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kmeisthaxtoday at 3:45 PM1 replyview on HN

Yes, we all know it, but good luck finding a jurisdiction that will agree with you on this.

One of the more galling aspects of the inevitable US-NATO[0] trade war is the fact that nobody is willing to reevaluate the legal underpinnings of US tech hegemony - namely, copyright and anticircumvention law. All the proposals for sovereign tech are really just "let's build more AI data centers". People like Cory Doctorow who have the actual way to play hardball with Trump - "let's get rid of anticircumvention and declare open season on AppleMobileFileIntegrity.kext" are sidelined as "IP thieves". Hell, even the Stop Killing Games people got brushed off by the European Commission with an excuse almost like "we can't mandate your game purchases work offline, that'd be stealing".

The reason for this is pretty straightforward: the moves done in the 90s to ensure digital purchases meant no ownership were as much a product of Europe as it was the US. Actually, the vast majority of international copyright law is actually a European invention, and the US was the last holdout on things like copyright registration and fixed (as opposed to life-plus) terms. Europe spent centuries binding the world to the most extreme version of copyright imaginable, specifically to ensure developing countries would never be able to actually economically develop.

Every country that has economically developed itself does so through a subsidy of IP theft. The Industrial Revolution was owned by England but stolen by America; and America itself wound up being stolen from by China, Japan, and South Korea. Economic development is not a game you win by playing by the rules, because the rules are designed to keep the winners on top. The entire debate over games preservation and ownership is downstream of the fact that the big American and European cultural industries are not financially viable without you renting your culture.

The reason why the fight has focused on physical vs. digital is that it's the one battle we've been somewhat victorious on. Physical ownership has generally been treated as sacred: Microsoft tried using the Xbox One launch as a way to massively restrict discs, and it created a backlash so large Xbox never actually recovered from it. Sony in contrast had to boil the frog[1], and Nintendo wound up doing so more or less by accident[2]. And when game consoles have problems loading physical discs, it's still treated by console manufacturers as a bug rather than a feature.

[0] In practice, the US vs. all of it's allies, including non-NATO ones.

[1] They were clearly intending to kill off discs with the PS5, just from the industrial design alone, but didn't actually do it until mid-cycle when everyone's actually bought their consoles and thus the impact would be minimized.

[2] It has been Nintendo policy since the 3DS to ban anyone who goes online with a duplicate cartridge ID. I don't think this was intended to poison the used market, but once cheap Switch flashcarts and means to clone cartridges became available, it absolutely did. The people using 3DS homebrew to load pirated games at least had to know what "public headers" meant in order to avoid getting banned.


Replies

inigyoutoday at 3:59 PM

Circumvention is, in practice, legal as long as you don't get caught. Nothing except your own patience stops you from REing Apple's kexts right now. Or taking an always-online single player game and making it work offline. I suggest you don't publish the results on your own website, but find a group that specialises in hosting politically sensitive material.