Nintendo emulator 'Suyu' removed from Gitlab following DMCA request | Hacker News Reader

Nintendo emulator 'Suyu' removed from Gitlab following DMCA request

overkill.wtf

62 pointsbrandrick35 comments

"In addition to the project page being removed, all of the accounts of those who have contributed to the Suyu project have also been locked."

So Gitlab is worse then github when it comes to dmca requests.

That's truly awful...

Except github never gave you a self-hosted github.

I have read some stories that don't sound good about gitlab's culture and management, and I don't frankly like the design of the system (the components and code and architecture I mean) so I'm no fanboi, but there are some differences where the rubber meets the road that I don't think should be disregarded.

edit: not discontinued, I'm just bad at Google

They discontinued it, but yeah they did.

https://docs.github.com/en/enterprise-server@3.8/admin/overv...

I don't think it's discontinued, you just linked to a version that's outside of its support window.

It's not discontinued: https://docs.github.com/en/enterprise-server@3.12/admin/all-...

Well, I didn't stipulate, so you got me on a technicality thanks to English ambiguity, but I submit that "gave" does not imply "contact sales".

Also my error for saying self-hosted when that was never the most important property.

This is quite fascinating, I was pulling the repo on github as i read this and the download was killed as I was cloning.

   error: RPC failed; curl 56 Recv failure: Connection reset by peer
   error: 6100 bytes of body are still expected
   fetch-pack: unexpected disconnect while reading sideband packet
   fatal: early EOF
   fatal: fetch-pack: invalid index-pack output

> Suyu unlawfully uses unauthorized copies of cryptographic keys

I thought that's not true, and that was the major change Suyu was making to avoid legal trouble.

I don’t imagine it matters much. Nintendo’s lawyers threatening gitlab if no action is taken is probably enough for them to bend over and get out of the way. I don’t see it mattering in the end you can’t really kill projects like these they will just end up on torrent sites or some other domain out of Nintendo’s reach.

Isn't that how the DMCA works, there's no need for Nintendo's lawyers to do any threatening apart from a DMCA form letter - if it's filled out enough to be intelligeble, the recipient (Gitlab) has to abide and then there's a theoretically a challenge process available for the target (that is very stacked against the target), and in practice no penalties for illegitimate DMCA requests.

In what ways is it stacked against the target?

Could individuals in collusion theoretically use well timed DMCA takedowns to keep e.g. nintendo's own services and brands taken down from their own platforms? (Or just third parties?)

Claiming to own the music or imagery from Mario, for instance, and just continuously sending another takedown timed to keep them suppressed as I've heard of occurring with youtubers?

Yes, this happened to Bungie where a player was sending fake DMCA requests against other YouTubers and Bungie themselves. Bungie is suing them.

https://www.eurogamer.net/bungie-lawsuit-against-perpetrator...

There's a bit in the law text that supposedly penalises bad DMCA requests (ie the sender must consider if it's fair use, etc) but it's turned out to do nothing in practice and for example fair use covered stuff on youtube just gets repeatedly DMCA'd even if by some miracle the target has the time and energy to try to counter it.

(A concrete example I remember off the top of my head is on a blog that doesn't welcome HN links...)

> In what ways is it stacked against the target?

Copying a comment I made (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39622375) on an unrelated post:

The DMCA is significantly skewed in favor of copyright holders (and senders of DMCA notifications on copyright holders' behalves). The only "penalty of perjury" part for senders is claiming to be the copyright holder or someone authorized by the copyright holder to send the takedown notice (17 U.S.C. § 512(c)(3)(A)(vi)) [1]:

> (vi)A statement that the information in the notification is accurate, and under penalty of perjury, that the complaining party is authorized to act on behalf of the owner of an exclusive right that is allegedly infringed.

As for justifying the claim of infringement, the sender only needs to claim good faith (512(c)(3)(A)(v)) [1]:

> (v)A statement that the complaining party has a good faith belief that use of the material in the manner complained of is not authorized by the copyright owner, its agent, or the law.

The person whose upload was taken down can file a counter notification, but must dispute the takedown under penalty of perjury (512(g)(3)(C)) [1]:

> (C)A statement under penalty of perjury that the subscriber has a good faith belief that the material was removed or disabled as a result of mistake or misidentification of the material to be removed or disabled.

In Lenz v. Universal Music Corp. (2015), the Ninth Circuit decided that the copyright holder (or at least the sender of the DMCA notification) must consider whether the user's uploaded material is fair use before filing the notice, but the user's burden to disprove the copyright holder's claim of good faith remains exactly the same as before the Lenz case. From the case text [2]:

> To be clear, if a copyright holder ignores or neglects our unequivocal holding that it must consider fair use before sending a takedown notification, it is liable for damages under § 512(f). If, however, a copyright holder forms a subjective good faith belief the allegedly infringing material does not constitute fair use, we are in no position to dispute the copyright holder's belief even if we would have reached the opposite conclusion.

Or as the Harvard Law Review put it [3]:

> In short, the fair use determination does not have to be correct or reasonable; it just has to have happened. The court in Rossi held that the jury therefore had to determine if Universal’s actions sufficiently approximated a fair use analysis (even if not labeled as such) on which it could have formed a subjective good faith belief regarding fair use.

[1] https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/512

[2] https://cdn.ca9.uscourts.gov/datastore/opinions/2015/09/14/1...

[3] https://harvardlawreview.org/print/vol-129/lenz-v-universal-...

Nintendo's definition of "authorized" does not seem to include a user dumping their own keys. They've been this way ever since they claimed that physical mask ROMs were not at risk of failure and thus did not need to be backed up, and as such their statement was that all game copiers were inherently illegal, since they did not "authorize" them.

The end result is someone hosting a gitea server in Belize.

The D in DVCS stands for centralised.

The I in DVCS stands for issue tracker.

True but getting less true by the day:

https://github.com/MichaelMure/git-bug

https://www.fossil-scm.org/home/doc/trunk/www/index.wiki

I don't think it is - are those issue trackers being adopted? Fossil is cool (as is any other DVCS that's not Git) but it has basically zero users and fewer by the day (as is any other DVCS that's not Git).

I think you've changed the argument from a technical one to a marketshare one.

Obviously they're not as popular but I don't think it matters if the people who want to use it are able to use it. (The emulator devs, sqlite team).

Related from just yesterday:

First beta of Nintendo Switch emulator Suyu goes live

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39766138

Is that a surprise to anybody?

Well, the developers use a distributed VCS so they can still work on the project, exchange patches, etc. only with less publicity, which is a good thing when you work on legally dubious stuff.

I don't get it how that letter can stand? Quoting from the first paragraph:

     | ... namely Suyu uses unauthorized copies of cryptographic keys to decrypt
     | unauthorized copies of Nintendo Switch games ...

Shouldn't the "unauthorized" word be proven true before this kind of letter is thrown at the wall to make sure it sticks? Not in this world apparently

Anyone know if GitLab has a transparent archive of DMCA notices similar to GitHub?

I’ve always thought that countries like Iran who want to piss off the US should just offer git hosting for these types of projects.

Heck offer Pirate Bay domains too.

Maybe they should use a service outside the land of the free like codeberg.org

Codeberg is hosted in Germany, which is part of the World Intellectual Property Organization Treaty, meaning they have very similar laws to the DMCA. The EU itself has the Copyright Directive.

You may want to look at Codeberg’s Terms of Service again, particularly the subsection on allowed content and copyright:

https://codeberg.org/Codeberg/org/src/branch/main/TermsOfUse...

Some countries have better exemptions for fair-use even accounting for WIPOisms than others.

> which is part of the World Intellectual Property Organization Treaty

That is almost all of the world except micronesia, palau and south sudan

The Suyu project also has their own self-hosted Git server. Be interesting if development continues there and information is spread by word-of-mouth or similar.

Centralized infrastructure at its very best.

Still up here: https://git.suyu.dev/suyu/suyu

Fuck Nintendo

Do you know if there is something similar for yuzu? did their code find a new home? forks are meh.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com