I think one of the major roadblocks toward jailbreaking hardware we're facing as a society is the idea that one is committing a crime. We're still pretty well-conditioned to reject criminal thoughts and actions whether they're truly criminal or not, and this is getting in the way of progress. I'll set your fears to rest right now: the act of jailbreaking your hardware, no matter how criminal the name sounds, is not illegal. It's akin to taking your device apart, so the company might think it can void your warranty (it can't, legally), but the company is never going to know what you're doing. Despite all the insisting to the contrary that they do, the device is yours, not theirs. "Jailbreaking" is just a word, like "paste" or "burn"; your device is not in jail and you are not breaking it out. It's in the theoretical jail of corporate feudalism, insofar as the corporation has instituted arbitrary rules in their pre-installed firmware about what the device is able to do by default; but firmware jailbreaking is no more illegal than renovating your house or partitioning your hard disk.
As far as committing crime? You're much more likely to commit a crime by simply driving your car to the store. In the US, anyway, the use of turning signals when turning onto a different road is a law; but people don't do it very much. I've even seen people turn without signalling in full view of a police officer without meeting any consequences. Walking across the road to get to the bus stop? Not at a crosswalk? Jaywalking. Crime. No one cares. Driving to class on the other side of the campus without your safety belt on? Crime. No one cares. Maybe you ran a red light by accident and, being the law-abiding citizen that you are, you go to the local precinct and turn yourself in—they'd laugh you out of the building. The number of small crimes we all commit every single day would shock you, and not just while driving.
Further to that point, there are some people who believe that, by interacting with pro-piracy posts on social media, they'll get added to some police list of potential lawbreakers. Well, if you've been paying even token attention to the news since at least 2014, you'll realise that you're already on such a list, simply by existing. The police have never needed just cause to arrest or even kill someone. All it takes is for one officer to have burned his toast that morning before finding the family dog took a dump in his shoe for a wrongful arrest or an officer-involved shooting to take place on the first person to cross his field of vision. You have a better chance of being arrested for resisting arrest on a traffic stop than reblogging a list of pirate websites from Tumblr.
Which leads into the next point. What constitutes "piracy"? The corporate feudal state would say that piracy is anything you're not giving them money for. If they had their way, growing your own vegetables rather than buying them from Dole would be considered piracy. Making your parents a handmade card for pesach instead of buying a generic greeting card from Hallmark would be considered piracy. Borrowing a DVD box set of Star Trek: The Next Generation from the local library instead of subscribing to Paramount+ would be considered piracy. The meaning of "piracy" is too broad to be taken seriously. Now, in general, I tend to take an "abandonware" view of what piracy is. It would seem that a company that has stopped making an item available in its original format and is not offering it in any alternative formats is no longer seeking to profit from the sale of that item. The Nintendo DS and 3DS are good examples of this: Nintendo have stopped offering these platforms and their games for sale. As there is no officially-sanctioned Nintendo product currently being produced that is capable of either, A: accepting DS or 3DS game cards, or B: receiving DS or 3DS ROMs from an online repository; all software for those platforms classifies as Abandoned and can be downloaded from ROM websites and used on jailbroken 3DS hardware or the MelonDS or Citra emulators in broad daylight.
This principle applies across the board, really. If Disney were to delete all episodes of Phineas & Ferb from Disney+, it stands to reason they do not anticipate anyone subscribing to the service in order to watch it, thereby abandoning it. They're not allowed to get mad at people downloading the entire series from rarbg or whatever KissCartoon is called these days. As they have left no other means of watching Phineas & Ferb except piracy, then piracy is how it must be accessed. Mickey did it to himself, there's no use blaming others for it.
This leads into our next point. The last issue people tend to have with piracy is "how are the creators going to get paid?" That's easy to answer: they're not getting paid. Even if Disney left all their shows in place, even if Nintendo still had the 3DS eShop going, even if Oh, No! It's Devo were still in print; not a single person involved in the creation of any work released under the label of a giant, multinational corporation makes any money from its sale. All the money goes to the merchants, the distributors, and finally, the corporate executives. Even if you've been pirating for decades, you haven't been taking the proverbial food out of anyone's mouth because the corporate desire for infinite growth and profit maximisation didn't start in 2020.
The corporations are going to scream and whinge and complain ad nauseam about "lost profits". Large financial magazines will spout propaganda about "X industry loses $5 billion to piracy over FY 2024", and it's all just so much bloviating. By that logic, I lost $1.1 billion in 2023 by not winning the super-colossal Powerball jackpot and I should be compensated accordingly by the Federal Trade Commission. It is not possible to lose something you never had. Even if everyone in the world with a computer did nothing but pirate feature films and TV programmes over the next 2 years, the industry has lost exactly $0. Just because they don't make any money doesn't mean that they lost it. They didn't go to the piracy store and say, "I'd like to buy some piracy, please," and the clerk says, "Sure thing, film industry! That'll be $5 Billion." They failed to make that money. If you're in an industry, piracy is a fact of life; something you have to plan for, rather than blame random schmoes on the street for.
So, what would generally make you a pirate under the law? What would it take for the FBI to knock down your door, taze you, and arrest you on charges of piracy? One word: distribution. This is the only way you're going to make it onto anyone's radar at all. The federal police agencies aren't interested in small time operators who just amass datahoards of pirated content and sit on them like the King Under the Mountain, they want the guys who actually run the servers. Just using a bucket to catch the drips isn't going to fix the leak. Plus, in the US anyway, the spy agencies have literal exabytes of data dumped on them on a daily basis, and there's no AI in the world that can parse all that data in real time. They're buried under mountains of data, so they have to pick and choose what they pay attention to, and honestly? You're just not that interesting. When you've got North Korean spies and Taliban agents or whatever to track down, why would you bother with some rando from upstate New York who's torrenting the entire series of The Mandalorian?
Feeling better? Now, go crack your Nintendo 3DS and get some games to play on it.
--6 January 2024--