• 2 Posts
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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 14th, 2023

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  • Trademarks have to be enforced or they can be lost, so it makes sense to be overbroad about them. You say you could have fought it but that doesn’t mean you were legally in the right.

    In this case, everything on their site is legal and above board.

    Admittedly, Nintendo doesn’t care if what you’re doing is legal if it could cut into sales of current systems, games, or merchandise - they’ll issue takedowns regardless. That’s why videos of people demoing the MIG Switch got taken down for copyright infringement, for example. But given that every system this can extract games from already has its entire library available online in the form of pirated ROMs, getting it taken down won’t do anything for their bottom line.

    In fact, Nintendo taking legal action against products like this would encourage piracy of their games. If a consumer wants a backup of their physical game cartridge library and the tools to create such backups are made unavailable or harder to access due to Nintendo’s actions, that consumer is likely to simply download the ROMs instead. That’s already piracy, and it’s only a few clicks more for the user to download ROMs for games they don’t own (and if you’re already legally a pirate, that line in the sand is awfully faint). And sites that host ROMs for the Gameboy Advance probably host ROMs for newer systems, too - including the ones that Nintendo actually cares about - so it’s in Nintendo’s best interest not to push those consumers in their direction.





  • If you’re talking about tomatoes, the difference is the context, and it isn’t a choice between colloquial vs scientific taxonomy, but between culinary/nutritional vs botany/taxonomy (and). You can talk about either in a colloquial context or a formal context, though generally there isn’t much reason to talk about botany in a colloquial setting.

    From a nutritional perspective, mushrooms are generally considered vegetables, too.

    afaik vegetable is a purely colloquial term anyway.

    I thought you were wrong but I looked it up and I appear to have been mistaken. It makes “tomatoes are fruits, not vegetables” sound nonsensical, as it implies that “vegetable” is a different taxonomical option, when really it’s just a word for objects with a particular collection of traits that are relevant in a different context. What we should he saying is “While tomatoes are not fruit in the food pyramid, taxonomically, they are.” Doesn’t really roll off the tongue, though. Maybe “Tomatoes are vegetables AND fruits!” would solve that?





  • I made a typo in my original question: I was afraid of taking the services offline, not online.

    Gotcha, that makes more sense.

    If you try to run the reverse proxy on the same server and port that an existing service is using (e.g., port 80), then you’ll run into issues. You could also run into conflicts with the ports the services themselves use. Likewise if you use the same outbound port from your router. But IME those issues will mostly stop the new services from starting - you’d have to stop the services or restart your machine for the new service to have a chance to grab the ports while they were unused. Otherwise I can’t think of any issues.


  • I’m afraid that when I install a reverse proxy, it’ll take my other stuff online and causes me various headaches that I’m not really in the headspace for at the moment.

    If you don’t configure your other services in the reverse proxy then you have nothing to worry about. I don’t know of any proxy that auto discovers services and routes to them by default. (Traefik does something like this with Docker services, but they need Docker labels and to be on the same Docker network as Traefik, and you’re the one configuring both of those things.)

    Are you running this on your local network? If so, then unless you forward a port to your server on the port your reverse proxy is serving from, it’ll only be accessible from the local network. This means you can either keep it that way (and VPN in to access it) or test it by connecting directly to your server on that port and confirm that it’s working as expected before forwarding the port.


  • It doesn’t matter if it’s emulated legally or not. They can issue a takedown for showing gameplay captured from an NES hooked up to a CRT if they want.

    A fair use defense has to be defended in court, and it’s not just about whether you’re right but also about whether you can afford to fight.

    It’s also not certain that a fair use defense would fly. One of the elements for determining whether fair use is market impact, and I suspect that Nintendo’s lawyers would argue that demoing that their games can be emulated - even if the specific demoed games are not being sold - has a negative market impact, since it makes people who might buy a Switch and a Nintendo Online membership to play the official emulated games less likely to do so.


  • Fun Fact: If you were to rip a Bluray to your computer, you’re legally not permitted to watch that movie if you’re no longer in possession of the disc.

    Not sure why you think this.

    You can legally rip a Bluray for backup purposes. If you sell or give away the Bluray, you have to delete the backed up copy. If it’s lost, stolen, or unintentionally damaged, you do not.

    However, you cannot bypass the DRM to watch it or when you’re creating the backup. This is true regardless of whether you still possess the physical disc.

    Decrypting DRM is illegal not based on whether you own the content but because the DRM encryption itself is separately copyright protected.

    Bypassing DRM is illegal because the DMCA explicitly prohibits the circumvention of technological measures that control access to copyrighted works, and there isn’t an exemption for personal use, personal backups, or fair use in general.




  • That makes sense, and that engine and some of the other games they feature look interesting.

    Does that mean that Balatro (and presumably other LOVE 2D games) is packaged like Doom with its WAD files, where there’s an engine (a generic LOVE 2D one) that runs the game, interpreting the Lua game code, which is basically just packaged like an asset? Or is there a Balatro engine that needed to be built for each platform? I saw that BMM downloads a base IPA and an APK patcher, so I’m assuming it’s closer to the latter, but I could see it going either way.