it allows you to make a bit-by-bit copy of your media for archiving it. It doesn’t allow you to bypass copyright protection mechanisms that exist on that content.

    So, you’d be protected if you were making a 1:1 exact cloned (and therefore, encrypted) copy of your switch game. Any action to decrypt that switch game (because the encryption is explicitly a copyright protection mechanism) would be a violation, whether it be you doing it manually with a tool, or an emulator doing it on your behalf. If you move that violation outside of the emulator, I would think that based on how the law is written they’d have to find some other way you were violating the DMCA with the emulator specifically in order to target it.

    Ultimately, I think the reason it’s illegal is because the DMCA is corpo crap that has been bastardized several times over to reduce consumer rights, but the lawyers seem to wield section 1201 as the silver bullet.


  • Emulation is legal but emulators that circumvent the DMCA in order to function are not. Yuzu and Ryujinx both decrypt encrypted Switch content using prod keys and title keys in order to execute it. The act of decrypting switch games in real-time using those keys is a violation of DMCA and is illegal (in countries that care about the DMCA anyhow). Having code in your emulator that CAN decrypt the Switch content can be viewed as a DMCA violation as well, even if it also supports unencrypted content.

    Based on that, it seems like all we need is for Ryujinx/Yuzu/some other switch emulator that hasn’t yet been sued by Nintendo to be built in a way that it requires decrypted copies of the software and they could then argue that the person who violated the DMCA was the person who released the decryption tool or the teams that release decrypted versions of switch software.

    Seems like if the developers remove the need for the emulator to use prod keys or title keys and they can remove the primary DMCA violation that is being weaponized against these emulators.


  • I want it treated like every other murder in New York. I want the police to spend 5 minutes pretending to look for the perpetrator, shrug their shoulders, say “nothing could be done, thoughts and prayers”, then throw this into the perpetually growing pile of unsolved murders and move on with their day.

    That’s what they do when anyone else in the city or state is murdered, this guy doesn’t deserve special attention. If they want to solve murders they should solve every murder, not just the billionaire’s murder.








  • On top of that, one of the biggest problems with climate change is that us as individual citizens have absolutely no control over it no matter how many people try and guilt us into taking action.

    No amount of individuals recycling, driving less or with a more efficient vehicle or with an electric car, or drinking less water is going to change the fact that container ships, factories, manufacturing facilities, cruise ships, private jets, etc. belch more pollutants into the atmosphere by so many orders of magnitude that anything we can do as individuals is completely and utterly inconsequential in comparison.

    Me recycling my plastic doesn’t mean shit and it never will. Same with me driving an electric car vs. a gas powered car, hell even me driving a car with good fuel economy vs one that has bad fuel economy. Cargo shipping is responsible for more than 20% of the greenhouse gas emissions in the world while passenger automobiles are responsible for 5%-7% at most based on recent estimates. If every single person in the world stopped driving fossil-fuel powered cars and moved entirely to renewable fuel sources for their transportation, it would still be a drop in the bucket – and that’s never going to happen.

    But the media keeps pointing the shotgun at everyday citizens like it’s our fault that cruise ships belch shit into the atmosphere when we haven’t been on a cruise in 10 years, or it’s our fault that the shipping industry refuses to use more ecological and eco-friendly fuel sources.

    Tell me more about how me as a single person recycling is gonna save the world, lol.



  • I think it’s stupid as hell for Square to have not released this on PC at the same time as they did on PS5, locking to a single console is a poor choice especially when that console is as expensive as the PS5 is and has as few exclusives as the PS5 does.

    With that in mind though, “a single game” is somewhat of a misnomer. The original FF7 took about 40 hours to play from start to finish, and about 80 hours if you wanted to really 100% everything. FF7 Remake took about 40 hours to play from start to finish, and about 80 hours if you want to really 100% everything.

    Is the root of your concern that you’re paying too much for too little gameplay? Considering rebirth takes about 50-60 hours to beat and ~80-100 hours to 100%, I don’t understand the criticism.

    If the answer is that you expected over 100 hours of base gameplay for $70, the problem isn’t with Square-Enix, imo. That’s before taking however long the 3rd game takes to beat into account, as well (which according to the devs is going to be at minimum the same length as rebirth – bringing it to over 150 hours of base gameplay for the trilogy.) I think expecting 150 hours of base gameplay in a single purchase for a story-driven JRPG is unrealistic. The only JRPGs that come close would be Disgaea and Persona 5 Royal, and I’d argue that the production costs on both of those are significantly lower because of their art style and the way that story is presented in both.

    That said, on flip side, the joy of these games eventually coming out on PC means if you wait long enough, you’ll be able to get all 3 and DLC for like $50 total, so there are options for everyone.