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by charcircuit 123 days ago
>there is an explicit carve-out in the Copyright Act to allow for backups of computer programs

But there is not a carve out for breaking DRM to do so. It's not the backup part that is the problem with dumping them. It's that these games are encrypted and decrypting them requires breaking the DRM scheme which is illegal.
1 comments
cyphar 123 days ago
There is a separate carve-out for breaking DRM for the purposes of "interoperability"[1], which (as far as I understand) is generally believed to include emulators.

I also disagree more broadly with the initial moral indignation over a perceived violation of copyright law -- legality and morality are two different things, copyright law is meant to be a balanced trade-off between the public and creators but modern copyright laws are a travesty. What ever happened to the hacker ethos behind DeCSS and the anti-"illegal numbers" movement?

[1]: https://www.austlii.edu.au/cgi-bin/viewdoc/au/legis/cth/cons...

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charcircuit 123 days ago
>will be done for the sole purpose of achieving interoperability

It's for solely achieving interoperability. It only covers the development of the emulator. Using it to get a picture for explaining what a game is in the blog post is not DRM being broken for solely achieving interoperability.

>What ever happened to the hacker ethos behind DeCSS and the anti-"illegal numbers" movement?

In practice the idea that you can't break laws if you are doing things via a computer is fundamentally flawed.

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