Copy protection has historically been a legal gray area in many cases, and still is. Generally, it works by encrypting the contents of a work (software, movies, what have ya) and decrypting it at runtime.

Decryption keys would need to be distributed with the copy circumvention tooling, but cryptographic keys don’t very clearly fall under copyright law; usually encryption keys are random data and not human works. That’s why the Wii Common Key is readily available The protection schemes themselves are also obviously not copyrightable; you can’t copyright a method. And, since most of the time they’re just based on standardized cryptographic schemes, none of this is patentable.

Obviously, circumventing copy protection and distributing the copyrighted work it protects is totally illegal, but there are legal reasons to copy a work for personal use (e.g. emulation of computer systems), so the protection itself is sometimes legal to circumvent.

But like, is copy protection intellectual property? A particular implementation of it is copyrighted, but if you reverse engineer it and replicate its functionality, is that somehow infringing on its Copyright?

Apple has previously tried to create a copy protection scheme that required copyright infringement to circumvent. They did this by embedding a haiku into the firmware of their devices, which macOS will verify exists at boot. A haiku is a creative work, and therefore protected by copyright.

“our hard work
by these words guarded
please dont steal
(c) Apple Computer Inc”

they lost when it was tried in court lol

@sodiboo this is specifically the court laughing off apple trying to seal that information which was publicly known at the time

unfortunately we are now in a post-DMCA 230 world

@sodiboo this is more or less what the DMCA is for, one of its key "features" is prohibiting "circumvention of technological measures used to secure electronic works"
fwiw it doesn't even matter how strong said measures are, any semblant of a digital lock triggers anti-circumvention which makes breaking DRM an illegal act in itself, modulo exceptions granted for things like jailbreaking
as far as cryptographic secrets are concerned, attempts have been made to argue that they are circumvention tools in order to hinder their distribution

@novenary @sodiboo raccording to german raccourts a hard raccoded password sent to racclients is effective user authentication

@novenary @sodiboo if you discover the raccredential and check what is behind it you are the one getting locked up for hacking charges

@sodiboo this isn't the first time something like this was tried either
famously, sega did it with the genesis in the 90s and lost the case
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sega_v._Accolade

@charlotte @sodiboo german law is so full of contradictions in this area, it's pretty sad

@novenary @sodiboo you have a bunch of out of touch judges and big raccorpos got lawyers that can racconvince judges of bullshit like that

thankfully precedence isn’t basically the law here so a different raccourt can go > no this is stupid that’s on you

@charlotte @sodiboo reminds me of that small time US politician who tried to sue security researchers for disclosing that their website was leaking private information... in HTML comments

@sodiboo the “wii common code flag”, huh? I prefer calling it the dolphin pride flag…

@sodiboo and then apple released the M1 series macs using ARM processors instead of x86 ones rendering any attempts at making hackintoshes or macOS VMs increasingly futile until they drop the last version of macOS that runs on the old x86-based macs, the end.

@sodiboo your description isn’t the whole story: before this string, there was a stolen from apple icon, which got introduced into the Macintosh ROM, drawn by a hidden routine and scrambled so it’s not easy to find. It got introduced because a few years prior another company cloned the Apple ][ and commercially released it, including ripping off their ROM. Apple fought them in court and eventually won, but wanted to ensure this doesn’t happen again in the future. The article I linked talks about this in way more detail; the comments are also a great read

@sodiboo if you directly use the reverse engineered code to reimplement it’s functionality, it’s infringement. however, there’s a reason clean-room design exists :3

@sodiboo i can't say this with 100% certainty but i'm pretty sure i'm the first one who made a flag like this (ofc it was based off of the previously existing AACS key flag)

i remember uploading it to fedi awhile ago (probably on my yiff life account), and the file date indicates as such

i think this was right after dolphin got rejected from steam, in which the talk of the time was it was because of the common key

@sodiboo oh hey i found the post

https://yiff.life/@EeveeEuphoria/110440593990172523

@sodiboo Isn‘t this how copy protection on the Game Boy worked? Each cart has the Nintendo logo in the header and this is what is displayed when you turn on the device. The rest of the rom won‘t boot if the logo on the rom doesn‘t match a version stored on the device. In order to make a bootleg you must include the Nintendo logo and therefore commit a copyright violation. Also, doubles as error check

@sodiboo the fact that it was the psystar thing that tested that is so funny

@sodiboo copyright and patent law in the digital age makes no sense

@sodiboo lmao Nintendo pride flag

@sodiboo this isn’t even a haiku