I thought I had the right to use circumvention procedures to back up my own games. If I own game and run it on an emulator with a firmware extracted from my device, what law am I breaking?
That's why Nintendo usually tries to avoid going to court for emulators unlike when they sued for the R4 cartridge for example, they are afraid of the result.
In the past, Nintendo tried using their trademark as a watchdog -- the console would reboot if the game did not display it at startup -- then sued unlicensed games for trademark violation. The courts ruled the trademark was purely functional in that use case, and not a trademark, then ruled against Nintendo.
I imagine a similar ruling, if the defense is: The user has a valid key, and a copy of the media. Any circumvention happened before that point in time. We're simply building a compatible device.
Of course, I'm not a lawyer, and the DMCA is a terribly designed law.
That was Sega v Accolade [1]. Although Nintendo also uses boot time trademarks, I don't think they sued over them.
It also wasn't protecting the games from being copied. It was protecting Nintendo (actually Sega) from competition from other people making their own games. The Nintendo Game Boy uses the same technique.
This is not true, Switch emulators can also run unencrypted games / programs if you provide one.
Games are usually shared encrypted, that's true, but that's just a custom, not something required by the emulator.
GitHub also has the right (responsibility, some say) to pre-emptively take down anything Nintendo complains about from their platform and optionally ask questions later.
It's baffling how these projects keep choosing Microsoft as their host.
Congress has now illegally approved copyright theft of millions of works from small authors, EVEN where everything was illegal about it, down to the torrent client used to get the works in the first place. Oh and this was illegal for Congress too, you see, just about the only thing Congress isn't allowed to do is to change the law retroactively (OpenAI, Meta, Google violated the law BEFORE congress made it legal. So that doesn't matter according to the law. A lot of states even created criminal responsibility for copyright violations. Do these companies or CEOs get convicted for that? No, of course not). But to protection billionaires congress gladly ignores the law (yes, technically congress didn't do anything, the "copyright office" did, but it's a part of congress and you can bet your firstborn if 10 congresscritters disagreed with the font the decision is published in they would have changed it immediately)
Even courts do it. They make up equally absurd justifications. I mean, in order to protect the billionaire AI labs from software engineers claiming copyright they have now declared AI models persons [1]. The reasoning is that because if they are not persons they cannot create a copyright, and so cannot give it to customers, in other words: AI labs would have nothing to sell. You wouldn't be legally allowed to use AI outputs, as they would be owned by the people the model learned from. What do you think the odds are that AI models will now be treated as persons when it doesn't benefit billionaires? I believe we have found the first example of odds bigger than 100%.
Congress does NOT apply copyright used against billionaires, but it does apply when billionaires sue 9 year olds with download software, without proof even, in most cases. 9 year olds get threatened with 2 months prison plus 300,000 PER INFRACTION, billionaires get to violate the law. Oh, and by the way, the EU commission has, separately, agreed with this way of doing things over the objection of German courts (the EU AI directive, like any other directive, comes from the commission. They had the good manners to let parliament vote on it, but is there anyone who doesn't remember what happens when parliament votes against it, say, something like "Chat Control" for example?)
And this is after copyright violation was made criminal in many places. The CEOs of these companies have admitted to hundreds of millions of copyright violations, so at 3 months per violation ... even if they were the first human ever to evolve they would still not even have 1% of their prison sentence served if the punishments applied to normal people were applied to them, as the law clearly dictates.
Fundamentally, Anthropic and OpenAI (and Google and Facebook and ...) are based on massive violations of copyright. If any of these companies were held liable to the standards courts hold 9 year olds, their billions wouldn't be enough to protect them from bankruptcy (violating millions of works at hundreds of thousands per work adds up fast).
Can someone explain to me how I get to do that? If I can violate the law millions of times making up a billion dollar company is trivial, for obvious reasons. How do I get courts and congress to find technicalities to never hold me responsible. Because under the deal Sam Altman, Larry Page, Elon Musk and Dario Amodei get from courts and congress, and even from the EU, anyone can become a billionaire ... Just make the Netflix everyone wants for starters, and I have zero problems coming up with 100 more ideas.
[1] https://www.courthousenews.com/coders-lose-appeal-in-copyrig...
[IANAL] The Constitution prohibits ex post facto laws which retroactively criminalize (or increase criminal penalties of) past legal conduct. This does not apply to civil penalties, and does not apply to reductions in criminal penalties or decriminalization.
Your citation says no such thing. Maybe there’s more in the case itself (in which case, cite it), but I think you’re inferring that based on what I think is an incorrect understanding of what’s going on, also revealed in the rest of the paragraph.
(I’m not commenting on other parts of the comment directly, though I feel not identifying the “‘fair use’ exemption” claim or reacting to that in such a long tirade is a bit off.)
It cannot even be a company according to the law (because copyright is split up in my textbook into what's called natural rights, such as authorship, and economic rights, such as the right to set a license. It must always have a natural person origin because that natural person retains the right to state they were the author forever, no matter what agreements he or she entered into. Meaning it's never the employer that gets that right)
https://www.copyright.gov/ai/Copyright-and-Artificial-Intell...
See IV. Fair use, D. Factor Four
In other words, no matter the license, the fact that OpenAIs fair use of the works for training MIGHT take opportunities from the plaintiffs should, BY ITSELF, be an argument to make that AI training illegal. Even if the software programmers agreed to allow AI training, then still sued OpenAI, that is a valid argument accepted from billionaire companies.
In case you're wondering how the court argued that in this decision? It didn't. Not covered at all. Obviously brought up by the plaintiffs, not adressed. The weirdest pro-billionaire arguments are just accepted by the court (the big one is accepting AI models as making new works despite the copyright act clearly stating, 50+ times, only "natural persons" can make new works), and the most reasonable, long established principles, such as market harm (if the use of a copyrighted work harms its authors in the smallest way, even lost sales, even lost job opportunities, lost licensing opportunities, ...) is enough to forbid it's use EVEN WHERE THE LICENSE STATES DIFFERENTLY.
This was required because they wanted to forbid digital lending out of Disney's movies, where the lending software would guarantee that only one copy is actually in circulation (ie. use of DRM to let a library just show a movie without the patron coming to the library to get it). In other words: when billionaires want to make money of works, and the first sale doctrine as well as long standing fair use principles for libraries were in the way, the courts declared that market harm superseded fair use. And, of course, suddenly, when it protects programmers from billionaires, it doesn't apply anymore.
The courts deciding this way has done incredible damage to the availability of older works, to the point of destroying them entirely, since libraries cannot legally keep collections of older works and make those available over the internet, and it is impossible to keep the physical media in working condition and available over a large area, like the united states, for example.
Repeating theme here: absurd arguments to protect billionaire profits, silently rejecting and ignoring reasonable arguments to protect normal people.
I mean if it trained on open source, you'd expect it to always come up with Quake essentially. That's not true at all. It's always very close to Call Of Duty in how they play.
Very hard to believe in coincidences.
90% sure Anthropic did just that.
If someone writes a really great Harry Potter (or whatever other character) book that you wind up really liking and you give them a buck for it, but then some faceless corporation yanks it out of your hands and throws them into prison because they weren't the original Harry Potter author, what has society really gained by doing that? Seems like we just put a guy in prison and burned that book that you liked for basically no reason.
We have the sum of all human knowledge at our fingertips thanks to the digitization of academia. Great! Huge positive for society, we should be in a golden age where anyone can learn anything they want to, but we're not because some guy in a suit says you owe him a million dollars to get access to the journal some paper was published in (a paper which was made by someone unrelated to the suit on your tax payer dime). Unbelievable, debatably apocalyptic net negative for society.
Nintendo doing this is just more of the same again. It won't ever stop until the law is fixed to fight for you and me instead of being used to kill people like Aaron.