• pearsaltchocolatebar@discuss.online
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    21 days ago

    They’re not bogus. The emulator that shut down were selling a product using a proprietary encryption key owned by Nintendo.

    That’s why Dolphin still exists.

    • Sauerkraut@discuss.tchncs.de
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      21 days ago

      I disagree. Sure, companies have a moral right to recoup their R&D costs on a console, but I fully reject the Divine Right of Shareholders. As long as the emulators aren’t sold for profit and no one is hurt, a multibillion dollar company like Nintendo has zero moral ground to tell us that we cannot emulate consoles that we have bought to play games that we also bought.

    • denshi@discuss.tchncs.de
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      17 days ago

      IANAL, but from a EU-centric perspective on copyright (which is the only one I can reliably talk about) the idea of a proprietary encryption key is bogus. A creative work can be copyrighted if it has sufficient originality (or under some other very specific conditions). Smaller parts of such a work are not copyrighted if they don’t meet that criteria on their own. The encryption key (which is very probably randomly generated and definitely not a creative work) thus can’t be copyrighted on it’s own. At least in the EU, there should be no argument against sharing said key (at least in respect to copyright).

      I honestly can’t talk about other jurisdictions (maybe someone else here can) but I imagine it should be similar to this in many other countries.

      • pearsaltchocolatebar@discuss.online
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        17 days ago

        Sharing isn’t the issue. The emulator was profiting from it.

        If I copied your house key and sold it, would that be alright?

        For the record, I support emulation, but I don’t lie to myself that it’s morally defensible.

    • catsup@lemmy.one
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      20 days ago

      Proprietary encryption key

      What if the key was in a book? It would have to be protected by free-speech, which makes it uncensorable.

      What if the key contents were used as hex values to make a flag? Would you censor a flag too?

      No such thing as “proprietary encryption keys” exist.

      • pearsaltchocolatebar@discuss.online
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        20 days ago

        The key wasn’t used in a book or in the hex values for a flag. That’s like saying the formula for Coke can’t be proprietary because it could be put in a book.

        Software can absolutely be proprietary, and that key is part of the software.

        • AbsentBird@lemm.ee
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          20 days ago

          Fuck that and proprietary recipes too. It’s just a scheme to manufacture scarcity and grant everlasting monopolies on production.

          Both things should be in the public domain by now, the concept of century plus term copyright is a grift to own culture, they’re just going to keep extending it until companies can have permanent ownership of ideas.