> UPDATE #3: According to an official statement on Ryujinx's Discord server, developer gdkchan was contacted by Nintendo and they were offered an agreement to stop working on the emulator project, and while the agreement wasn't confirmed yet, the organization has been entirely removed.
What ever exactly happened, ultimately this is just another corporation trying to disturb people in their ownership of their purchased property, in specific video games. Anyone who really thinks about this topic will start questioning why some company located on an island on the other side of the world should be dictating what I do or don't do with a cartridge or disc I paid for with my own money and which is in my possession. It's just ludicrous behavior from a group of power-hungry megalomaniacs. This is why it's important to claw back as much ownership in that space as possible. If you want things to move in the right direction, you should sign https://www.stopkillinggames.com/eci if you're an EU citizen, or support them in any other way if you're not. This stuff is important and will ultimately decide whether we own things in our life or not, as increasingly more items have critical features that are anchored in the digital world. Without stuff like that we will become digital paupers.
> Anyone who really thinks about this topic will start questioning why some company located on an island on the other side of the world
Why does the location of the company matter? They have branches in america and Europe even if it does somehow matter.
> should be dictating what I do or don't do with a cartridge or disc I paid for with my own money and which is in my possession
You can't ignore the entire idea of intellectual property just because you have a physical disc or cartridge in your possession. There are arguments to be made against IP but this is just lazy.
"Intellectual property" is a meaningless term: GP is specifically referring to rules dictated by copyright laws, which generally allow one to do whatever they please with their "copy" for the most part (as long as they don't hurt the copyright holder's business through a couple of well defined "protections").
Copyright laws were established when it became cheap to "copy" creative works, so creativity would continue to be stimulated by guaranteeing rewards for a set time (idea was not to guarantee getting filthy rich, just to make sure creation happens by keeping the authors fairly compensated).
Digital "sales" are attempts to trick customers into thinking they are buying a copy when they are only getting a license, but this is unrelated to Nintendo killing emulators with an army of lawyers.
>"Intellectual property" is a meaningless term: GP is specifically referring to rules dictated by copyright laws, which generally allow one to do whatever they please with their "copy" for the most part (as long as they don't hurt the copyright holder's business through a couple of well defined "protections").
And Nintendo isnt going after you if you make a copy. Only if you try to package it and sell it en masse. Which seems to be a reasonable protection of copyright.
Regardles, it's not like any of us created a Nintendo Switch emulator, so we don't have much grounds here. Someone else distributed a tool that can be argued as used to bypass copyright and they are taking the heat for it.
> Only if you try to package it and sell it en masse.
Ryujinx wasn't being sold, it was being given away for free.
> Someone else distributed a tool that can be argued as used to bypass copyright
By this logic your entire computer is a tool to bypass copyright. An emulator is just a virtual machine, it doesn't contain any games or other copyrighted material. They are legal, despite Nintendo's mafioso scare tactics.
"packaged and distributed en masses" is you want to be nitpicky. I don't get to get away with dealing illegal substances just because I give it away for free. Money simply puts a target on my back.
>your entire computer is a tool to bypass copyright
Reducto ad absurdum doesn't really work here. There are specific scopes and use cases taken into consideration when considering what tools or works are bypassing copyright. I cant claim Yuzu is the same as VMware in their use cases (especially when VMware had to work with Microsoft to have that be allowed. And why it can't legally distribute Mac OS Tom's freely).
> You can't ignore the entire idea of intellectual property just because you have a physical disc or cartridge in your possession. There are arguments to be made against IP but this is just lazy.
But IP law says nothing about interaction with already-existing copies. This just isn't about copyright at all.
Huh? Last I checked you can still order them off AliExpress without an issue. And I highly doubt that Nintendo would go after the thousands of people who bought one after the big MIG Switch announcements.
isnt this basically piracy enabling technology? its good n all that people take the stance they will only use it for their legitimately owned copies but thats not the reality. people dump stuff and spread it around, and others play illegal copies. its much more rare for people to use such tech legitimately than the other clearly illegal case...
No it's not. You can't just say "SOME PEOPLE ARE USING THIS FOR PIRACY SO NOBODY SHOULD BE ALLOWED TO USE THIS LEGALLY". That's _not_ how it works and there are many court cases on point here.
The legal uses as well as the plausible fair uses need to be evaluated before you can say "nope, this has gotta go".
Nintendo's latest legal argument against emulators does rest on the DMCA's anti-circumvention provision. The letter from Nintendo to Valve in the Dolphin case makes it pretty clear.
> You can't just say "SOME PEOPLE ARE USING THIS FOR PIRACY SO NOBODY SHOULD BE ALLOWED TO USE THIS LEGALLY"
That is in fact how many court cases are resolved.
>The legal uses as well as the plausible fair uses need to be evaluated before you can say "nope, this has gotta go".
what "fair uses" do we really have to stand on? "I can play Nintendo games better on my PC"? Are you a university or organization trying to preserve software?
At the end of the day, video games as a whole are not a societal need. So it becomes hard to make some argument against having IP owners not clamp down on entertainment intended to make money.
The LoC can issue exemptions, sort of, but it has to be renewed every three years, and they don't actually apply to circumvention devices themselves, only to users.
> That's _not_ how it works and there are many court cases on point here.
Those court cases were overridden by Congress... when they passed the DMCA.
Under the DMCA, IT IS A CRIME to:
1) circumvent an "effective" copyright measure for any purpose, except specific, delineated purposes and cases which must be approved and reapproved by the Librarian of Congress every 3 years;
2) traffic in the means or technology to so circumvent a copy protection measure, with no exceptions.
The definition of "effective" is so weak that it applies to anything, even a bit of JavaScript that intercepts right click so you can't "Save Image As". It basically means, would the copy protection measure prevent copying "during the normal course of its operation". I.e., if it's buggy, employs weak crypto, or is otherwise trivially defeated, too bad. You can still catch federal time for breaking it.
In order for a Switch emulator to work properly, the copy protection on the game must be defeated. So even if you dump it yourself and a court somehow rules that copy to be fair use, YOU ARE STILL COMMITTING A CRIME by the very act of dumping it. Therefore, it is illegal to run a Switch emulator to play legitimate Switch games, irrespective of whether those games are "legal" copies or not. And a court may rule that Switch emulators are illegal to distribute as well, since they only have illegal uses.
I am not a lawyer, so I recommend you find yourself a good one if you want to mess around with Switch emulation. Best bet is to not get involved with it at all. Forget about preservation. The Switch and its games are not yours to preserve.
How does an after fact of someone's supposed illegal activity become itself illegal in a case like this? Especially in Brazil if I'm assuming correctly.
I never heard of a case declaring a non-circumvent tool to be illegal just because it may indirectly rely on people dumping it first. If so, then even project64 would be illegal too as bypassing a physical cartridge was ruled to also bypass copy protection.
Also the tool was in another specific country, which I heard doesn't have copy protection laws so the idea that it itself becomes illegal because of the actions in another country sounds even more silly.
Sure, but primary intent is open to interpretation too.
Dig down deep enough and you'll find the very core of computers is about making copies. Colloquially we speak about moving data across memory or transferring it over a network swap a buffer to disk, but that's not what happens. We make copies and often, but not always, abandon the original.
So it's always been kind of hair splitting to discern between different kinds of copying. Piracy and fair use, owning a software vs having a license to use it - it's a gray area.
and I wager about a million kids, people who can't afford games, or just self-righteous pirates are the ones who engage in copying data. Primary intent can be warped by consumer usage, even if the original ideals were noble (see: Bitcoin).
That's probably why some philantropist doesn't want to try and challenge matters like DMCA. It may only make things worse.
with scanner and printer i printed material for my school colleagues in the german version of highschool, because they could not afford some of the specialized books.
i do not say, piracy is always okay, but the intended use is VERY MUCH open to debate, depending on the view point and the money.
and even more volatile, if much money can influence the societal debate and the law system.
many people are very much we-trust-authority-and-companies-to-do-nothing-wrong.
>i do not say, piracy is always okay, but the intended use is VERY MUCH open to debate, depending on the view point and the money.
I completely agree with this POV. But it also seems like we always get an influx of users who want to unironically destroy (not simply readjust) the idea of IP and copyright everytime topics like this occur. So it can be hard to navigate a discussion like this where some people have such radical mindsests to begin with (and usually not anything resembling a model for their plan)
>many people are very much we-trust-authority-and-companies-to-do-nothing-wrong.
yes, I get that a lot just because I want to simply limit copyright terms down to its original 14/14 terms instead of the absurd 95 years or soemthing, or remove it entirely. 28 years happens to be most of a traditional career, so it seems fair for creators to benefit from their creation for assumedly the rest of their career and a bit into retirement before throwing it out for the public for others to iterate on.
The general idea of "well companies can pay to license it out" hasn't worked out to well in hindsight. Lots of companies will happily sit on projects for years, decades, because sometimes denying others of a project is better than giving it out. I'd also be interested in some sort of "use it or lose it" clause of maybe 10 years or so to prove you have an actual proudct in production before an IP goes into the public domain. It'd also solve those weird licensing hells we run into as companies shut down, but I also see a few obvious loopholes to close.
Is it a coincidence every one of those pieces of tech have been under controversy? Yes, companies have been against easily copying their works for decades, and the laws are wishy washy until someone angry enough to challenge it rises up.
But odds are, if you have that kind of money you benefit from keeping it vauge.
In a way, to me, this makes it “more legal” to rip copyright material as I’m forced to pay for it on every HD, usb, etc. i understand it’s not, but if you are going to force me to pay a tax on any storage device, then I might as well get my value out of it.
If people used emulators for homebrew there wouldn’t be much of a fuss about it. But they don’t, they use emulators for piracy.
It doesn’t matter if it has legitimate uses if 50%+ of the information online is about piracy and game dumping.
Nintendo is gonna care and they’re gonna try to stop these things, so long as their primary use is piracy. It doesn’t matter that there are legitimate and legal use cases. There are zero people writing homebrew of any real value for any console platform newer than the SNES as far as I’m aware. There are lots and lots of toy applications in homebrew stores but nothing serious. LOTS of detailed and useful info about how to pirate games, though.
No, my argument is that the information on the web is about how to pirate games, no matter how it is couched in the tool documentation.
The case for homebrew is in the homebrew software that is available, and all of the homebrew software that I have ever seen is absolute shite. Toy programs and simple SDK test tools, nothing of value other than the 3rd party SDKs themselves.
It does not matter if you make a legitimate backup copy of a cart you own for safekeeping, emulation of legitimately owned copies of retail games is not an exemption of the DMCA.
It doesn’t matter if you own a copy of the game, making a copy for any reason is not in accordance with the DMCA, as far as I’m aware. Exemptions to the DMCA are granted every few years, and some exemptions are rescinded at the same time. Copying game cartridges has never been an exemption.
And even if it was, you can’t put your copy back onto a legitimate blank cartridge to regain playability if the original is destroyed.
It’s a shitty situation to be sure, and it is wholly unfair. Blame gamers who are “morally opposed” to paying for games that they play. There are a lot of them, and they play a lot of games, and are often popular streamers on YouTube and Twitch.
If people stopped pirating games so much, the homebrew and legitimate use people would have a solid defense and maybe even support in government, but the amount of piracy that goes on absolutely dwarfs legitimate uses of unlocked hardware.
I personally am fascinated with Nintendo hardware and the choices made when they design their systems, and despite repeated efforts to get a Switch dev kit, I have been denied approval time and time again. I have no interest in piracy, I have interest in hardware platforms. But I am in the extremely small minority with that focus.
If piracy slows somewhat dramatically, Nintendo won’t be able to do this with impunity like they do today. They will simply not have a leg to stand on when they say emulators are purely piracy mechanisms. But today, they really are.
How many new games come out for the SNES every year? How many SNES emulators are there under active development? Are you going to say that all of those emulators and all of that time spent making them and perfecting them, making them cycle-perfect is done so that 1-2 games can come out every 1-2 years? EMULATORS ARE PRIMARILY USED FOR PIRACY.
Until that changes, Nintendo will keep doing this.
Selling a tool designed to circumvent DRM, even to make backups, seems straightforwardly illegal under the DMCA? I'm not sure that counts as an abuse of the law...
Using it to shut down emulators that don't help you circumvent DRM does seem like an abuse, though.
So your position is that almost nobody who sells their content should be able to make a living doing that?
You either must be able to fund it through ads, host it on platform which make piracy effectively impossible and/or impractical like Apple's App Store, YouTube etc. or be independently wealthy and just do it as a hobby?
e.g. screw all the authors who are writing books, Amazon should just be able to distribute (or sell for some "convenience" fee) books to everyone who has a Kindle without paying anything to them? That (which would be the logical outcome of nothing having no IP protection) certainly sounds like a reasonable opinion..
In practice I agree with your points, but it's also important to consider that the open source model is alive, well and is directly and indirectly at the heart of employing many people. I won't make the argument that society is willing or could switch to that model successfully, but I also wouldn't be willing to say it couldn't work, either.
Also even then OSS generally seems to only be universally successful in areas where software is a "cost centre" i.e. companies are willing to invest into it when it makes it cheaper for them run their business than building/buying proprietary stuff or they build their products on top of it (A but almost never when it's the actual end product targeted at consumers.
And if we extend the definition of software to video games, OS is not even a thing there (besides middleware of course which falls into the previous category).
Throwing away these abused IP laws wouldn't prevent creators from making a living off their art.
Plenty of ways for artist to monetize. Selling a copy of the art is one way, very cherished by publishers. Creators for the most part don't make money off copy distribution of their art. That was the case with physical copies, still the case with online distribution.
The good old "let's protect the artists" is a fallacy. It's only to protect publishers and distributors.
These IP laws, at least their interpretation acts against the public interest, creators included.
Other forms of monetisation of art? Performance, training and teaching, patronage, custom requests, etc.
Ask Taylor Swift where most of her money is coming from, that's not from Spotify.
Piracy is product of artificial scarcity, people pirate mostly because it is easier and more convenient than the legitimate counterpart, music piracy almost disappeared when convenient streaming services appeared, same for movies until studios decided that they wanted “cable tv 2.0” Make something as easy as pirating and people will pay for it.
> other sources of revenue exist
> revenue through donation
So what? Not everyone wants to engage in all of the PR/marketing stuff that's necessary to make any money from that and it would still generally result in significantly lower revenue.
> On another level, we could pivot to UBI instead of dedicating
And fund it how exactly? Even if that were sustainable why do you think that content creators should be fully content living of UBI + a few pennies in donations while people working in most other industries should be able to money the same way they previously did?
IP protection (even if often implemented in a suboptimal way which of course should be improved) have been one of the primaries force behind human progress over that last 300+ years.
> Not everyone wants to engage in all of the PR/marketing stuff that's necessary to make any money from that
That's not a difference, PR/Marketing is already used to profit over IP work.
> Even if that were sustainable why do you think that content creators should be fully content living of UBI + a few pennies in donations while people working in most other industries should be able to money the same way they previously did?
This is assuming creators are fully content on how stuff work now, and I'm betting that's not the case for the vast majority, most of them cannot make end meets with the current system, regardless of how hard they work on their book/song/game/etc, and they have to have a side job just to put food on the table.
> IP protection (even if often implemented in a suboptimal way which of course should be improved) have been one of the primaries force behind human progress over that last 300+ years.
That's a bold claim. Most of, if not all, human progress on this period is directly attributable to the use of fossil fuel, from the steam engine to the modern use of it, and how it empowered us to do so much more with less human-hour.
What do you say to people who want to stop using Open Source software licences and instead use 'Fair Source' licences intended to prevent cloud companies monetising the works of others?
I don't agree with them, but i haven't seen the argument being pro scarcity. To steelman it, the argument is that without these protections the incentive to create is lower so we actually will have more scarcity
I can run legally an mp3 through a calculator. No one can dictate otherwise - it's my machine, and purchased media to do with as I (privately) please. This does not interfere with copyright. To legislate otherwise would be insane - as that would effectively legislate your ability to calculate.
This argument extends to any purchased media, to any program.
The US AHRA requires serial copy management (SCMS or an equivalent) when using format shifting to digital media. Nobody bothers to follow that part of the law and it seems to have never been enforced.
Not just a mp3 file. any media you have purchased can be format shifted by you for archive/personal purposes. regardless of DRM/copy protections. What is illegal is redistribution (thus the copyright).
Again: ianal. But this is kind of a fundamental right. If you own something, it's yours to do with privately as you wish. If you don't own the copyright, then you can't redistribute.
The DMCA makes breaking DRM illegal, even when done for fair use purposes, if it doesn't fall into a small number of tightly-defined exceptions. And they can go after tools that enable people to do this, as well (think of DeCSS for example).
unless i’m mistaken, nobody is telling you what to do with your media.
the issue at play here would be whether the emulator publishers/developers have the right to publish what is almost certainly an infringing piece of software, which courts have repeatedly determined they do not.
While an emulator does not infringe on copyright and is illegal per US court precedence, an emulator being available is a large part of what makes copyright infringement popular and as such it is related.
Adding in the DMCAs anti-circumvention provisions and the fact that you have to violate them to emulate a modern console, the whole thing becomes very nuanced and tightly linked to copyright infringement despite not directly infringing.
> That merely explains why Nintendo doesn't like them, not why anyone should care that they don't like them
I don't think it has been tested in courts yet but the general idea is that you have to violate the DMCA to use a switch emulator, so people making switch emulators are making tools to help people circumvent the switch's copy protection.
Well if we're going to dive into morality, requiring me to produce additional pollution and e-waste to run your program when I have a perfectly capable turing machine already is unconscionable.
Nintendo: Put your games on steam. Let me buy them without killing the planet.
Apple: License your damn operating system for running on non-apple hardware. Hell, just let me legally run it in an virtual machine so I can test my scripts on your OS without killing the planet.
Nintendo's primary competitive advantage in the gaming space is it's expertise in hardware and tight integration of self-published games. Nintendo would have to fundamentally change it's business model and alter the design of their games (and consequently the unique appeal of them) in order to fit your demand.
You are right about Apple though, simply allowing people to install their OS on other hardware for personal use would not impact their market strategy in any significant way.
I'd argue the success of the switch emulators proves their games can be successful without changes in the PC space. I'd certainly agree with you when it came to Wii-era games since that had the unusual controller[0] but the switch is a pretty standard controller.
[0] Which they could have sold as first-party PC accessories, further capitalizing on the PC market
> Well if we're going to dive into morality, requiring me to produce additional pollution and e-waste to run your program when I have a perfectly capable turing machine already is unconscionable.
This is not obvious to me - I would be interested in reading more about the ethical considerations here, if you or anyone else has any good links.
Links for what? The environmental damage of producing electronics?
- Apple has a report for the environmental impact of an iphone, 81% of the carbon emissions is from the production of the device [0]
- In addition to the whole global warming thing, there's the health impact [1].
So here I am, typing this message out on a perfectly capable universal turing machine. But in order to run <nintendo game> I have to incur that 81% carbon emissions again to buy a different universal turing machine from Nintendo. One that will, after a few years, get thrown into the back of a closet where it will accumulate dust until one day I haul it down to electronics recycling where it can continue its journey poisoning the children.
Its a simple matter of 1 device is less bad than 2.
I disagree. In my case I want to play some of my legally acquired games in ways that were not possible on the original hardware. High FPS, widescreen support, VR, mods. I also want to play my games in a way that's convenient for me, like not having to hook up my console over its own dedicated HDMI. There's more to emulation than just piracy, it opens up a whole field of possibilities for the software.
Even so, there is no difference between games from the 80s and games released last week from the perspective of copyright law, which usually works in Nintendo's favor.
>disturb people in their ownership of their purchased property
It's a nice utopic view, but I'd be surprised if more than 10% of the games emulated are also owned by the user. I'd be surprised if more than half the people using emulators ever owned a Switch to begin with.
>Anyone who really thinks about this topic will start questioning why some company located on an island on the other side of the world should be dictating what I do or don't do with a cartridge or disc I paid for with my own money and which is in my possession.
They don't really. If you made Ryujinx or Yuzu and kept it to yourself and maybe a few close friends, they'd never know nor care. But things get complicated when you post it on the public internet.
>This is why it's important to claw back as much ownership in that space as possible. If you want things to move in the right direction, you should sign https://www.stopkillinggames.com/eci if you're an EU citizen, or support them in any other way if you're not.
I dont think even the EU wants to touch the matter of emulation. Precisely because they may discover many emulator users are pirates.
Apple doesn’t need any laws to enforce the following:
- you can’t pirate App Store IAP
- you can’t pirate Apple News
- you can’t pirate Apple Arcade
- you can’t pirate iCloud storage and you can’t upgrade phone storage space from anyone but Apple, and therefore the amount of data you can practicably store in the iOS ecosystem
- it’s impracticable to pirate App Store apps
Okay, that’s like 90% of Apple services revenue.
Is Apple the only company allowed to make money? That’s kind of what your position is: “the only permissible limitations are the ones that cannot be surmounted technologically.” Why should the law be toothless in copyright protections, but not in other things? Because that is a Pro Apple position in disguise.
The law should have teeth and should say that DRM is actually illegal, or at the very least that circumventing it is legal.
No matter how ludicrously long Disney manages to get copyright terms extended to, copyright does still expire, and there are even other exceptions such accessibility and military and emergency usage that trump copyright.
But encryption never expires and does not care if it would save someones life to use some product in some unusual situation, so, it should either be illegal to sell an encrypted audiobook that can never be decrypted even 100 years later when it is public domain, or at the very least, if it is to be legal to produce such a thing, then the trade-off is it is at least legal for anyone else to try to overcome it.
How could drm risk anyone's life? I don't know but it isn't just protecting a movie from playing, it's baked into the hardware of devices and makes the entire device non-functional, like HDCP making a display not-display.
Maybe a pdf has critical emergency information like how to sanitize water during an natural disater or war, or identify if a berry is safe or poisonous, but the only pdf you have happened to come from an expensive college course so you can't read it. Contrived examples will always sound contrived and dismissable but no particular example matters. The principle holds even without any examples. If a tv can fail to tv, then forget about if tvs are important, what matters is a tool can be arbitrarily and artificially rendered non-functional.
The law should absolutely have teeth, but it should say something other than what it currently does, and have the teeth to enforce that.
> ultimately this is just another corporation trying to disturb people in their ownership of their purchased property, in specific video games.
Is it reasonable to assume the majority of Ryujinx users merely emulate Switch games they legally own? That only a minority uses the emulator to play pirated Switch games?
Yeah. It's a bummer because I actually own the games and just want to play them at 4k60 rather than on the weak HW of the Switch. But I understand why Nintendo would target emulators of a _current gen console_.
To say that this is solely an attack on law abiding folks who own the game is... being willfully ignorant because you don't want to accept that a large percentage of installs are doing so for piracy.
Of course it's not solely an attack on law abiding folks who own the game. But is is an attack on them nonetheless. Its also an attack on open source, software freedom, and digital preservation. Further, assuming there were legal threats involved, its an abuse of the legal system to harass open source developers working on perfectly legal software. Emulators are also direct competition to Nintendo's hardware, so you could see this as an anti-competitive move as well. There are lots of problems with this, and they're only mostly Nintendo's fault.
I feel like the blame mostly lies on people who pirate games. It's a sort of tragedy of the commons. We could have a better world (Nintendo not caring if we play switch games we bought at 4k60 on a PC) but people who pirate games mucked it up.
Could be an organization issue, when I think of a Nintendo Switch it should be organized under Bh not Gh. Especially with an emulator which doesn’t get updates from Nintendo.
glaring omission of the statement "it's not an issue with Nintendo". they have a reputation for relentlessly pursuing the creators of homebrew/emu projects like this. sometimes even going as far as contracting operatives to stalk hobby devs living outside of Japan. look up "nintendo ninjas"...
It was indeed Nintendo. They released a statement about 50 minutes ago that the lead developer "agreed to stop working on the project" after speaking with Nintendo.
It's still true, though. If they really don't want people to speculate on why they did something, they can provide a reason. It doesn't require an entire PR team to figure that out.
They may have been hit by something entirely unexpected and may still need to get their bearings. "It's not github, it's not a DCMA takedown." may very well be the only thing they can communicate with a modicum of certainty at this moment.
If what you say may have legal implications, it might be wiser to just say "no comments" for some time, while seeking proper counseling.
"Not DMCA" and "not GitHub" is plenty already. But maybe it's a possible malware infiltration, or having something unbecoming committed to the repo by mistake, or anything else that might warrant denying public access for some time to prevent damage.
There are a million reasons not to say something, and a blush of legal anything should deter you from opening your mouth in public before you're straight with a lawyer.
I think protecting themselves from being sued into oblivion is more important than getting a message out to users an hour earlier. We don't have any form of SLA agreement with Ryujinx
Also the project is being shut down. Why should they care about community reaction?
This, a hundred times over. It turns out that communication isn't entirely a bullshit field of study* and it requires significant planning and effort to keep people happy.
* note: all fields have bullshit; this is a recent learning of mine -- unlearning, rather, of a single day of a communications class which left me with the impression that many of us here seem to have of soft sciences: all bullshit by default.
RE: Update 3 (gdkchan being "encouraged" to step down)
I'm mostly just surprised it took Nintendo this long to make a move - the Switch is on its last legs, its successor is less than a year away and almost certainly won't be hacked for a good while. Acting in a way that's bound to piss everyone off but doing it so late that the upside to them is minimal (there won't be that many more new Switch games to pirate at this point) is a weird unforced error. Lawyers move in mysterious ways I guess.
I would assume the launch of the Switch successor is why they are clamping down. It's likely very similar architecturally to the Switch. Nobody knows how long it would take to hack it, someone could be silently sitting on an exploit that they've been saving to see if it'll work on the successor. In the event it's hacked quickly and there are still actively developed Switch emulators, it wouldn't be a stretch to believe support would quickly be added to those emulators for the successor.
> Acting in a way that's bound to piss everyone off but doing it so late that the upside to them is minimal ... is a weird unforced error.
This describes their response to Palworld (the Pokemon-"inspired" game that they're suing now) too. When Palworld came out, everyone was talking about how it blatantly copied things and how surprised they are that Nintendo is doing nothing. Now, after several months of people playing Palworld and many of them enjoying it, Nintendo is suddenly choosing to sue them. And predictably, the general response is a lot more negative now, with people having a lot more positive associations with Palworld and having gotten used to assuming that it's here-to-stay.
> Lawyers move in mysterious ways I guess.
Indeed. The timeline to build a case doesn't necessarily align with the business profit goals (like in the Switch case) nor with the public relations goals (like in the Palworld case).
Do you think the average joe who owns a Switch or is a potential client for their next console, is even aware of any of this happening? This is the tiniest of stories. The only way the public at large can become aware of emulators is if they hit a big app store.
So as far as timing of this move goes, it's as good a time as any to "protect what's theirs".
In case anyone's curious about Nintendo's general MO (not sure how similar this case is) around 10 years ago they successfully prevented someone from publishing a method to run arbitrary code on the 3DS using an NDA and the threat of legal action. Here's some documents detailing their approach: https://archive.org/details/Knock_And_Talk_directcontact/Kno...
Given that Ryujinx is open source, I wonder what rights other OSS contributors have? Surely there's nothing stopping another fork from continued development provided nothing illegal is happening.
Even if you think/"know" the project to be 100% legit do you want to be the OSS contributor that spends the next year or two in court fighting Nintendo about it or did you just like writing some emulator code once in a while in your spare time?
Wow. When yuzu was taken down I wrote a script to automatically download the 5 latest releases of a few other emulators I use, and that included Ryujinx (so I do have the binaries for those, which will go into safekeeping).
Now I wish I had set up a Gitea mirror as well, even though I would likely never build it myself.
It is designed to be very low impact (I had it on a daily cron).
Feel free to use it to ensure you can preserve the software you rely on. As far as I'm concerned, I'm _very_ sad that Nintendo has now made it impossible to enjoy my games on better hardware, and will probably focus on PC gaming henceforth (there are lots of nice indie games on Steam, like Dredge, which is my current favorite).
The forks aren't actually automatically taken down in most cases. The claimant must list every individual fork in the claim. Which I love, because it's kind of petty but still following the DMCA to the letter.
Here is an example[1] of the form claimants must fill out.
> Each fork is a distinct repository and must be identified separately if you believe it is infringing and wish to have it taken down
IIRC it took them a couple months to get through all of the Yuzu forks after the initial DMCA and lawsuit. I doubt there were nearly as many forks of Ryujinx, though.
Next time it will undoubtedly be DMCA considering what happened to Yuzu. This is the perfect case for some sort of decentralized Git[1] or a Git repo via Tor.
Probably worth reminding that this is the project where the backing company is centered around crypto/blockchain, but they pinkie promise it will never affect this work!
AFAIK git doesn’t concern itself with discoverability, which is presumably what OP means. Sure, if you already know the IP address of someone hosting a git repo you can pull it. But that’s not really a decentralized service (or not any more decentralized than downloading stuff from a known host via HTTPS).
The popular narrative seems to be that Yuzu had something to do and/or profited in some way from the Zelda Tears of the Kingdom leak, which isn't true. The Patreon-only Early Access builds could not play the game any more than the public Nightly builds could. Both versions needed an unofficial game patch for the game to launch, a patch which the Yuzu developers had nothing to do with. Yuzu developers also did not implement or work on any bug fixes involving the game before its official release. Perhaps you were alluding to something else, though.
I thought they were sharing Nintendo encryption keys that are "technically" supposed to be from the Switch you're emulating. People were using Yuzu to turn their Steamdeck into a Switch and using Yuzu's private discord to get the keys needed to do that.
It's the same reason other emulators ask you to bring your own BIOS file because that is proprietary.
I thought that there was also speculation of people sharing ROMs directly on Discord, with the Yuzu admins being pretty ambivalent about the whole thing?
I only followed the story peripherally, so it's possible I'm wrong.
The Yuzu devs banned anyone even mentioning TotK in the Discord. However, they apparently had some private Discord or something where the Yuzu devs shared ROMs between themselves.
I'm a big advocate of emulation (and piracy, frankly) but yeah, honestly, painting the Yuzu developers as the victims is insane. How much were they pulling in via Patreon? $30,000 a month?
The lawsuits that effectively legalized console emulation in the 90s were commercial products, enabling you to play PlayStation games on your PC or DreamCast
There’s even a video of Steve Jobs showing off Connectix on the Ma..
What's wrong with getting money out of a product? The fact that it was an emulator changes nothing. They would have been sued, Patreon or no Patreon. Making an emulator is not illegal. And I don't mean gray-area not illegal, I mean court-precedent not illegal.
Under precedents established before the DMCA was law, and under lawsuits filed before the DMCA was applicable, on consoles which did not have encryption on which the DMCA would have applied.
> Correct, but the DMCA has an explicit exception for this kind of thing.
That has never been examined or declared, as the DMCA exemptions are much narrower than they appear. The reverse engineering exemption, for example, does not cover the right to make a product that interfaces with the original - only to examine the technology to build your own product.
An obvious example of this is DVDs, which have the same exemptions. The US PTO, and the US Librarian of Congress (who has the power to make DMCA exemptions) are unequivocally clear that a private copying exemption does not exist in their view. This is also why the EFF has been begging every 3 years for the last... two decades... to make such an exemption, and has failed.
(1)Notwithstanding the provisions of subsection (a)(1)(A), a person who has lawfully obtained the right to use a copy of a computer program may circumvent a technological measure that effectively controls access to a particular portion of that program for the sole purpose of identifying and analyzing those elements of the program that are necessary to achieve interoperability of an independently created computer program with other programs, and that have not previously been readily available to the person engaging in the circumvention, to the extent any such acts of identification and analysis do not constitute infringement under this title.
(2)Notwithstanding the provisions of subsections (a)(2) and (b), a person may develop and employ technological means to circumvent a technological measure, or to circumvent protection afforded by a technological measure, in order to enable the identification and analysis under paragraph (1), or for the purpose of enabling interoperability of an independently created computer program with other programs, if such means are necessary to achieve such interoperability, to the extent that doing so does not constitute infringement under this title.
(3)The information acquired through the acts permitted under paragraph (1), and the means permitted under paragraph (2), may be made available to others if the person referred to in paragraph (1) or (2), as the case may be, provides such information or means solely for the purpose of enabling interoperability of an independently created computer program with other programs, and to the extent that doing so does not constitute infringement under this title or violate applicable law other than this section.
Nintendo may potentially argue that yes, you are completely right. You have the right to interoperability, in the sense that you are allowed to make a device which physically takes Switch cards, decrypts them, plays them, from the original card, does not copy it to storage media of any kind, and does not allow the user any semblance of a DRM bypass, or any way to resell the original card while maintaining a copy. Interoperability is for building CD players, not CD rippers.
EDIT TO REPLY FOR "POSTING TOO FAST": Section 117 is very clever, except there's one problem: It was created in 1980, before the DMCA. Thus, if there is a conflict between the DMCA and Section 117, the DMCA is likely to receive the benefit of the doubt. As such, Section 117 is only effective for demonstrating the legality of copying non encrypted programs, or (as an actual lawyer put it), copying a program with the DRM remaining intact, as useless as that is.
Combine my point about interoperability in the courtroom + Section 117 likely being overruled by Section 1201 of the later DMCA which is extremely restrictive on bypassing "technological protection measures" copied or not, and it's not a clear win.
The case you linked to has nothing to do with the interoperability exception. I don't know how they could reject my view if they never touched it.
Also
> Nintendo may potentially argue that yes, you are completely right. You have the right to interoperability, in the sense that you are allowed to make a device which physically takes Switch cards, decrypts them, plays them, from the original card, does not copy it to storage media of any kind, and does not allow the user any semblance of a DRM bypass, or any way to resell the original card while maintaining a copy.
And they would be right, if copyright law didn't have an additional exception...
17 U.S.C § 117 - Limitations on exclusive rights: Computer programs
(a)Making of Additional Copy or Adaptation by Owner of Copy.—
Notwithstanding the provisions of section 106, it is not an infringement for the owner of a copy of a computer program to make or authorize the making of another copy or adaptation of that computer program provided:
(1)that such a new copy or adaptation is created as an essential step in the utilization of the computer program in conjunction with a machine and that it is used in no other manner, or
(2)that such new copy or adaptation is for archival purposes only and that all archival copies are destroyed in the event that continued possession of the computer program should cease to be rightful.
> painting the Yuzu developers as the victims is insane.
Hope you're not thinking I'm the painter here... I know they turned the thing into big business and I don't have a lot of understanding for that.
Realistically though, I expect Nintendo to find ways to wipe Ryujinx from Github and sue these developers too, considering people have turned to it now that Yuzu is gone.
The only way to escape that fate would be to maintain proper opsec, stay in the right jurisdiction and not rely on (DMCA sensitive) big tech platforms for the development.
Yeah, but that's not the comment I was responding to.
I understand the issue of making money drawing attention to the piracy they (supposedly?) participated in. But there is nothing wrong with the money they got for their development efforts. That money is not a counterpoint to them being victims, regardless of whether they actually are victims or not.
I doubt any meaningful amount of it went to piracy, if any. If that's wrong, then okay I'll change my mind.
And big citation needed that they had a money collection specifically for some instance of piracy.
None of that are requirements for a version control system, let alone a distributed one.
What people are after is a decentralised GitHub. Which I think is a good idea. But git itself is already built from the ground up to work decentralised.
So if someone were to build a decentralised discovery service for git, then you could take any existing git repository, whether it’s local copies on your laptop or “centralised” versions in GitHub, and use them equally as a seed.
You're conflating git with git forges. Most popular forges use a centralized model. Git was built as distributed from the start and it's original mode of collaboration was through a federated protocol.
I mean, nominally, but honestly how many of us actually use Git in a distributed fashion? I think most of us treat Git more or less like Subversion with local committing and much better merging.
I think what the person was referring to was something more along the lines of a DHT (e.g. Pastry or Kademlia), IPFS, or (as they mentioned) Tor, where it can be truly leaderless and owned by everyone and no one at the same time.
My niece tells me that decentralized Git is, well Git.
As far as a web interface to Git, she was saying the basic pieces are kinda already there with Gitea, and provided the following points:
- Gitea is a single executable, fairly easy to install at least on Linux (it does need a database), and while the configuration requires some time it's worth it for all that Gitea does - which is basically be a copy of Github.
- Gitea has a migration option which will literally pull in an entire Git repo with one click.
So my niece was telling me zany things like "why doesn't everyone run their own Gitea and simply cross migrate everything?" I don't know, I feel like it's dangerous and essentially providing easy tools and paraphernalia to potential evil doers, such as those who may want to infringe copyright, so this is an application I'll never host or run in my life.
Ironically, this is the type of behavior that will make me STOP buying a company's products.
They're obviously doing this because they think their losing sales - which they probably are on net. But I wish more people would stop buying products from companies that try to ruins people's literal lives over - essentially - a rounding error to the company's bottom line.
I haven’t bought a Nintendo product in almost a decade. My life is better for it. Previously I avidly bought every MH, every Pokémon, would have bought the Digimon releases on Switch too. A fair portion of the recent Zeldas too. Nowadays I play pirated games on my 3DS and am quite happy, far happier than I had been paying Nintendo only to fuck over the things I enjoy. My impact may be small, but that hardly matters because at least I‘m putting my (lack of) money where my mouth is.
I would bet serious money that this is because of the upcoming Switch 2. If the rumors are true, it could very much be like how the Dolphin emulator is able to run both Gamecube and Wii games because the system architectures are so similar. Nintendo wants to avoid a day-zero emulator for Switch 2.
And even if it wasn't a day-zero (or even several month in) Switch 2 emulator it's seeming like one of the big selling points of the new system is going to be "play your old Switch games on the new system, now in higher resolution" but it's a lot of bad press if that's still "play them in worse quality than emulators were 3 years before this hardware came out".
For clarity, Ryujinx has no connection to the Yuzu Switch emulator which Nintendo unleashed their wrath on earlier this year. They were developed independently of each other, by different people, in parallel until Yuzus demise.
I was shocked to learn there was a short period in the '90s when even reselling your physical games was outlawed in Japan. At the time, Nintendo put "no resale" icons on the back of all their games.
Well that seals the deal, never buying a Nintendo product again. I’m sure I don’t matter to them but I’ll help friends and family get more into PC and retro gaming if they want to pick my brain.
I always though switch emulation got too good too fast. Switch being such weak hardware you can emulate it on a potato. Nintendo must've been eyeing an angle to close Ryujinx for a while now.
It would be very interesting if the main dev actually got paid to delete everything. Although it looks like a "dick move" at first, if you know the source will live on and you get retirement money. I would be very pressed to accept if in that situation. Much more likely they just offered to not sue him to oblivion.
I honestly don't blame Nintendo for angling emulators with everything they have while the hardware is current. They have much shittier behaviour when interacting with the community, like suing tournaments that used mods and threatening others.
I'm wondering if the anticipated Switch 2 is going to be very similar to the current device in terms of architecture and OS, and the real concern of Nintendo isn't Switch 1 piracy right now, it's that the current Switch emulators could evolve into Switch 2 emulators in the early months/years of the new hardware lifecycle, emulators able to play ripped Switch 2 games well before anyone figures out how to mod the new hardware to enable piracy.
But they probably also want to re-sell us previous games, too, particularly if they can run 'remastered' versions of the Switch Zelda games at a better resolution/framerate on the new hardware - which you can already to via emulation...
I am sure the Switch 2 is just a more powerful switch. Still massively underpowered compared to a PC so updating the emulators to run switch 2 would be a fast affair considering how easy people were able to dump the first one. Its likely just a "switch pro" iteration that the OLED never was.
Its likely inevitable considering the hunger for pirated nintendo games on markets like Brazil with a large supply of competent hackers and not much chance of people being able to afford legit games.
So I understand wanting to build emulators so that people can continue to play their old games after the hardware fails. But in building an emulator for a current generation console, it seems likely that much of the audience is just interested in pirating the games.
Legal or not, Nintendo will release its hounds and drown you in court fees. Personally, I'd rather not have to deal with this legal bullshit and stress in my life.
Just upgraded the Flathub flatpak to the latest version on my machine. Not sure what's the recommended way to keep two stray Flatpak apps alive.
I have the latest Yuzu flatpak installed on one machine and the latest Ryujinx flatpak on another. How do I save them for the future and migrate them to a new machine?
The name Ryujinx is even a C# in-joke of sorts, early iterations of the emulator translated the Switches ARM code into .NET CIL bytecode and then used the standard .NET JIT, which is called RyuJIT, to translate that to native code. NX was the Switches codename, so RyuJIT + NX, minus the T, makes Ryujinx.
They eventually outgrew that approach and rolled their own JIT, but the name had stuck at that point.
I submitted a PR a couple months ago and was really pleasantly surprised at how accessible it was to contribute. No funny business, just `git clone` and open up Rider.
I was only touching the frontend client (i.e. game library screen etc, not the actual emulation), but it took less than two weeks to go from zero-to-PR-submitted on a fairly complex refactor.
This just affirms the idea that Nintendo doesn't care about legality, they are extremely litigious and will attack anything and everything they perceive to be as harmful to them whether it is actually harmful or not.
> Yesterday, gdkchan was contacted by Nintendo and offered an agreement to stop working on the project, remove the organization and all related assets he's in control of. While awaiting confirmation on whether he would take this agreement, the organization has been removed, so I think it's safe to say what the outcome is. Rather than leave you with only panic and speculation, I decided to write this short message to give some closure.
This is absolutely terrible. It may be in the business interest of Nintendo but the absolute anti-consumer way this is carried out destroys all the good will that the customers still had towards them.
I was able to build the project with a single command, so there's hope that easy barrier for entry and a language more developers are familiar with will ensure the survival.
> Yesterday, gdkchan was contacted by Nintendo and offered an agreement to stop working on the project, remove the organization and all related assets he's in control of. While awaiting confirmation on whether he would take this agreement, the organization has been removed, so I think it's safe to say what the outcome is. Rather than leave you with only panic and speculation, I decided to write this short message to give some closure.
Don’t buy it, put money towards a PC system or card. I’m done with Nintendo after this. It takes a lot to make me skip out on Mario, but in the end Nintendo burned through all of my nostalgia for them from my childhood
Nintendo's behavior recently has guaranteed that I will never purchase another Nintendo product ever again. I'm exclusively pirating their games from now on, lol
Not familiar with the first but the second is funded by a commercial company whose core focus is Ethereum-based, and they're making another cryptocurrency and caused a bunch of PR spammers the same way Tea did.
It wasn't taken down by Github, it was seemingly taken down by the maintainers. Git already provides protection against this via local copies, so there's no benefit.
That sounds much worse for projects like this unless the authors go fully anonymous and always practice clean opsec.
Nintendo probably sent them a deal along the lines of "Agree to take down the project or else we will sue you for millions of dollars". Could you imagine if you were served that and had to respond "it is impossible for me to take down the project because of the hosting I used."
Even if it's a trial Ryujinx could win... Winning and trial isn't free, and you can often can't recoup attorney fees.
Yet another chapter of Nintendo's wrath against the people? How long the world is going to be dominated by absurd copy(made up)right laws?
PS. Even if that wouldn't be the case here, my POV stands. Current copy(made up)right laws don't even make tiny-little sense nowadays. FREEDOM NOW FOR HUMAN KNOWLEDGE once for all FGS.
- Nintendo was probably _always_ like that, since 80s or 40s or however long ago: they were merely dormant outside the home country due to the famously enormous language barrier.
- Hypothetical defanged Nintendo that isn't like that probably holds little value: even Microsoft with -1 hardcoded as budget ceiling had been successful at forcing Nintendo into obsolescence. This suggests that Nintendo "being like that" is an advantage in itself.
Not sure about the 80s, but off the top of my head, there is clear evidence in the early 90s with lawsuits against both Galoob (game genie) and Atari (Tengen games without the 10NES chip).
This is absolutely the case considering their insane lawsuit on Palworld, which is a patent dispute. Nintendo has clearly turned evil and this is only going to cause great harm and strife in the gaming industry long-term if they win. We've been largely free of patent trolling in gaming aside from the lawsuits against hardware technologies like vibration (which is itself insanity and harmful), but this would open the flood gates.
Updating a software patent application and then suing a competitor to strip profits is Nintendo's modus operandi. There was one settled for $30m(then) as recent as 2021, just not known outside the country.
Nintendo have been absolute monsters for a long time. The only thing preventing people from realizing this is the cognitive dissonance between their cute games and their evil behavior.
See: Nintendo v. Galoob, Atari and Tengen v. Nintendo, their predatory in general business practices throughout the NES era.
Just because Shigeru Miyamoto flashes his friendly Austin Powers grin and opens up another world of wonder playable on your Switch doesn't mean that the company doesn't or never had a dark side. Hell, the man himself cancelled StarFox 2 to pillage its 3D transform code for use in Super Mario 64.
Darn. I finally got pop os working the way I like and was about to set up my emulation stuff this weekend. Now Nintendo has successfully stopped me forever! /s
I'm surprised RU or PRC doesn't throw some state sponsored program to break DRM to undermine Nintendo or Sony for shits and giggles. NKR did the Sony hack years back, would be nice if they put some team on playstation emulation.
https://gbatemp.net/threads/ryujinx-emulator-github-reposito...
> UPDATE #3: According to an official statement on Ryujinx's Discord server, developer gdkchan was contacted by Nintendo and they were offered an agreement to stop working on the emulator project, and while the agreement wasn't confirmed yet, the organization has been entirely removed.
What ever exactly happened, ultimately this is just another corporation trying to disturb people in their ownership of their purchased property, in specific video games. Anyone who really thinks about this topic will start questioning why some company located on an island on the other side of the world should be dictating what I do or don't do with a cartridge or disc I paid for with my own money and which is in my possession. It's just ludicrous behavior from a group of power-hungry megalomaniacs. This is why it's important to claw back as much ownership in that space as possible. If you want things to move in the right direction, you should sign https://www.stopkillinggames.com/eci if you're an EU citizen, or support them in any other way if you're not. This stuff is important and will ultimately decide whether we own things in our life or not, as increasingly more items have critical features that are anchored in the digital world. Without stuff like that we will become digital paupers.
> Anyone who really thinks about this topic will start questioning why some company located on an island on the other side of the world
Why does the location of the company matter? They have branches in america and Europe even if it does somehow matter.
> should be dictating what I do or don't do with a cartridge or disc I paid for with my own money and which is in my possession
You can't ignore the entire idea of intellectual property just because you have a physical disc or cartridge in your possession. There are arguments to be made against IP but this is just lazy.
"Intellectual property" is a meaningless term: GP is specifically referring to rules dictated by copyright laws, which generally allow one to do whatever they please with their "copy" for the most part (as long as they don't hurt the copyright holder's business through a couple of well defined "protections").
Copyright laws were established when it became cheap to "copy" creative works, so creativity would continue to be stimulated by guaranteeing rewards for a set time (idea was not to guarantee getting filthy rich, just to make sure creation happens by keeping the authors fairly compensated).
Digital "sales" are attempts to trick customers into thinking they are buying a copy when they are only getting a license, but this is unrelated to Nintendo killing emulators with an army of lawyers.
>"Intellectual property" is a meaningless term: GP is specifically referring to rules dictated by copyright laws, which generally allow one to do whatever they please with their "copy" for the most part (as long as they don't hurt the copyright holder's business through a couple of well defined "protections").
And Nintendo isnt going after you if you make a copy. Only if you try to package it and sell it en masse. Which seems to be a reasonable protection of copyright.
Regardles, it's not like any of us created a Nintendo Switch emulator, so we don't have much grounds here. Someone else distributed a tool that can be argued as used to bypass copyright and they are taking the heat for it.
> Only if you try to package it and sell it en masse.
Ryujinx wasn't being sold, it was being given away for free.
> Someone else distributed a tool that can be argued as used to bypass copyright
By this logic your entire computer is a tool to bypass copyright. An emulator is just a virtual machine, it doesn't contain any games or other copyrighted material. They are legal, despite Nintendo's mafioso scare tactics.
"packaged and distributed en masses" is you want to be nitpicky. I don't get to get away with dealing illegal substances just because I give it away for free. Money simply puts a target on my back.
>your entire computer is a tool to bypass copyright
Reducto ad absurdum doesn't really work here. There are specific scopes and use cases taken into consideration when considering what tools or works are bypassing copyright. I cant claim Yuzu is the same as VMware in their use cases (especially when VMware had to work with Microsoft to have that be allowed. And why it can't legally distribute Mac OS Tom's freely).
I must ask you to please stop commenting all over this thread if you have such demonstrably little idea what you're talking about.
> You can't ignore the entire idea of intellectual property just because you have a physical disc or cartridge in your possession. There are arguments to be made against IP but this is just lazy.
But IP law says nothing about interaction with already-existing copies. This just isn't about copyright at all.
Thanks to the DMCA's anti circumvention provisions, it is sort of about copyright
IP law more or less "worked" in the 20th century because of the first sale doctrine. Removing that is what led to the dystopian situation today.
Okay, so how do you plug a proprietary Switch cart into a PC to play your “already-existing copy” on an emulator?
MIG Flash Dumper
You mean the one that Nintendo crushed and now has details on everyone who bought (or at least ordered) one?
Sure those are just flying around where anyone can grab one.
If you have a 1st hardware generation Switch you have all the dumping hardware you require anyway.
Huh? Last I checked you can still order them off AliExpress without an issue. And I highly doubt that Nintendo would go after the thousands of people who bought one after the big MIG Switch announcements.
That doesn’t fit the bill, as it seems to only be for “making backup copies”, not interfacing directly with an emulator.
You can play your backup on the emulator, and you can even make these backup through a modded Switch.
There have been tools built to do this, which Nintendo abused IP law to shut down.
isnt this basically piracy enabling technology? its good n all that people take the stance they will only use it for their legitimately owned copies but thats not the reality. people dump stuff and spread it around, and others play illegal copies. its much more rare for people to use such tech legitimately than the other clearly illegal case...
Ope, we'd better ban CD burners, Xerox machines, 3D printers, EPROM burners, VCRs, and DAT tape decks because they're pIrAcY eNaBlInG tEcHnOlOgY!!!!!!
That's not how any of this works.
It's how the DMCA works though, if the media has any DRM on it.
No it's not. You can't just say "SOME PEOPLE ARE USING THIS FOR PIRACY SO NOBODY SHOULD BE ALLOWED TO USE THIS LEGALLY". That's _not_ how it works and there are many court cases on point here.
The legal uses as well as the plausible fair uses need to be evaluated before you can say "nope, this has gotta go".
Nintendo's latest legal argument against emulators does rest on the DMCA's anti-circumvention provision. The letter from Nintendo to Valve in the Dolphin case makes it pretty clear.
> You can't just say "SOME PEOPLE ARE USING THIS FOR PIRACY SO NOBODY SHOULD BE ALLOWED TO USE THIS LEGALLY"
That is in fact how many court cases are resolved.
>The legal uses as well as the plausible fair uses need to be evaluated before you can say "nope, this has gotta go".
what "fair uses" do we really have to stand on? "I can play Nintendo games better on my PC"? Are you a university or organization trying to preserve software?
At the end of the day, video games as a whole are not a societal need. So it becomes hard to make some argument against having IP owners not clamp down on entertainment intended to make money.
The LoC can issue exemptions, sort of, but it has to be renewed every three years, and they don't actually apply to circumvention devices themselves, only to users.
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/10/victory-users-libraria...
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/11/new-dmca-ss1201-exempt...
> That's _not_ how it works and there are many court cases on point here.
Those court cases were overridden by Congress... when they passed the DMCA.
Under the DMCA, IT IS A CRIME to:
1) circumvent an "effective" copyright measure for any purpose, except specific, delineated purposes and cases which must be approved and reapproved by the Librarian of Congress every 3 years;
2) traffic in the means or technology to so circumvent a copy protection measure, with no exceptions.
The definition of "effective" is so weak that it applies to anything, even a bit of JavaScript that intercepts right click so you can't "Save Image As". It basically means, would the copy protection measure prevent copying "during the normal course of its operation". I.e., if it's buggy, employs weak crypto, or is otherwise trivially defeated, too bad. You can still catch federal time for breaking it.
In order for a Switch emulator to work properly, the copy protection on the game must be defeated. So even if you dump it yourself and a court somehow rules that copy to be fair use, YOU ARE STILL COMMITTING A CRIME by the very act of dumping it. Therefore, it is illegal to run a Switch emulator to play legitimate Switch games, irrespective of whether those games are "legal" copies or not. And a court may rule that Switch emulators are illegal to distribute as well, since they only have illegal uses.
I am not a lawyer, so I recommend you find yourself a good one if you want to mess around with Switch emulation. Best bet is to not get involved with it at all. Forget about preservation. The Switch and its games are not yours to preserve.
If an emulator isn't actually enabling the circumvention (the DRM has already been circumvented) it does seem a serious stretch to apply it to them.
I wouldn't want to have to pay lawyers to litigate that, mind you...
How does an after fact of someone's supposed illegal activity become itself illegal in a case like this? Especially in Brazil if I'm assuming correctly.
I never heard of a case declaring a non-circumvent tool to be illegal just because it may indirectly rely on people dumping it first. If so, then even project64 would be illegal too as bypassing a physical cartridge was ruled to also bypass copy protection.
Also the tool was in another specific country, which I heard doesn't have copy protection laws so the idea that it itself becomes illegal because of the actions in another country sounds even more silly.
I am not a lawyer by the way.
Well maybe, if you have the time and the money to make a fair use defense in court...
It is not the entirety of how it works but determining the primary intended use case of a technology is part of how it works.
Sure, but primary intent is open to interpretation too.
Dig down deep enough and you'll find the very core of computers is about making copies. Colloquially we speak about moving data across memory or transferring it over a network swap a buffer to disk, but that's not what happens. We make copies and often, but not always, abandon the original.
So it's always been kind of hair splitting to discern between different kinds of copying. Piracy and fair use, owning a software vs having a license to use it - it's a gray area.
>primary intent is open to interpretation too.
and I wager about a million kids, people who can't afford games, or just self-righteous pirates are the ones who engage in copying data. Primary intent can be warped by consumer usage, even if the original ideals were noble (see: Bitcoin).
That's probably why some philantropist doesn't want to try and challenge matters like DMCA. It may only make things worse.
with scanner and printer i printed material for my school colleagues in the german version of highschool, because they could not afford some of the specialized books.
i do not say, piracy is always okay, but the intended use is VERY MUCH open to debate, depending on the view point and the money.
and even more volatile, if much money can influence the societal debate and the law system.
many people are very much we-trust-authority-and-companies-to-do-nothing-wrong.
>i do not say, piracy is always okay, but the intended use is VERY MUCH open to debate, depending on the view point and the money.
I completely agree with this POV. But it also seems like we always get an influx of users who want to unironically destroy (not simply readjust) the idea of IP and copyright everytime topics like this occur. So it can be hard to navigate a discussion like this where some people have such radical mindsests to begin with (and usually not anything resembling a model for their plan)
>many people are very much we-trust-authority-and-companies-to-do-nothing-wrong.
yes, I get that a lot just because I want to simply limit copyright terms down to its original 14/14 terms instead of the absurd 95 years or soemthing, or remove it entirely. 28 years happens to be most of a traditional career, so it seems fair for creators to benefit from their creation for assumedly the rest of their career and a bit into retirement before throwing it out for the public for others to iterate on.
The general idea of "well companies can pay to license it out" hasn't worked out to well in hindsight. Lots of companies will happily sit on projects for years, decades, because sometimes denying others of a project is better than giving it out. I'd also be interested in some sort of "use it or lose it" clause of maybe 10 years or so to prove you have an actual proudct in production before an IP goes into the public domain. It'd also solve those weird licensing hells we run into as companies shut down, but I also see a few obvious loopholes to close.
Is it a coincidence every one of those pieces of tech have been under controversy? Yes, companies have been against easily copying their works for decades, and the laws are wishy washy until someone angry enough to challenge it rises up.
But odds are, if you have that kind of money you benefit from keeping it vauge.
That is exactly why on some countries there is an additional copy tax on that stuff.
Spain and Portugal. We hate the Spanish RIAA a lot (SGAE, sociedad general de autores y editores, I think it doesn't need a translation).
In a way, to me, this makes it “more legal” to rip copyright material as I’m forced to pay for it on every HD, usb, etc. i understand it’s not, but if you are going to force me to pay a tax on any storage device, then I might as well get my value out of it.
And France, Germany, and a couple of others.
If people used emulators for homebrew there wouldn’t be much of a fuss about it. But they don’t, they use emulators for piracy.
It doesn’t matter if it has legitimate uses if 50%+ of the information online is about piracy and game dumping.
Nintendo is gonna care and they’re gonna try to stop these things, so long as their primary use is piracy. It doesn’t matter that there are legitimate and legal use cases. There are zero people writing homebrew of any real value for any console platform newer than the SNES as far as I’m aware. There are lots and lots of toy applications in homebrew stores but nothing serious. LOTS of detailed and useful info about how to pirate games, though.
> and game dumping.
Your argument is that legally purchasing a game and playing that in an emulator is piracy?
No, my argument is that the information on the web is about how to pirate games, no matter how it is couched in the tool documentation.
The case for homebrew is in the homebrew software that is available, and all of the homebrew software that I have ever seen is absolute shite. Toy programs and simple SDK test tools, nothing of value other than the 3rd party SDKs themselves.
It does not matter if you make a legitimate backup copy of a cart you own for safekeeping, emulation of legitimately owned copies of retail games is not an exemption of the DMCA.
It doesn’t matter if you own a copy of the game, making a copy for any reason is not in accordance with the DMCA, as far as I’m aware. Exemptions to the DMCA are granted every few years, and some exemptions are rescinded at the same time. Copying game cartridges has never been an exemption.
And even if it was, you can’t put your copy back onto a legitimate blank cartridge to regain playability if the original is destroyed.
It’s a shitty situation to be sure, and it is wholly unfair. Blame gamers who are “morally opposed” to paying for games that they play. There are a lot of them, and they play a lot of games, and are often popular streamers on YouTube and Twitch.
If people stopped pirating games so much, the homebrew and legitimate use people would have a solid defense and maybe even support in government, but the amount of piracy that goes on absolutely dwarfs legitimate uses of unlocked hardware.
I personally am fascinated with Nintendo hardware and the choices made when they design their systems, and despite repeated efforts to get a Switch dev kit, I have been denied approval time and time again. I have no interest in piracy, I have interest in hardware platforms. But I am in the extremely small minority with that focus.
If piracy slows somewhat dramatically, Nintendo won’t be able to do this with impunity like they do today. They will simply not have a leg to stand on when they say emulators are purely piracy mechanisms. But today, they really are.
How many new games come out for the SNES every year? How many SNES emulators are there under active development? Are you going to say that all of those emulators and all of that time spent making them and perfecting them, making them cycle-perfect is done so that 1-2 games can come out every 1-2 years? EMULATORS ARE PRIMARILY USED FOR PIRACY.
Until that changes, Nintendo will keep doing this.
Selling a tool designed to circumvent DRM, even to make backups, seems straightforwardly illegal under the DMCA? I'm not sure that counts as an abuse of the law...
Using it to shut down emulators that don't help you circumvent DRM does seem like an abuse, though.
IP is an obsolete idea of a bygone century
it arose from a legitimate answer to material scarcity, but it's nonesense in the digital space
people who advocate for IP and DRM and all such thing are in the end advocating for scarcity.
So your position is that almost nobody who sells their content should be able to make a living doing that?
You either must be able to fund it through ads, host it on platform which make piracy effectively impossible and/or impractical like Apple's App Store, YouTube etc. or be independently wealthy and just do it as a hobby?
e.g. screw all the authors who are writing books, Amazon should just be able to distribute (or sell for some "convenience" fee) books to everyone who has a Kindle without paying anything to them? That (which would be the logical outcome of nothing having no IP protection) certainly sounds like a reasonable opinion..
In practice I agree with your points, but it's also important to consider that the open source model is alive, well and is directly and indirectly at the heart of employing many people. I won't make the argument that society is willing or could switch to that model successfully, but I also wouldn't be willing to say it couldn't work, either.
> consider that the open source model is alive
Not everything revolves around software.
Also even then OSS generally seems to only be universally successful in areas where software is a "cost centre" i.e. companies are willing to invest into it when it makes it cheaper for them run their business than building/buying proprietary stuff or they build their products on top of it (A but almost never when it's the actual end product targeted at consumers.
And if we extend the definition of software to video games, OS is not even a thing there (besides middleware of course which falls into the previous category).
Throwing away these abused IP laws wouldn't prevent creators from making a living off their art.
Plenty of ways for artist to monetize. Selling a copy of the art is one way, very cherished by publishers. Creators for the most part don't make money off copy distribution of their art. That was the case with physical copies, still the case with online distribution.
The good old "let's protect the artists" is a fallacy. It's only to protect publishers and distributors. These IP laws, at least their interpretation acts against the public interest, creators included.
Other forms of monetisation of art? Performance, training and teaching, patronage, custom requests, etc.
Ask Taylor Swift where most of her money is coming from, that's not from Spotify.
Piracy is product of artificial scarcity, people pirate mostly because it is easier and more convenient than the legitimate counterpart, music piracy almost disappeared when convenient streaming services appeared, same for movies until studios decided that they wanted “cable tv 2.0” Make something as easy as pirating and people will pay for it.
Convenient streaming services do not pay musicians a living wage for their work. It's basically still ripping them off.
other sources of revenue exist, lot of creators get their revenue through donation, either one time or recurring (monthly, yearly, by release).
On another level, we could pivot to UBI instead of dedicating ressource to enforce fake scarcity.
> other sources of revenue exist > revenue through donation
So what? Not everyone wants to engage in all of the PR/marketing stuff that's necessary to make any money from that and it would still generally result in significantly lower revenue.
> On another level, we could pivot to UBI instead of dedicating
And fund it how exactly? Even if that were sustainable why do you think that content creators should be fully content living of UBI + a few pennies in donations while people working in most other industries should be able to money the same way they previously did?
IP protection (even if often implemented in a suboptimal way which of course should be improved) have been one of the primaries force behind human progress over that last 300+ years.
> Not everyone wants to engage in all of the PR/marketing stuff that's necessary to make any money from that
That's not a difference, PR/Marketing is already used to profit over IP work.
> Even if that were sustainable why do you think that content creators should be fully content living of UBI + a few pennies in donations while people working in most other industries should be able to money the same way they previously did?
This is assuming creators are fully content on how stuff work now, and I'm betting that's not the case for the vast majority, most of them cannot make end meets with the current system, regardless of how hard they work on their book/song/game/etc, and they have to have a side job just to put food on the table.
> IP protection (even if often implemented in a suboptimal way which of course should be improved) have been one of the primaries force behind human progress over that last 300+ years.
That's a bold claim. Most of, if not all, human progress on this period is directly attributable to the use of fossil fuel, from the steam engine to the modern use of it, and how it empowered us to do so much more with less human-hour.
What do you say to people who want to stop using Open Source software licences and instead use 'Fair Source' licences intended to prevent cloud companies monetising the works of others?
For instance, here's discussion about a blog post titled So you want to compete with or replace open source https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40993787
With no copyright, it would be akin to using permissive BSD-style licensing, which is by no means everyone's preference.
I don't agree with them, but i haven't seen the argument being pro scarcity. To steelman it, the argument is that without these protections the incentive to create is lower so we actually will have more scarcity
I can run legally an mp3 through a calculator. No one can dictate otherwise - it's my machine, and purchased media to do with as I (privately) please. This does not interfere with copyright. To legislate otherwise would be insane - as that would effectively legislate your ability to calculate.
This argument extends to any purchased media, to any program.
If your mp3 is copy protected and your calculator bypasses that copy protection, it is in fact illegal (in the US)
There is no such thing as an mp3 being copy protected. A game on a cartridge is not "copy protected" either.
Such a translation would be "format shifting" which is protected under US/UK law (IANAL).
The US AHRA requires serial copy management (SCMS or an equivalent) when using format shifting to digital media. Nobody bothers to follow that part of the law and it seems to have never been enforced.
I think you are correct in the case of an actual MP3 file and calculator.
I was thinking they were metaphorical.
Not just a mp3 file. any media you have purchased can be format shifted by you for archive/personal purposes. regardless of DRM/copy protections. What is illegal is redistribution (thus the copyright).
Again: ianal. But this is kind of a fundamental right. If you own something, it's yours to do with privately as you wish. If you don't own the copyright, then you can't redistribute.
The DMCA makes breaking DRM illegal, even when done for fair use purposes, if it doesn't fall into a small number of tightly-defined exceptions. And they can go after tools that enable people to do this, as well (think of DeCSS for example).
unless i’m mistaken, nobody is telling you what to do with your media.
the issue at play here would be whether the emulator publishers/developers have the right to publish what is almost certainly an infringing piece of software, which courts have repeatedly determined they do not.
How is an emulator infringing on the copyrights of Nintendo?
While an emulator does not infringe on copyright and is illegal per US court precedence, an emulator being available is a large part of what makes copyright infringement popular and as such it is related.
Adding in the DMCAs anti-circumvention provisions and the fact that you have to violate them to emulate a modern console, the whole thing becomes very nuanced and tightly linked to copyright infringement despite not directly infringing.
Explaining that emulators can be used in concert with copyright infringement does not explain what right a copyright holder has over emulators.
That merely explains why Nintendo doesn't like them, not why anyone should care that they don't like them.
Cars may be used to commit bank robberies, yet banks have no rights over cars.
> That merely explains why Nintendo doesn't like them, not why anyone should care that they don't like them
I don't think it has been tested in courts yet but the general idea is that you have to violate the DMCA to use a switch emulator, so people making switch emulators are making tools to help people circumvent the switch's copy protection.
Which is also a violation of the DMCA.
Like I said, it is nuanced.
>While an emulator does not infringe on copyright and is illegal per US court precedence
At least until Nintendo manages to overturn Sony v. Connectix, given recent SCOTUS trends.
Emulating consoles that are no longer sold makes some sense.
Emulating a console that already exists just feels wrong. Even if technically in the right.
And it's hard to ignore, even when the emulator is in the right, 100% legal, 99.99% of people will simply be pirating their roms.
Well if we're going to dive into morality, requiring me to produce additional pollution and e-waste to run your program when I have a perfectly capable turing machine already is unconscionable.
Nintendo: Put your games on steam. Let me buy them without killing the planet.
Apple: License your damn operating system for running on non-apple hardware. Hell, just let me legally run it in an virtual machine so I can test my scripts on your OS without killing the planet.
Nintendo's primary competitive advantage in the gaming space is it's expertise in hardware and tight integration of self-published games. Nintendo would have to fundamentally change it's business model and alter the design of their games (and consequently the unique appeal of them) in order to fit your demand.
You are right about Apple though, simply allowing people to install their OS on other hardware for personal use would not impact their market strategy in any significant way.
I'd argue the success of the switch emulators proves their games can be successful without changes in the PC space. I'd certainly agree with you when it came to Wii-era games since that had the unusual controller[0] but the switch is a pretty standard controller.
[0] Which they could have sold as first-party PC accessories, further capitalizing on the PC market
> Well if we're going to dive into morality, requiring me to produce additional pollution and e-waste to run your program when I have a perfectly capable turing machine already is unconscionable.
This is not obvious to me - I would be interested in reading more about the ethical considerations here, if you or anyone else has any good links.
Links for what? The environmental damage of producing electronics?
- Apple has a report for the environmental impact of an iphone, 81% of the carbon emissions is from the production of the device [0]
- In addition to the whole global warming thing, there's the health impact [1].
So here I am, typing this message out on a perfectly capable universal turing machine. But in order to run <nintendo game> I have to incur that 81% carbon emissions again to buy a different universal turing machine from Nintendo. One that will, after a few years, get thrown into the back of a closet where it will accumulate dust until one day I haul it down to electronics recycling where it can continue its journey poisoning the children.
Its a simple matter of 1 device is less bad than 2.
I disagree. In my case I want to play some of my legally acquired games in ways that were not possible on the original hardware. High FPS, widescreen support, VR, mods. I also want to play my games in a way that's convenient for me, like not having to hook up my console over its own dedicated HDMI. There's more to emulation than just piracy, it opens up a whole field of possibilities for the software.
Even so, there is no difference between games from the 80s and games released last week from the perspective of copyright law, which usually works in Nintendo's favor.
>disturb people in their ownership of their purchased property
It's a nice utopic view, but I'd be surprised if more than 10% of the games emulated are also owned by the user. I'd be surprised if more than half the people using emulators ever owned a Switch to begin with.
>Anyone who really thinks about this topic will start questioning why some company located on an island on the other side of the world should be dictating what I do or don't do with a cartridge or disc I paid for with my own money and which is in my possession.
They don't really. If you made Ryujinx or Yuzu and kept it to yourself and maybe a few close friends, they'd never know nor care. But things get complicated when you post it on the public internet.
>This is why it's important to claw back as much ownership in that space as possible. If you want things to move in the right direction, you should sign https://www.stopkillinggames.com/eci if you're an EU citizen, or support them in any other way if you're not.
I dont think even the EU wants to touch the matter of emulation. Precisely because they may discover many emulator users are pirates.
Apple doesn’t need any laws to enforce the following:
- you can’t pirate App Store IAP
- you can’t pirate Apple News
- you can’t pirate Apple Arcade
- you can’t pirate iCloud storage and you can’t upgrade phone storage space from anyone but Apple, and therefore the amount of data you can practicably store in the iOS ecosystem
- it’s impracticable to pirate App Store apps
Okay, that’s like 90% of Apple services revenue.
Is Apple the only company allowed to make money? That’s kind of what your position is: “the only permissible limitations are the ones that cannot be surmounted technologically.” Why should the law be toothless in copyright protections, but not in other things? Because that is a Pro Apple position in disguise.
The law should have teeth and should say that DRM is actually illegal, or at the very least that circumventing it is legal.
No matter how ludicrously long Disney manages to get copyright terms extended to, copyright does still expire, and there are even other exceptions such accessibility and military and emergency usage that trump copyright.
But encryption never expires and does not care if it would save someones life to use some product in some unusual situation, so, it should either be illegal to sell an encrypted audiobook that can never be decrypted even 100 years later when it is public domain, or at the very least, if it is to be legal to produce such a thing, then the trade-off is it is at least legal for anyone else to try to overcome it.
How could drm risk anyone's life? I don't know but it isn't just protecting a movie from playing, it's baked into the hardware of devices and makes the entire device non-functional, like HDCP making a display not-display.
Maybe a pdf has critical emergency information like how to sanitize water during an natural disater or war, or identify if a berry is safe or poisonous, but the only pdf you have happened to come from an expensive college course so you can't read it. Contrived examples will always sound contrived and dismissable but no particular example matters. The principle holds even without any examples. If a tv can fail to tv, then forget about if tvs are important, what matters is a tool can be arbitrarily and artificially rendered non-functional.
The law should absolutely have teeth, but it should say something other than what it currently does, and have the teeth to enforce that.
> ultimately this is just another corporation trying to disturb people in their ownership of their purchased property, in specific video games.
Is it reasonable to assume the majority of Ryujinx users merely emulate Switch games they legally own? That only a minority uses the emulator to play pirated Switch games?
I don’t know why you are being downvoted. Of course emulators are being used to play pirated games.
Yeah. It's a bummer because I actually own the games and just want to play them at 4k60 rather than on the weak HW of the Switch. But I understand why Nintendo would target emulators of a _current gen console_.
To say that this is solely an attack on law abiding folks who own the game is... being willfully ignorant because you don't want to accept that a large percentage of installs are doing so for piracy.
Of course it's not solely an attack on law abiding folks who own the game. But is is an attack on them nonetheless. Its also an attack on open source, software freedom, and digital preservation. Further, assuming there were legal threats involved, its an abuse of the legal system to harass open source developers working on perfectly legal software. Emulators are also direct competition to Nintendo's hardware, so you could see this as an anti-competitive move as well. There are lots of problems with this, and they're only mostly Nintendo's fault.
It's also important to remember that emulators exist without ROMs.
All the code that's in an emulator isn't infringing on any Nintendo's IP -- it's re-implementing Nintendo's hardware interface.
That it can be used to make piracy easier is unfortunately, but isn't really the emulator developers' concern, given...
There are substantial, legal, non-infringing uses.
In most legal jurisdictions, thankfully you can't ban something useful just because it might be used to commit a crime.
But what if it is mainly used to commit a crime?
I feel like the blame mostly lies on people who pirate games. It's a sort of tragedy of the commons. We could have a better world (Nintendo not caring if we play switch games we bought at 4k60 on a PC) but people who pirate games mucked it up.
Could be an organization issue, when I think of a Nintendo Switch it should be organized under Bh not Gh. Especially with an emulator which doesn’t get updates from Nintendo.
> it's not a DMCA, it's not an issue with GitHub.
glaring omission of the statement "it's not an issue with Nintendo". they have a reputation for relentlessly pursuing the creators of homebrew/emu projects like this. sometimes even going as far as contracting operatives to stalk hobby devs living outside of Japan. look up "nintendo ninjas"...
It was indeed Nintendo. They released a statement about 50 minutes ago that the lead developer "agreed to stop working on the project" after speaking with Nintendo.
Nice career you have there. Be a shame if something happened to it.
I get the message but this is one of those things where you should have YOUR explanation ready before you pause everything...
Granted that's understandable if they didn't choose the timeline.
It's hard to blame a hobby group for not having a perfect comms strategy.
It's still true, though. If they really don't want people to speculate on why they did something, they can provide a reason. It doesn't require an entire PR team to figure that out.
They may have been hit by something entirely unexpected and may still need to get their bearings. "It's not github, it's not a DCMA takedown." may very well be the only thing they can communicate with a modicum of certainty at this moment.
If what you say may have legal implications, it might be wiser to just say "no comments" for some time, while seeking proper counseling.
"Not DMCA" and "not GitHub" is plenty already. But maybe it's a possible malware infiltration, or having something unbecoming committed to the repo by mistake, or anything else that might warrant denying public access for some time to prevent damage.
There are a million reasons not to say something, and a blush of legal anything should deter you from opening your mouth in public before you're straight with a lawyer.
I think protecting themselves from being sued into oblivion is more important than getting a message out to users an hour earlier. We don't have any form of SLA agreement with Ryujinx
Also the project is being shut down. Why should they care about community reaction?
If and only if this was their intent and timeline. May be external.
This, a hundred times over. It turns out that communication isn't entirely a bullshit field of study* and it requires significant planning and effort to keep people happy.
* note: all fields have bullshit; this is a recent learning of mine -- unlearning, rather, of a single day of a communications class which left me with the impression that many of us here seem to have of soft sciences: all bullshit by default.
RE: Update 3 (gdkchan being "encouraged" to step down)
I'm mostly just surprised it took Nintendo this long to make a move - the Switch is on its last legs, its successor is less than a year away and almost certainly won't be hacked for a good while. Acting in a way that's bound to piss everyone off but doing it so late that the upside to them is minimal (there won't be that many more new Switch games to pirate at this point) is a weird unforced error. Lawyers move in mysterious ways I guess.
I would assume the launch of the Switch successor is why they are clamping down. It's likely very similar architecturally to the Switch. Nobody knows how long it would take to hack it, someone could be silently sitting on an exploit that they've been saving to see if it'll work on the successor. In the event it's hacked quickly and there are still actively developed Switch emulators, it wouldn't be a stretch to believe support would quickly be added to those emulators for the successor.
> Acting in a way that's bound to piss everyone off but doing it so late that the upside to them is minimal ... is a weird unforced error.
This describes their response to Palworld (the Pokemon-"inspired" game that they're suing now) too. When Palworld came out, everyone was talking about how it blatantly copied things and how surprised they are that Nintendo is doing nothing. Now, after several months of people playing Palworld and many of them enjoying it, Nintendo is suddenly choosing to sue them. And predictably, the general response is a lot more negative now, with people having a lot more positive associations with Palworld and having gotten used to assuming that it's here-to-stay.
> Lawyers move in mysterious ways I guess.
Indeed. The timeline to build a case doesn't necessarily align with the business profit goals (like in the Switch case) nor with the public relations goals (like in the Palworld case).
Do you think the average joe who owns a Switch or is a potential client for their next console, is even aware of any of this happening? This is the tiniest of stories. The only way the public at large can become aware of emulators is if they hit a big app store.
So as far as timing of this move goes, it's as good a time as any to "protect what's theirs".
In case anyone's curious about Nintendo's general MO (not sure how similar this case is) around 10 years ago they successfully prevented someone from publishing a method to run arbitrary code on the 3DS using an NDA and the threat of legal action. Here's some documents detailing their approach: https://archive.org/details/Knock_And_Talk_directcontact/Kno...
Given that Ryujinx is open source, I wonder what rights other OSS contributors have? Surely there's nothing stopping another fork from continued development provided nothing illegal is happening.
Even if you think/"know" the project to be 100% legit do you want to be the OSS contributor that spends the next year or two in court fighting Nintendo about it or did you just like writing some emulator code once in a while in your spare time?
A threat is not a natural 'agreement'.
Interesting, I wonder if this means that they got paid.
I mean it's hard to imagine this being anything other than the worst.
Wow. When yuzu was taken down I wrote a script to automatically download the 5 latest releases of a few other emulators I use, and that included Ryujinx (so I do have the binaries for those, which will go into safekeeping).
Now I wish I had set up a Gitea mirror as well, even though I would likely never build it myself.
Edit: here's the script - https://gist.github.com/rcarmo/89afd64747fc909e80b29abc902c8...
It is designed to be very low impact (I had it on a daily cron).
Feel free to use it to ensure you can preserve the software you rely on. As far as I'm concerned, I'm _very_ sad that Nintendo has now made it impossible to enjoy my games on better hardware, and will probably focus on PC gaming henceforth (there are lots of nice indie games on Steam, like Dredge, which is my current favorite).
Do forks go away together with the original repository when it's removed from Github?
In this case it seems so, someone just uploaded the codebase again (archived): https://github.com/emmauss/Ryujinx
5 years out of date though, it would seem.
Codebase, but no releases...
Edit: I guess I'm wrong, see reply
If a repository is removed by Github in response to a DMCA request, yes.
(But it's not clear that that's what happened here.)
The forks aren't actually automatically taken down in most cases. The claimant must list every individual fork in the claim. Which I love, because it's kind of petty but still following the DMCA to the letter.
Here is an example[1] of the form claimants must fill out.
> Each fork is a distinct repository and must be identified separately if you believe it is infringing and wish to have it taken down
[1]: https://github.com/github/dmca/blob/master/2024/05/2024-05-3...
IIRC it took them a couple months to get through all of the Yuzu forks after the initial DMCA and lawsuit. I doubt there were nearly as many forks of Ryujinx, though.
Depends on which type of removal they do, but they can be yes.
I actually do have a private gitea mirror setup after the yuzu takedown.
Doesn't matter what the reason is this time.
Next time it will undoubtedly be DMCA considering what happened to Yuzu. This is the perfect case for some sort of decentralized Git[1] or a Git repo via Tor.
[1] https://radicle.xyz
Probably worth reminding that this is the project where the backing company is centered around crypto/blockchain, but they pinkie promise it will never affect this work!
https://radicle.xyz/faq
Radworks, the organization that has been financing Radicle is organized around the RAD token which is a governance token on Ethereum.
It gives off the same odor as Tea did, for me personally.
[flagged]
I'm doing my part!
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> is the perfect case for some sort of decentralized Git
This is exactly what git is made to be without any extra tooling on top.
AFAIK git doesn’t concern itself with discoverability, which is presumably what OP means. Sure, if you already know the IP address of someone hosting a git repo you can pull it. But that’s not really a decentralized service (or not any more decentralized than downloading stuff from a known host via HTTPS).
What happened to Yuzu was that they took money to help people pirate a brand new game. I don't think that's a reasonable take.
The popular narrative seems to be that Yuzu had something to do and/or profited in some way from the Zelda Tears of the Kingdom leak, which isn't true. The Patreon-only Early Access builds could not play the game any more than the public Nightly builds could. Both versions needed an unofficial game patch for the game to launch, a patch which the Yuzu developers had nothing to do with. Yuzu developers also did not implement or work on any bug fixes involving the game before its official release. Perhaps you were alluding to something else, though.
I thought they were sharing Nintendo encryption keys that are "technically" supposed to be from the Switch you're emulating. People were using Yuzu to turn their Steamdeck into a Switch and using Yuzu's private discord to get the keys needed to do that.
It's the same reason other emulators ask you to bring your own BIOS file because that is proprietary.
AFAIK, they were explicitly not sharing those keys. You had to get your own. They provided instructions on how to copy them from your own hardware.
I thought that there was also speculation of people sharing ROMs directly on Discord, with the Yuzu admins being pretty ambivalent about the whole thing?
I only followed the story peripherally, so it's possible I'm wrong.
The Yuzu devs banned anyone even mentioning TotK in the Discord. However, they apparently had some private Discord or something where the Yuzu devs shared ROMs between themselves.
I'm a big advocate of emulation (and piracy, frankly) but yeah, honestly, painting the Yuzu developers as the victims is insane. How much were they pulling in via Patreon? $30,000 a month?
The lawsuits that effectively legalized console emulation in the 90s were commercial products, enabling you to play PlayStation games on your PC or DreamCast
There’s even a video of Steve Jobs showing off Connectix on the Ma..
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bleem!
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Sony_Computer_E...
What's wrong with getting money out of a product? The fact that it was an emulator changes nothing. They would have been sued, Patreon or no Patreon. Making an emulator is not illegal. And I don't mean gray-area not illegal, I mean court-precedent not illegal.
Does the Nintendo-Tropic Haze settlement not count as court precedent? It was signed off by a judge after all.
A settlement does not imply guilt or create legal precedent (AFAIK IAMNAL LOL).
>they took money to help people pirate a brand new game
That is where they went wrong
> court-precedent not illegal
Under precedents established before the DMCA was law, and under lawsuits filed before the DMCA was applicable, on consoles which did not have encryption on which the DMCA would have applied.
Correct, but the DMCA has an explicit exception for this kind of thing.
> Correct, but the DMCA has an explicit exception for this kind of thing.
That has never been examined or declared, as the DMCA exemptions are much narrower than they appear. The reverse engineering exemption, for example, does not cover the right to make a product that interfaces with the original - only to examine the technology to build your own product.
An obvious example of this is DVDs, which have the same exemptions. The US PTO, and the US Librarian of Congress (who has the power to make DMCA exemptions) are unequivocally clear that a private copying exemption does not exist in their view. This is also why the EFF has been begging every 3 years for the last... two decades... to make such an exemption, and has failed.
The reversing clause doesn't, but the law does.
It's "declared" specifically in the Act, here:
(1)Notwithstanding the provisions of subsection (a)(1)(A), a person who has lawfully obtained the right to use a copy of a computer program may circumvent a technological measure that effectively controls access to a particular portion of that program for the sole purpose of identifying and analyzing those elements of the program that are necessary to achieve interoperability of an independently created computer program with other programs, and that have not previously been readily available to the person engaging in the circumvention, to the extent any such acts of identification and analysis do not constitute infringement under this title.
(2)Notwithstanding the provisions of subsections (a)(2) and (b), a person may develop and employ technological means to circumvent a technological measure, or to circumvent protection afforded by a technological measure, in order to enable the identification and analysis under paragraph (1), or for the purpose of enabling interoperability of an independently created computer program with other programs, if such means are necessary to achieve such interoperability, to the extent that doing so does not constitute infringement under this title.
(3)The information acquired through the acts permitted under paragraph (1), and the means permitted under paragraph (2), may be made available to others if the person referred to in paragraph (1) or (2), as the case may be, provides such information or means solely for the purpose of enabling interoperability of an independently created computer program with other programs, and to the extent that doing so does not constitute infringement under this title or violate applicable law other than this section.
Let's say your interpretation holds water even though I, and the EFF in their handbook [https://www.eff.org/pages/unintended-consequences-fifteen-ye...], and the US legal system just a few months ago [https://www.pearlcohen.com/court-upholds-dmcas-anti-circumve...], do not believe is correct. (It's easy to be an armchair lawyer - if you read the first amendment out of context, threatening to kill someone seems protected.)
Nintendo may potentially argue that yes, you are completely right. You have the right to interoperability, in the sense that you are allowed to make a device which physically takes Switch cards, decrypts them, plays them, from the original card, does not copy it to storage media of any kind, and does not allow the user any semblance of a DRM bypass, or any way to resell the original card while maintaining a copy. Interoperability is for building CD players, not CD rippers.
EDIT TO REPLY FOR "POSTING TOO FAST": Section 117 is very clever, except there's one problem: It was created in 1980, before the DMCA. Thus, if there is a conflict between the DMCA and Section 117, the DMCA is likely to receive the benefit of the doubt. As such, Section 117 is only effective for demonstrating the legality of copying non encrypted programs, or (as an actual lawyer put it), copying a program with the DRM remaining intact, as useless as that is.
Combine my point about interoperability in the courtroom + Section 117 likely being overruled by Section 1201 of the later DMCA which is extremely restrictive on bypassing "technological protection measures" copied or not, and it's not a clear win.
> Let's say your interpretation holds water even though I, and the EFF in their handbook [https://www.eff.org/pages/unintended-consequences-fifteen-ye...], and the US legal system just a few months ago [https://www.pearlcohen.com/court-upholds-dmcas-anti-circumve...], do not believe is correct.
The case you linked to has nothing to do with the interoperability exception. I don't know how they could reject my view if they never touched it.
Also
> Nintendo may potentially argue that yes, you are completely right. You have the right to interoperability, in the sense that you are allowed to make a device which physically takes Switch cards, decrypts them, plays them, from the original card, does not copy it to storage media of any kind, and does not allow the user any semblance of a DRM bypass, or any way to resell the original card while maintaining a copy.
And they would be right, if copyright law didn't have an additional exception...
17 U.S.C § 117 - Limitations on exclusive rights: Computer programs (a)Making of Additional Copy or Adaptation by Owner of Copy.—
Notwithstanding the provisions of section 106, it is not an infringement for the owner of a copy of a computer program to make or authorize the making of another copy or adaptation of that computer program provided:
(1)that such a new copy or adaptation is created as an essential step in the utilization of the computer program in conjunction with a machine and that it is used in no other manner, or
(2)that such new copy or adaptation is for archival purposes only and that all archival copies are destroyed in the event that continued possession of the computer program should cease to be rightful.
Reply to your edit:
That's what the first exception in the DMCA itself is for. It provides that:
1. You can manually decrypt DRM'd content if it's software you own a legal copy of and you need to run it.
2. You can make an automated tool that does step 1.
3. You can share that tool with anyone as long as they respect 1.
The DMCA DRM clauses only care about that, the DRM itself. Not whether you make a new copy of the content.
> painting the Yuzu developers as the victims is insane.
Hope you're not thinking I'm the painter here... I know they turned the thing into big business and I don't have a lot of understanding for that.
Realistically though, I expect Nintendo to find ways to wipe Ryujinx from Github and sue these developers too, considering people have turned to it now that Yuzu is gone.
The only way to escape that fate would be to maintain proper opsec, stay in the right jurisdiction and not rely on (DMCA sensitive) big tech platforms for the development.
EDIT: guess I was kind of right... Seems Nintendo succeeded with their goal: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41712399
There's nothing wrong with a team of people getting that much money to code an emulator.
>they took money to help people pirate a brand new game
That was the wrong part
Yeah, but that's not the comment I was responding to.
I understand the issue of making money drawing attention to the piracy they (supposedly?) participated in. But there is nothing wrong with the money they got for their development efforts. That money is not a counterpoint to them being victims, regardless of whether they actually are victims or not.
I doubt any meaningful amount of it went to piracy, if any. If that's wrong, then okay I'll change my mind.
And big citation needed that they had a money collection specifically for some instance of piracy.
But the comments you were replying too agreed with the point I quoted.
There is most likely a correlation between their Patreon donations and their helpfulness regarding games
Mandatory reminder as well, to the emulation community, that $30K a month is probably enough to fund a legal defense...
Perhaps not against Nintendo, but yes.
git already is decentralised. GitHub isn’t. But you can clone the git repository and mirror that as many places as you want.
git doesn't have discoverability or any kind of decentralized CDN service AFAIK.
None of that are requirements for a version control system, let alone a distributed one.
What people are after is a decentralised GitHub. Which I think is a good idea. But git itself is already built from the ground up to work decentralised.
So if someone were to build a decentralised discovery service for git, then you could take any existing git repository, whether it’s local copies on your laptop or “centralised” versions in GitHub, and use them equally as a seed.
git is decentralized and can be served across anything, including tor.
i think you don't know what decentralized means
You're conflating git with git forges. Most popular forges use a centralized model. Git was built as distributed from the start and it's original mode of collaboration was through a federated protocol.
Some sort of decentralized Git.
You mean Git?
I mean, nominally, but honestly how many of us actually use Git in a distributed fashion? I think most of us treat Git more or less like Subversion with local committing and much better merging.
I think what the person was referring to was something more along the lines of a DHT (e.g. Pastry or Kademlia), IPFS, or (as they mentioned) Tor, where it can be truly leaderless and owned by everyone and no one at the same time.
I think what they meant was GitHub, not Git.
A common conflation these days, and one GitHub works hard to reinforce.
Sure, but a vast majority of people who use Git will centralize it, with Gitlab, or Bitbucket, or SourceForge, even barring Github.
While the git program is allowed to be decentralized, pretty much everyone's workflow is decidedly not.
My niece tells me that decentralized Git is, well Git.
As far as a web interface to Git, she was saying the basic pieces are kinda already there with Gitea, and provided the following points:
- Gitea is a single executable, fairly easy to install at least on Linux (it does need a database), and while the configuration requires some time it's worth it for all that Gitea does - which is basically be a copy of Github.
- Gitea has a migration option which will literally pull in an entire Git repo with one click.
So my niece was telling me zany things like "why doesn't everyone run their own Gitea and simply cross migrate everything?" I don't know, I feel like it's dangerous and essentially providing easy tools and paraphernalia to potential evil doers, such as those who may want to infringe copyright, so this is an application I'll never host or run in my life.
YouTube accounts showing devices that emulate Nintendo games have been targeted recently as well
https://www.timeextension.com/news/2024/10/nintendo-is-now-g...
Ironically, this is the type of behavior that will make me STOP buying a company's products.
They're obviously doing this because they think their losing sales - which they probably are on net. But I wish more people would stop buying products from companies that try to ruins people's literal lives over - essentially - a rounding error to the company's bottom line.
I think this move hurts yourself more than the company. There are more level headed ways to go about it but this one ain’t it
I haven’t bought a Nintendo product in almost a decade. My life is better for it. Previously I avidly bought every MH, every Pokémon, would have bought the Digimon releases on Switch too. A fair portion of the recent Zeldas too. Nowadays I play pirated games on my 3DS and am quite happy, far happier than I had been paying Nintendo only to fuck over the things I enjoy. My impact may be small, but that hardly matters because at least I‘m putting my (lack of) money where my mouth is.
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Nintendo's success during the Switch era is completely orthogonal to their recent overly zealous litigation.
It is not recent, they have been like this for decades.
These projects really need to start standing up their own Gitea or Gitlab instances and mirroring to GitHub.
It also cracks me up every time I see legalistic apologists on this website backing up giant corporations.
A) Who cares about the law? It’s rarely moral. B) Which laws should we follow? The internet exists in every country.
I would bet serious money that this is because of the upcoming Switch 2. If the rumors are true, it could very much be like how the Dolphin emulator is able to run both Gamecube and Wii games because the system architectures are so similar. Nintendo wants to avoid a day-zero emulator for Switch 2.
And even if it wasn't a day-zero (or even several month in) Switch 2 emulator it's seeming like one of the big selling points of the new system is going to be "play your old Switch games on the new system, now in higher resolution" but it's a lot of bad press if that's still "play them in worse quality than emulators were 3 years before this hardware came out".
For clarity, Ryujinx has no connection to the Yuzu Switch emulator which Nintendo unleashed their wrath on earlier this year. They were developed independently of each other, by different people, in parallel until Yuzus demise.
If nintendo could come into your hoise and smash all your old games consoles so you buy thr rerelease, they would do it.
I was shocked to learn there was a short period in the '90s when even reselling your physical games was outlawed in Japan. At the time, Nintendo put "no resale" icons on the back of all their games.
Doesn't look to be DMCA'd see here for GitHub DMCA takedowns:
https://github.com/github/dmca
I wonder if they went after the maintainer directly.
I wouldn't be surprised if they showed up at the maintainer's house even.
According to the Discord, that’s exactly what they did.
Related:
Nintendo Is Now Going After YouTube Accounts Which Show Its Games Being Emulated https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41708771
Well that seals the deal, never buying a Nintendo product again. I’m sure I don’t matter to them but I’ll help friends and family get more into PC and retro gaming if they want to pick my brain.
I wonder how far this will go. Is Nintendo going to send a cease and desist for the MiSTer project?
Probably not, pretty much all those cores would be for machines where patents have fully expired, but who the hell knows?
Modern Vintage Gamer (MVG) has a video out already about this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A9JZW7hDBK8.
I always though switch emulation got too good too fast. Switch being such weak hardware you can emulate it on a potato. Nintendo must've been eyeing an angle to close Ryujinx for a while now.
It would be very interesting if the main dev actually got paid to delete everything. Although it looks like a "dick move" at first, if you know the source will live on and you get retirement money. I would be very pressed to accept if in that situation. Much more likely they just offered to not sue him to oblivion.
I honestly don't blame Nintendo for angling emulators with everything they have while the hardware is current. They have much shittier behaviour when interacting with the community, like suing tournaments that used mods and threatening others.
I'm wondering if the anticipated Switch 2 is going to be very similar to the current device in terms of architecture and OS, and the real concern of Nintendo isn't Switch 1 piracy right now, it's that the current Switch emulators could evolve into Switch 2 emulators in the early months/years of the new hardware lifecycle, emulators able to play ripped Switch 2 games well before anyone figures out how to mod the new hardware to enable piracy.
But they probably also want to re-sell us previous games, too, particularly if they can run 'remastered' versions of the Switch Zelda games at a better resolution/framerate on the new hardware - which you can already to via emulation...
I am sure the Switch 2 is just a more powerful switch. Still massively underpowered compared to a PC so updating the emulators to run switch 2 would be a fast affair considering how easy people were able to dump the first one. Its likely just a "switch pro" iteration that the OLED never was.
Its likely inevitable considering the hunger for pirated nintendo games on markets like Brazil with a large supply of competent hackers and not much chance of people being able to afford legit games.
Probably because of the backwards compability of Switch 2. Just imagine emulators outperforming bc games, which of course will happen lol
for comparison, here's what a DMCAd repo looks like:
https://github.com/yuzu-mirror/yuzu
So I understand wanting to build emulators so that people can continue to play their old games after the hardware fails. But in building an emulator for a current generation console, it seems likely that much of the audience is just interested in pirating the games.
The Switch hardware is so underpowered that most games run a lot better (no framedrops, higher resolution) on PC.
It doesn't matter what most people are doing, emulators are legal.
Legal or not, Nintendo will release its hounds and drown you in court fees. Personally, I'd rather not have to deal with this legal bullshit and stress in my life.
Good. If there's one company that deserves to have their stuff pirated, it's Nintendo.
Here's a recent (unofficial) AppImage for future use...
https://web.archive.org/save/https://github.com/Samueru-sama...
EDIT: it's not the latest. 1.1.1403 is the latest.
Consolidated in https://rentry.co/ryujinx (Windows and macOS)
Windows latest is on Archive.org
https://archive.org/details/ryujinx-1.1.1403-win_x64
Someone should mirror the flatpaks
Just upgraded the Flathub flatpak to the latest version on my machine. Not sure what's the recommended way to keep two stray Flatpak apps alive.
I have the latest Yuzu flatpak installed on one machine and the latest Ryujinx flatpak on another. How do I save them for the future and migrate them to a new machine?
https://docs.flatpak.org/en/latest/flatpak-command-reference... ?
flatpak build-bundle /var/lib/flatpak/repo org.ryujinx.Ryujinx.VERSION.flatpak org.ryujinx.Ryujinx stable is what you need.
One of the most impressive C# code bases :(
The name Ryujinx is even a C# in-joke of sorts, early iterations of the emulator translated the Switches ARM code into .NET CIL bytecode and then used the standard .NET JIT, which is called RyuJIT, to translate that to native code. NX was the Switches codename, so RyuJIT + NX, minus the T, makes Ryujinx.
They eventually outgrew that approach and rolled their own JIT, but the name had stuck at that point.
Thanks a lot, you clarified my confusion about these two things
I submitted a PR a couple months ago and was really pleasantly surprised at how accessible it was to contribute. No funny business, just `git clone` and open up Rider.
I was only touching the frontend client (i.e. game library screen etc, not the actual emulation), but it took less than two weeks to go from zero-to-PR-submitted on a fairly complex refactor.
Microsoft themselves have highlighted Ryujinx as an example of high performance modern .NET.
The forks from the listed co-developers are still available...and some of them pretty recent
Nintendo must be getting ready to launch the next generation, which by targeting Switch emulators may signal that Switch 2 is not that far from it.
This just affirms the idea that Nintendo doesn't care about legality, they are extremely litigious and will attack anything and everything they perceive to be as harmful to them whether it is actually harmful or not.
> Yesterday, gdkchan was contacted by Nintendo and offered an agreement to stop working on the project, remove the organization and all related assets he's in control of. While awaiting confirmation on whether he would take this agreement, the organization has been removed, so I think it's safe to say what the outcome is. Rather than leave you with only panic and speculation, I decided to write this short message to give some closure.
Taken from Discord announcement.
So they bribed him into taking down the project? That's certainly one way to go about it.
I also thought that at first, but they could have just threatened him with a lawsuit if he does not "agree".
Indeed, i would be very surprised if Nintendos offer was all carrot and no stick.
It's probably a C&D.
More likely a verbal threat, take the $20k carrot or we’ll see you in court over the next few years.
This is absolutely terrible. It may be in the business interest of Nintendo but the absolute anti-consumer way this is carried out destroys all the good will that the customers still had towards them.
It seems someone hosts a mirror: https://git.naxdy.org/Mirror/Ryujinx/
I was able to build the project with a single command, so there's hope that easy barrier for entry and a language more developers are familiar with will ensure the survival.
Someone else re-uploaded the repo (archived): https://github.com/emmauss/Ryujinx
That doesn't look to be an up-to-date fork at all. Latest commit is from 5 years ago.
Look at other branches, e.g. arm_delegate_native was active yesterday
Last master commit as of two days ago was very different: https://web.archive.org/web/20240929032514/https://github.co...
So not a good fork either way since the builds were made out of master.
5 years old :(
The emulator can play 99% of the games, talk about closing the barn doors after..
New update (from discord):
> Yesterday, gdkchan was contacted by Nintendo and offered an agreement to stop working on the project, remove the organization and all related assets he's in control of. While awaiting confirmation on whether he would take this agreement, the organization has been removed, so I think it's safe to say what the outcome is. Rather than leave you with only panic and speculation, I decided to write this short message to give some closure.
...
I am strongly reconsidering buying a Switch 2 now. This is absolutely disgusting from Nintendo.
Don’t buy it, put money towards a PC system or card. I’m done with Nintendo after this. It takes a lot to make me skip out on Mario, but in the end Nintendo burned through all of my nostalgia for them from my childhood
Nintendo's behavior recently has guaranteed that I will never purchase another Nintendo product ever again. I'm exclusively pirating their games from now on, lol
It's always morally correct to pirate Nintendo Games.
Have you been living under a rock? Nintendo has been like this since the NES days.
If you want to avoid such a takedown, check out:
https://protocol.land/
https://radicle.xyz/
Not familiar with the first but the second is funded by a commercial company whose core focus is Ethereum-based, and they're making another cryptocurrency and caused a bunch of PR spammers the same way Tea did.
https://radicle.xyz/faq https://docs.radworks.org/#projects https://www.drips.network/
Drips sounded like a reasonable idea to get builders funded.
It wasn't taken down by Github, it was seemingly taken down by the maintainers. Git already provides protection against this via local copies, so there's no benefit.
Data on protocol.land is permanent and can't be deleted.
That sounds much worse for projects like this unless the authors go fully anonymous and always practice clean opsec.
Nintendo probably sent them a deal along the lines of "Agree to take down the project or else we will sue you for millions of dollars". Could you imagine if you were served that and had to respond "it is impossible for me to take down the project because of the hosting I used."
Even if it's a trial Ryujinx could win... Winning and trial isn't free, and you can often can't recoup attorney fees.
Okay and I'm not sure maintainers want that
this is why centralized "free" services like discord and github are a big risk to projects that exist in a legal gray area.
hard to beat a physical server you own in a data center you have a contract with.
Github didn't do anything here, it was the project owned who did: https://twitter.com/RyujinxEmu/status/1841188744126480428
So the exact same thing would have happened with whomever owned the physical server.
Yet another chapter of Nintendo's wrath against the people? How long the world is going to be dominated by absurd copy(made up)right laws?
PS. Even if that wouldn't be the case here, my POV stands. Current copy(made up)right laws don't even make tiny-little sense nowadays. FREEDOM NOW FOR HUMAN KNOWLEDGE once for all FGS.
I think:
- Nintendo was probably _always_ like that, since 80s or 40s or however long ago: they were merely dormant outside the home country due to the famously enormous language barrier.
- Hypothetical defanged Nintendo that isn't like that probably holds little value: even Microsoft with -1 hardcoded as budget ceiling had been successful at forcing Nintendo into obsolescence. This suggests that Nintendo "being like that" is an advantage in itself.
Not sure about the 80s, but off the top of my head, there is clear evidence in the early 90s with lawsuits against both Galoob (game genie) and Atari (Tengen games without the 10NES chip).
This is absolutely the case considering their insane lawsuit on Palworld, which is a patent dispute. Nintendo has clearly turned evil and this is only going to cause great harm and strife in the gaming industry long-term if they win. We've been largely free of patent trolling in gaming aside from the lawsuits against hardware technologies like vibration (which is itself insanity and harmful), but this would open the flood gates.
> Nintendo has clearly turned evil
They've been roughly like this for a long time. They're very protective of their IP.
Updating a software patent application and then suing a competitor to strip profits is Nintendo's modus operandi. There was one settled for $30m(then) as recent as 2021, just not known outside the country.
1: https://kotaku.com/nintendo-s-lawsuit-forces-japanese-dev-to...
Nintendo have been absolute monsters for a long time. The only thing preventing people from realizing this is the cognitive dissonance between their cute games and their evil behavior.
> Nintendo has clearly turned evil
Astronaut 2: Always has been.
See: Nintendo v. Galoob, Atari and Tengen v. Nintendo, their predatory in general business practices throughout the NES era.
Just because Shigeru Miyamoto flashes his friendly Austin Powers grin and opens up another world of wonder playable on your Switch doesn't mean that the company doesn't or never had a dark side. Hell, the man himself cancelled StarFox 2 to pillage its 3D transform code for use in Super Mario 64.
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Darn. I finally got pop os working the way I like and was about to set up my emulation stuff this weekend. Now Nintendo has successfully stopped me forever! /s
The only thing they've guaranteed is that I'll never buy another one of their consoles or games again. For context I only buy PC and Nintendo.
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I'm surprised RU or PRC doesn't throw some state sponsored program to break DRM to undermine Nintendo or Sony for shits and giggles. NKR did the Sony hack years back, would be nice if they put some team on playstation emulation.
This is a non issue to most human beings
Why not scroll on past then? Most posts here are technical or fairly specific, do you come to all the article comments and say they are irrelevant?
That probably applies to like 90% of posts here.
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