this post was submitted on 01 Oct 2024
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Emulation
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Since when is it illegal to dump games? I understand distributing them being illegal but this is my own hardware, if I wanna dump BotW to my Deck I'm gonna dump it
In the USA if you are circumventing some digital lock (encryption) in order to create the backup, it is illegal. The DMCA fucked us out of our rights to an archival copy.
If anyone knows from a more technical perspective - where exactly would the DRM breaking come into play?
I think I understand correctly that to take (for example) a Switch cartridge and pull out the game on it in a way that it could be playable on an emulator involves breaking DRM somehow.
But if that requires cracking or decrypting, shouldn't it also be possible to pull a copy of the protected software off the cartridge? And have an actual unmodified backup of the software that couldn't be played in an emulator without modification, but could still be read by the original hardware?
Isn't that exactly what copy protection is supposed to prevent? If you can read data from the cartridge and then put it on some other medium that still works in original hardware then what you've done is copied the game.
Well I guess that's what I'm asking. It has to be stored as data in some format. It should be possible to get that data and not be able to do anything useful with it. Unless the storage on the cartridge itself has some additional hardware that needs to be bypassed (which would be the breaking DRM part). Or I guess the cartridge itself has something separate from the software data that isn't easy to imitate with a cartridge of your own.
I haven't paid attention to the details of how copy protection works since the PSX, which put some information in a physical area of the disk that couldn't be read or written to by consumer hardware.
From what I understand the dmca backup issue only comes into play when it involves emulation, yeah, because you either need to reproduce the decryption mechanism or bypass it, and both could be argued to be “circumvention of encryption” which comes into play on the DMCA stuff.
As far as I know, that would be legal. It’s the circumventing of the encryption that’s problematic. I am not a law stylist though.