Nintendo secures RCM loader ban in the U.S.

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For anyone living in the United States, buying a RCM Loader just got much more difficult.

As you may have heard, Nintendo filed a lawsuit in November 2020 against Vietnamese resident Le Hoang Minh, who manufactured RCM Loaders and sold them on Amazon under the name "Winmart". This came after a DMCA takedown request from Nintendo, resulting in Amazon taking down his listings. Le disputed the request, allowing him to resume selling the devices. Nintendo called this an abuse of the DMCA's counternotification system, since Le lives in Vietnam, where any consequences for wrongly disputing DMCA takedowns are unenforceable. Due to this, Nintendo sought an injunction by a U.S. court. After the lawsuit was filed, Le did not respond to it, nor did Le enter discussions with Nintendo. This led Nintendo to seek a default judgment.

According to Nintendo, here is why the product is illegal:
Once this circumvention has occurred, the unauthorized CFW modifies the authorized Nintendo Switch operating system, thereby allowing users to obtain and play virtually any pirated game made for the Nintendo Switch. All of this happens without authorization or compensation to Nintendo or to any authorized game publishers
On April 15, 2021, the U.S. court to which Nintendo brought the case has ruled in favor of Nintendo's request for a default judgment. Any online store selling RCM Loaders is now prohibited from shipping them to the U.S.

Nintendo is seeking a total of $2,500 in damages (down from their original request for $2,500 per violation) in an effort to not drag the litigation out much longer:
This request for a $2,500 award is intended to be very conservative and does not reflect anything close to the full amount of damages Nintendo could reasonably seek from Defendant,” the company writes.

Nintendo could…credibly seek a separate award for every device Defendant sold — almost certainly many devices, given that Defendant’s RCM Loader device was available online for many months. However, rather than attempt to quantify Defendant’s total sales, Nintendo seeks to facilitate an efficient resolution of this case through entry of judgment awarding damages for a single § 1201 violation.
The injunction also applies to "any and all products, services, devices, components or parts thereof” that circumvent Nintendo's security measures. Does this mean that Le Hoang Minh (and anyone working with him) can't even sell paperclips?

:arrow: Source (courtesy of TorrentFreak)
 

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smf

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rather not say as idek how but more of the safety side of things but yeah the mods there know how to keep that site safe from prying eyes

My guess is that whatever they are doing to prevent lawyers signing up, is pointless.

Because AFAICT lawyers are just normal people.
 

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You can build your own rcm loader, you just don't start a business selling or commercializing a complete and fully functional device (plug n play)

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https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-circumvention

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Rcm Loaders is technically a dmca violation

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Screenshot_20210512-095043.png



Screenshot_20210512-094932.png
 
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Gep_Etto

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Rcm Loaders is technically a dmca violation

an RCM loader does not "descramble a scrambled work, decrypt an encrypted work, or otherwise avoid, bypass, remove, deactivate or impair a technological measure" which "requires the application of information, or a process or a treatment, with the authority of the copyright owner, to gain access to [a] work", unless the "work" in question is Horizon OS itself and not any other software that runs on it. And even then that's murky, because you need a payload to inject in order for the RCM loader to be of any use at all. Really, it's the payloads that break copyright, not the RCM loaders themselves.

The only way to make a case against RCM loaders is going by item B of your last screenshot (or C if the seller is a complete moron like the SX OS folks). And in my limited experience, it will depend a lot on whose bullshit the judge assigned to the case is more willing to swallow. Are RCM loaders used exclusively or almost exclusively to unlawfully gain access to games copyrighted by Nintendo? Or are there several legitimate uses for them¹, and is there a sufficient proportion of people using them for these legitimate activities so as to decharacterize item B? There are no statistics on this.

I assume that most courts will side with the copyright holder in cases like this, but that's just me.

¹like running homebrew apps, emulating games for old systems that have become abandonware (the concept of "abandonware" itself is shaky, since copyright in the USA lasts for 50 years after the authors death, which means that technically every piece of software ever written that can run on an x86 computer is still under copyright protection) or using ports of games for other platforms that require assets and/or code from the original in order to run (presumably meaning that the user owns a legitimate copy).
 
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an RCM loader does not "descramble a scrambled work, decrypt an encrypted work, or otherwise avoid, bypass, remove, deactivate or impair a technological measure" which "requires the application of information, or a process or a treatment, with the authority of the copyright owner, to gain access to [a] work", unless the "work" in question is Horizon OS itself and not any other software that runs on it. And even then that's murky, because you need a payload to inject in order for the RCM loader to be of any use


Any modifications or alterations to DRM and security protection provided, rcm loaders allows you to modify, alter, and bypass, DRM and software protections, the only reason people buy them is to run unlicensed code, with most just to pirate games, what else you gonna buy it for? Without the rcm loader your payload is useless.


Learn to build it yourself you won't have that issue
 
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Gep_Etto

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Without the rcm loader your payload is useless.

And without the payload, your RCM loader is useless. The code that actually alters anything in how the Switch boots, allowing you to run CFW and ultimately to install and run pirated content is present in the payloads, not in the loader. They're what is actually circumventing DRM. To make this extra obvious, there are several different ways to inject these payloads (RCM loaders, modchips, computers, smartphones, even some websites) but they all inject the same handful of payloads, because what matters is the payload being injected, not the method used to inject it.

This distinction is, of course, completely lost on our aging and not at all tech-savvy population of judges, but it does exist.
 
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And without the payload, your RCM loader is useless. The code that actually alters anything in how the Switch boots, allowing you to run CFW and ultimately to install and run pirated content is present in the payloads, not in the loader. They're what is actually circumventing DRM. To make this extra obvious, there are several different ways to inject these payloads (RCM loaders, modchips, computers, smartphones, even some websites) but they all inject the same handful of payloads, because what matters is the payload being injected, not the method used to inject it.

This distinction is, of course, completely lost on our aging and not at all tech-savvy population of judges, but it does exist.

You can't run the payload, without the rcm loader

Doesn't matter, it's specific goal is hardware/software circumventing

You can give any excuse, still it's circumvention

Payload is useless with out an rcm loader, so it's required, and is needed to circumvent drm, otherwise you could just boot cfw like I boot win/Linux on my pc

Even if you own the game, and just run homebrew, you still have to circumvent anti piracy and DRM measures put in place




In the United States, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (“DMCA”)has implemented the treaty provisions regarding the circumvention of some technological barriers to copying intellectual property. Section 103 (17 U.S.C Sec. 1201(a)(1)) of the DMCA states:

  • No person shall circumvent a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title.
The Act defines what it means in Section 1201(a)(3):

  • (3) As used in this subsection –
  • (A) to “circumvent a technological measure” means to descramble a scrambled work, to decrypt an encrypted work, or otherwise, to avoid, bypass, remove, deactivate, or impair a technological measure, without the authority of the copyright owner; and
  • (B) a technological measure “effectively controls access to a work” if the measure, in the ordinary course of its operation, requires the application of information, or a process or a treatment, with the authority of the copyright owner, to gain access to the work.
    Thus, if there is some “technological measure that effectively controls access to a work”, it is illegal to circumvent that measure. However, Section 1201 creates several exceptions to this rule, and the Library of Congress is empowered to create additional exceptions.


As you mentioned the rcm loader is required for your payload to work, so you can't run the payload unless you build it yourself


Ignorance of the law isn't an excuse when you're in court


The scene kinda brought the issue on itself, it moved from homebrew to Piracy,

It wasn't ever this bad, yeah a few instances here and there, but you can look at the previous gens, and the actual plethora of homebrew applications, games, and utilities

Now it's, mods, cheats, and roms

Smartphones are also to blame

Microsoft doesn't really care and they are worth 1 trillion, that's why their consoles also are much harder to hack, which will be patched quickly if you did, they've been around since 1975 and know what they are doing, and they'll probably give you a job if you hack the xbone


Sony actually is worth the same as Nintendo, they both just sue you, take your money, and have you sign a C&D
 
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Gep_Etto

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This has turned into a chicken and egg discussion. I say the loader is useless without the payload, you say the payload is useless without the loader, we quote the same text to back up our positions. The truth is both parts are necessary and the only reason Nintendo went after the RCM loader sellers and not the payload sellers is because nobody is selling payload files but lots of people are selling RCM loaders.
 

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