Reminder for the 2 of you who haven't muted this thread. I noticed some users sharing the new Animal Crossing event in the form of BCAT files which are a big no-no. Full details are in the first post but basically they are treated like firmware updates.
So in the name of science I found myself looking at the animal crossing bcat files in my hex editor. 2.2kb compressed download covering all regions.
Directory consisted of a meta file describing the files (some ascii names, a whole load of 00 padding and what might be a hash, signature or checksum) and in another a few BCAT....number.region type files corresponding to the different regions.
The bcat file (measured in a few hundred bytes) contents were a header with the "do this event flag" in them and single plain ASCII start and end dates, times and what have you.
That would not reach a creative work threshold in any court case I have ever seen. There is no text (the name part was "mFlagName.BCAT_EventFlag_000" and not even a funny pun or something that might barely qualify in something somewhere, and if it is an unlock then even less likely to mean anything), no graphics, no audio, no gameplay design (a whole list of special times and dates, and maybe locations, perhaps would reach it similar to how the phonebooks count in some places). Not to mention the one I have is seemingly edited to be from 1999 to 2061 so the times would at very best be some kind of derived work.
In the absolute extreme then it is not pure ascii as the file say starts with 88A86D hex but that is hardly any more creative than using { instead of [ in your markup.
Now this is Nintendo (I saw them strike down a video for this game showing a duplication exploit where you spin a box with something on top it and grab at the right time with a second player, all within a stock game on a stock console) and people do like to play it safe (see policy here on sharing keys) but I can't get to calling these warez. I don't really see the functional difference between this and some of the save unlock stuff that we saw made when the DS online was ending, on an ini file.
Maybe some future game bcat files will have something but these I would say should be free and clear to share no different than how you might share a FAQ listing past events. If this is some kind of infringement then so is a cheat to unlock it, and probably the alternative guides people were linking.
