Nintendo sends DMCA notice to GitHub to block repositories accused of violating intellectual property
Nintendo has sent a DMCA notice to GitHub demanding the blocking of repositories accused of violating the company’s intellectual property and bypassing the protection technologies used in its Nintendo Switch consoles. The notice was sent based on the act on copyright in the USA in the digital era and concerns two repositories, Lockpick and lockpick_rcm, as well as about 80 of their forks. The application is currently under consideration by GitHub and will be blocked until the violation is remedied.
The Nintendo Switch console and games supplied for it use several protection mechanisms to limit the possibility of launching pirated copies of games on the console and to protect against copying games for subsequent launch on non-authorised devices.
The repository lockpick contains an open utility that extracts cryptographic keys from Nintendo Switch gaming consoles, while lockpick_rcm contains components to obtain encryption keys of various components of the console’s operating system. Using these tools, users can extract keys for firmware components and legally purchased games.
The authors of Lockpick imply that users can dispose of their purchased console as they like for personal purposes, such as using keys to start an emulator, install additional programs, or experiment with debugging utilities like haactool, libhac, and chioidujour.
Nintendo alleges that the use of Lockpick allows users to circumvent the console’s protection mechanisms and obtain unauthorised access to cryptographic keys stored in console TPM. The keys can be used to violate manufacturers’ copyright by launching pirate copies of games on third-party devices without Console TPM or on systems with disabled Console TPM. The appearance of the pirate access of the game “The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom” on May 1 is believed to have been the final straw. It became available for launching in emulators two weeks before the upcoming official release for the game console.