Is it legal to extract digital game copies from a game console to emulate/backup/mod the game? I have a Nintendo Switch with some digital games installed on it. I want to extract, decrypt, mod and play the games on my PC using an open-source emulator, while still being able to play them on my Switch (when nobody is using my PC). This is not to publish/distribute the games (which I know is illegal), just for personal use.
There's a big difference between the two things Physical media backups These are legal. If you own, say, an NES cartridge of Super Mario Bros., then it is generally considered legal for you to download the software into a ROM and play it on an emulator elsewhere. The DMCA permits you to make backup copies of software (emphasis mine) Copyright law permits you to make one copy of your computer software for the purpose of archiving the software in case it is damaged or lost. In order to make a copy, you must own a valid copy of the software and must destroy or transfer your backup copy if you ever decide to sell, transfer or give away your original valid copy. It is not legal to sell a backup copy of software unless you are selling it along with the original. Nintendo Switch Online The largest problem with making a copy of the NSO ROM is you don't own any physical media. And per the Nintendo Account Terms of Service Subject to the terms of this Agreement, Nintendo grants you a non-exclusive, non-transferable, revocable license to use the Nintendo Account Services solely for your personal and non commercial use. You are not allowed to lease, rent, sublicense, publish, copy, modify, adapt, translate, reverse engineer, decompile or disassemble all or any portion of the Nintendo Account Services without Nintendo's written consent, or unless otherwise expressly permitted by applicable law. And later As part of the Nintendo Account Services, Nintendo or third parties may make certain digital content or items available to you (&quot;Digital Items&quot;). If you buy or acquire any Digital Items, you obtain a limited license (as set forth in Section 2) to use such Digital Items in connection with the Nintendo Account Services. Other than this limited license, you have no right or title in or to Digital Items. In other words, you're paying Nintendo a subscription fee to access a copy of the game they will provide. If you stop paying, the license to play it goes away. In general, it is not legal for you to copy software you have no direct ownership of.
TLDR: it's illegal to BUY it. It's illegal to USE it. Know your suppliers. That's certainly an interesting question, in light of how the market has changed in recent years, particularly due to Amazon/eBay, but even moreso due to Amazon Fulfillment and competitors. Over on diy.se, this is a constant vexation, because we see people buy crud like this all the time, and they need help installing it. And we find it's illegal to install, not even safe, and needs to be sent back in lieu of listed product. The advanced nations do have a highly effective apparatus for screening and blocking dangerous goods. However, these protections are geared toward bricks-and-mortar retail. Can you count on something bought at Wickes, Redoute or Home Depot? By and large, yes. Is it legal to export it to you? Yes, for all practical purposes. The people selling it are in an unreachable bastion in a foreign country that would not cooperate with their extradition, and would interfere with investigation. The government knows perfectly well that the stuff is complete crud, and doing so aligns with its national policies of raising hard currency and building industrial capacity, while harming the capacity of other nations. Is it legal for the item to be listed on Amazon or eBay? Amazon and eBay say &quot;Yes&quot;. Their position is that they are merely a platform which connects buyers and sellers. They surely have excellent lawyers. Amazon is more like eBay than you might realize. Amazon opened their retail site to third party sellers. Third parties can sign up as additional sellers of a particular SKU, or write their own product listings. Since Amazon's behavior has been unchallenged, the answer seems to be &quot;yes&quot;. Is it legal for Amazon to bring it into their warehousing systems? Amazon also opened their warehousing system to third party use. That can be for companies that don't sell on Amazon... or it can be for companies that do both Amazon and off-Amazon sales; in the latter case you order elsewhere but Amazon fulfills (ships) the item. When a company both sells the item on Amazon and it ships from an Amazon warehouse, it qualifies for &quot;Prime&quot; shipping where Amazon offers that. Amazon also offers &quot;Commingling&quot; for established SKUs. The idea is that if you have widgets in the Madrid warehouse, and I have widgets in a Warsaw warehouse... and a Madrid customer buys mine - why not ship them yours since they are all the same? I get credit for the sale and Amazon &quot;owes you one&quot;. When you get a sale in Madrid, Amazon has one in Barcelona so they ship that one to your customer. Commingling is great, but what happens when I inject a pallet full of those SKUs - and they're counterfeits? Amazon doesn't know the difference, and your Warsaw customer gets my counterfeit. So do Amazon's Berlin and Wroclaw customers. Amazon ships them around the network to balance the warehouses, and now my counterfeit has contaminated the supply. I'm sitting in China. Whatcha gonna do about it? Again, Amazon has top lawyers, who have surely done their diligence. Still, the program is ambitious, and e-commerce giants break the law all the time with their ambitions. In the US, there's the &quot;Express Shipment&quot; rule, which allows small orders ($800 or less) with no duty and an informal entry process. So they ship to Mexican warehouses, and then bring the items over by the truckload. Wait, how can a truckload be less than $800? Because they don't bring it over until there's an end-user customer order, and they argue &quot;these are for individual customers&quot;. This qualifies them to breeze through customs, bypassing the quality and safety controls that prevent Home Depot from doing the exact same thing with a truckload that hasn't found customers yet. Is it legal for you (as the end consumer) to import it? No. The rules for Conformité Européenne are that the importer is responsible. When you as an end customer buy mail-order from China, you are the importer. Under EU law, if you bring a CE-marked item into the EU, you are responsible for meeting the CE design standards, and doing in-house lab testing to affirm the performance of the product. By having the CE mark on the thing you imported, you are attesting to having done that. Further, the various nations may require that a certified independent testing lab verify your testing and claims. This was historically done by national testing labs like BSI, TUV, CSA or UL. However by treaty they are largely cross-recognized: US OSHA keeps a canonical list of &quot;Nationally (by USA) Recognized Testing Labs&quot; (NRTLs) that every other agency and many other countries defer to. Big Clive is probably fine, since Clive's purpose is public ridicule, not usage. Is it legal for you to install it in your house? Oh, heck no. Every nation has rules as to what certifications equipment must meet to legally be installed in a building's electrical system. For instance North America's El NEC, widely adopted or copied, has 110.2: 110.2 Approval. The conductors [wires] and equipment required or permitted by this Code shall be acceptable only if approved. &quot;Approved&quot; means by competent testing labs; i.e. OSHA's list of NRTLs. So no, you can't install non-approved equipment in any jurisdiction with a similar rule (and you pretty much need such a rule for inspections to have any teeth).
That is going to depend on the details of exactly who does what, and how much is written down. It will also depend on the agreements between the people involved, which may well be verbal or implied. I don't know of any actual cases where such a dispute came to a copyright lawsuit. As copyright suits largely deal with financial harms and damages, and in most individual game there is little or no financial impact, a suit might be unlikely in most cases. But lets look at some possibilities. In the typical case, the game organizer or DM creates a setting and outline for a series of sessions. This is likely to include maps, descriptions of rooms or locations, descriptions of artifacts, descriptions of non-player characters, locations and types of monsters and other hazards, and other such background. This is probably mostly or fully written down (which includes being recorded on some sort of computer file.) It is therefore protected by copyright, and the initial owner of that copyright is its creator, probably the DM. (In some cases the DM uses a published &quot;module&quot; and makes only limited changes, in which case the DM would only hold copyright on those changes, if anything.) Then the players create characters, in a process that may be supervised by the DM, and possibly participated in by other players. Each player would probably hold copyright to the description of his or her own character, but the DM or other players might be considered to be co-authors of that, depending on their degree of participation. Then the players start having playing sessions, each player controlling the actions of a character (or perhaps more than one), and the DM more-or-less controlling the rest of the world, guided by the pre-created maps and descriptions. Some of those will be shared with the players, or modified (partial) versions of them will be. Events of the sessions may or may not be written down (or otherwise preserved in a tangible form). If they are not, there is no copyright on them. If they are, there is a copyright, and all the players and the DM are probably co-authors. Now lets look and agreements and ownership. The DM probably owns his or her notes, S/he has at least permitted players to use any that have been revealed to the players. The group has probably agreed (implicitly) to co-create the adventure as it happens. There probably are no written agreements about any of this. If a dispute arises, the DM is legally free to withhold the campaign notes, maps, etc that have not been shared with the players. Whether s/he can legally demand that the players not further use the parts of the setting that had been previously revealed is not so clear. It would depend on what the agreement between the DM and the players said; on, in effect, what license the DM had granted to the players. And since there was probably no written agreement, and quite likely not even an explicit verbal agreement, it would depend on what a court found they had agreed on by implication, based on their actions, and the usual customs of such groups. Sorting that out would be loads of fun. It might involve significant legal fees. The DM is unlikely to hold any exclusive copyright on the previous events of the campaign. Most likely everyone who participates would be a co-author of those. Unless there is a specific agreement to the contrary, any co-author of any shared work has the right to use, and license the use of, the shared work, although s/he must account to the others for any profits. The DM certainly has no legal right to forbid the same group from playing together with a different DM (absent a very improbable contract giving such a right). The DM can only control the maps and notes s/he created independently. If a professional DM is involved, as a comment mentions is possible, it might be more likely that an explicit wri9tten contract between the players and the DM will have been agreed to, If so, its terms will control, whatever they are, unless they are somehow contrary to law. Such a pro DM might be more defensive of copyrights, but would not have any more rights than any DM, except as a specific contract might have provided them. I doubt that the courts will see many actual lawsuits over such issues.
Obviously you may end up voiding warranties, losing on-going support from the manufacturer, or there may be a contract you agreed to stating that you won't do it, but assuming none of that is relevant (e.g. a salvaged Tesla doesn't get support/warranty anyway) is there any law preventing you from modifying your property to remove the limits placed on it? This assumes away one of the biggest issues, which is doing this is almost certainly a breach of contract unless the contract term is void as against public policy (which it probably isn't). So, the manufacturer can sue you for money damages probably equal to the difference in value between the limited and unlimited hardware in the marketplace. The manufacturer might also be able to obtain an injunction against this practice, which could result in the incarceration of someone who knowingly violated this court order for contempt of court, once an injunction is secured from a court to enforce the contract. There is also an anti-hacking statute in the United States, whose plain language appears to prohibit taking actions that override a digital system's security features. Unlocking these hardware features would appear to violate this statute. This is part of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) and is codified at United States Code Title 17, Section 1201. As Wikipedia explains: 17 U.S.C. 1201 is often known as the DMCA anti-circumvention provisions. These provisions changed the remedies for the circumvention of copy-prevention systems (also called "technical protection measures") and required that all analog video recorders have support for a specific form of copy prevention created by Macrovision (now Rovi Corporation) built in, giving Macrovision an effective monopoly on the analog video-recording copy-prevention market. The section contains a number of specific limitations and exemptions, for such things as government research and reverse engineering in specified situations. Although, section 1201(c) of the title stated that the section does not change the underlying substantive copyright infringement rights, remedies, or defenses, it did not make those defenses available in circumvention actions. The section does not include a fair use exemption from criminality nor a scienter requirement, so criminal liability could attach to even unintended circumvention for legitimate purposes. The statute is quite lengthy and full of technical definitions and narrow exceptions and exceptions to exceptions to the general rule. These legal issues have mostly gained media attention in the context of farmers who seek to hack into the built in software of their farm machinery in order to repair it where the manufacturing companies have not cooperated. There have been legislative fixes proposed that would make these prohibition void as against public policy for some specific purposes like doing repairs. There have also been efforts to characterize this kind of business practice as an anti-trust violation. But, none of that legislation has passed in the United States, to the best of my knowledge and belief. But, I am not aware of any high profile legal precedent that has addressed this point but I wouldn't rule out the possibility that there is one. The closest case I could find on point (from the High Court in Australia) is Stevens v. Sony, which holds "that a device allowing PlayStations to play games with a different region code did not violate the anti-circumvention laws, because the mechanism in the PlayStation did not directly prevent the infringement of copyright." I am not personally familiar with non-U.S. law on this topic. Wikipedia reviews some of the applicable law in the E.U. and Australia. According to this Wikipedia entry, pursuant to European Directive 2001/29/EC of the European Parliament and of the council of May 22, 2001 on the harmonisation of certain aspects of copyright and related rights in the information society, E.U. member nations must adopt domestic anti-circumvention statutes that meet certain minimum E.U. standards set forth in the directive. Also according to the same Wikipedia entry: "Australia prohibits circumvention of "access control technical protection measures" in Section 116 of the Copyright Act." In Australia, "Penalties for violation of the anti-circumvention laws include an injunction, monetary damages, and destruction of enabling devices."
If you do, can you build/run it without being bound by said license? No, you cannot. Because there is no way to &quot;build/run&quot; it without making a copy. You copy the sourcecode, before you can run your compiler. That is the copy you are making, not copying the file that results from this process. A valid question might be, are you bound by the license? Well, that is up for lawyers and a court to decide, but in all countries I know, copyright is automatic for anything worth copying. And the copyright holder can grant licenses to people to allow things. So arguing you are not bound by a specific license would mean you would argue that you are bound by the legal default, which in most countries is &quot;You cannot copy that. At all. Unless you have explicit permission&quot;. That argument would sound like &quot;I stole all 10, because the offer of buy-one-get-one-free was not legally binding&quot;. Maybe it wasn't. But that doesn't mean you get to do something unrelated illegal instead. Now, there are many exceptions for &quot;personal use&quot;. You can sing any song in the shower. I would assume you can compile any program there, too. You just cannot use that program for anything worthwhile, the same way you cannot record your song in the shower and sell it.
As you have agreed, by contract, not to reverse engineer the product, technically it would be a "breach of contract" to do so, assuming such terms are enforceable where you live (or wherever the EULA selects as the choice of forum).
No, it means you can't copy it. By default, the copyright to a work is owned by its creator, and nobody else is allowed to copy it, or create derived works, without their permission. That permission can be granted by a license. "License unknown" doesn't really tell us anything, but it certainly isn't clearly granting you permission. So you don't have permission to copy, and thus you cannot. You would have to seek permission from the copyright holder. See also If no licence is distributed with an application/source code, what license applies by default if any? (Some jurisdictions do allow for "fair use" exceptions, which allow you to copy a work without permission. You haven't said what jurisdiction you are in.)
Is this legal? Generally yes, unless it unlawfully exceeds the scope of the license. Also, if it is, how can I check if it's permitted by the original store's EULA? Read the whole EULA, focusing on terms related to resale, assignment, and transferability.