The purpose of a fuse is to blow, and the purpose of these fuses is to be DRM to prevent downgrades. The fact that they "blow" has no relevance to a claim of "malicious destruction of property".
This is the device operating the way it was designed. It may be something that should be prevented by civil consumer protection law, but calling it criminal is just unfounded under the definition of what those words legally mean.
Fuses are a safety mechanism to protect against an overcurrent situation heating up wiring and potentially starting a fire.
The purpose of a fuse is not to blow, but to only blow when dangerous amounts of current flow through the wire they are protecting.
eFuses are a hackish way that System on a Chip makers have created to try and permit patching flawed hardware with questionable firmware. Permanently breaking electrical contact of a circuit in a chip is definitely damaging that circuit.
> The purpose of a fuse is not to blow, but to only blow when dangerous amounts of current flow through the wire they are protecting.
The purpose of these fuses is to blow and serve as write-once storage memory.
> eFuses are a hackish way that System on a Chip makers have created to try and permit patching flawed hardware with questionable firmware.
No, eFuses are literally the only mutable nonvolatile storage that can be implemented inside SoCs in modern silicon processes, because you can't put Flash/EEPROM in them for technical reasons. That is why they are universally used for irreversible configuration actions on every single modern high-performance SoC. You will only find Flash memory in small microcontrollers.
The specific purpose of the fuse doesn’t matter. The permanence doesn’t matter.
The fact that the fuse has a function, means that it isn’t “destruction of property”. They added it for DRM, and there’s no evidence to show that it’s anything other than DRM. For it to be “destruction of property”, you’d need to prove that they didn’t do it for DRM, but because they wanted to hurt users. (whether or not it does hurt users is irrelevant for determining mens rea)
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not defending Nintendo; I’m just saying that this is not a criminal matter.
>The purpose of a fuse is not to blow, but to only blow when dangerous amounts of current flow through the wire they are protecting.
Fuses are simply electrical components. They have no more inherent purpose than a capacitor, resistor, or diode. These fuses are working just as intended, even though its in a use case that you're not familiar with.
If you buy a car, and a few months later, the person you bought it from, came to your abode and changed out one wheel for a totally different wheel, would it bother you?
Tesla already has done this by removing supercharging[1], autopilot[2] and ethernet [3] on its cars without notifying the owner prior to disabling these features.
Not if they said the second I bought it "You can have it for $45k and we don't come to your house and swap the wheels, or $43k and we do come to your house in 3 months and swap the wheels", or "Sure you can buy it, but you need to sign on the dotted line that you understand that the wheels are still ours and we'll swap them in a while for some other wheels, also ours and there is no way you can buy or use your own wheels."
Is it an acceptable practice to do this in fine print? I don't know. It's a bit dodgy I'll admit. But I have personally completely given up on the idea that just because I hand over money and receive a physical item I somehow "own" it in the sense that I can do what I want with it, at least if it contains software.
Is that still “malicious destruction of property”?