Gitlab confirms it's removed Suyu, a fork of Nintendo Switch emulator Yuzu
theverge.com
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I wish copyrighted music was a fair price and easy to use, currently for sync licensing the music industry claim to want around 16% of REVENUE which seems insane to me.
So when I worked at an ISP, we received tons of DMCA requests for customers doing torrent. All of them were redirected to the trash. We won't obey to some random email.
Also the service provider is protected under law if they restore the content due to a counterclaim by the user that the work is not actually infringing.
Hell yeah they do.
The thing, is as long as those people have the ownership, they can demonetise your video and take it down, but you cant remove their claim of ownership unless you are the legal owner of the copyright, who as I said, does not care about it...
So whatever system you get, it is not perfect...
RIP gitlab?
It's an American law but a European company abides by it with no leeway given. Shameful.
Everything on the web needs decentralisation as we nearing some sort of dystopia where corporations dictate how we live.
Do you think a p50 user goes for such measures to get to a service?
> basically every single one of them is capable
Absolutely not. My mother is not capable of doing that.
https://www.reddit.com/r/germany/comments/2hxy4j/help_me_ger...
Or blocking the bootstrapping?
https://www.reddit.com/r/ipfs/comments/tzrkoc/is_ipfs_blocke...
There are plenty of options.
Your IPFS link is a screenshot of someone failing to access docs.ipfs.io in a standard webbrowser over HTTP.
Are you aware how many people use VPNs? Also take a look at how Tor Project hand out unlisted entry points into their network - IPFS could take a similar approach if it really came to it.
There are several examples of how content that is not illegal was blocked even in the last couple of years.
It is possible to block pretty much anything that the country wants to block. It would be impossible to bloack content with a truly decentralized (meaning only peer-to-peer network access) system.
As of today the only thing that comes to close to this is something like Meshstatic. Obviously it is only good for messaging and nothing more at this stage.
As far as I can tell, yes, injunctions like that extend beyond the person they've been issued against. Sure, it may not be fully correct assuming you modify the Yuzu code to take out everything to do with bypassing TPMs, but Nintendo has a strong legal team and the ability to drag out a court case if you want to test that. I don't think most people will want to do that.
People have gotten cease-and-desists from their lawyers for drawing fan-art of their characters. Streamers will get strikes/takedowns for playing their games. And similar stuff...
If you don't want to get legal threats, I recommend to never mention their name, any of their trademarks, or even ever publicly acknowledge their existence.
They have become the-company-which-may-not-be-named.
Nintendo as a company does greatly benefit from people talking about it and it's products. That's publicity, word of mouth, free advertising basically.
When they abuse takedowns, strikes and other measures, they do not want to stop that free publicity and word of mouth advertising. They are attempting to control it, manipulate it, and limit it to company approved screenshots, videos and information only.
If those attempts generate more publicity - including making the taken down screenshots go viral (Streisand effect style) - that's beneficial publicity and word-of-mouth for them and their products. And it also amplifies the message sent to others: use only approved materials, or face our wrath!
Therefore providing them with improved visibility and publicity - more word of mouth - and helping them spread their "fall in line!" message, can be seen as "rewarding" what they are doing. If instead most people were to completely ignore them and stop talking about them (out of fear)... THAT would hurt their publicity.
One reason is that playing the emulated version is a better experience. Why would you play Breath of the Wild at 900p/30fps, when you can play it at 4k/60fps AND have all the customizability of running it on a PC.
Emulators illustrate that Nintendo forces you to buy an outdated tablet to play an intentionally hamstrung version of their game, so that once you are bought in to the hardware, you are more likely to buy more of their games.
How is it not? By having a good emulator, one can easily play Switch games without paying. I'm aware emulator devs don't provide game ROMs and usually have certain mechanisms to ensure you have a "legal copy", but these are all very trivial to bypass historically.
(I'm also aware there are claims that piracy does not hurt revenue of copyright holder. I can get behind some points in these claims, but not entirely.)
It simply isn't a threat to their business in any way. Also, that argument leads to a lot of insane consequences once you start arguing that you're not allowed to do things because they're vaguely, potentially a threat to a company.
Go nuts.
IIRC, a significant fraction of the studies of the subject tend to show that it even positively affects revenues of IP rights holders.
I subscribe to Patreon artists frequently. Lots of them, especially Japanese artists, have expressed that they hate piracy (i.e. repost their paid rewards on interweb) simply because it's (in their opinion) wrong. They're fully aware people who pirate is unlikely to pay a single penny regardless, or that piracy actually increases their "exposure".
At the end of the day, in my opinion it's right holder's call, regardless if their decision is based on emotion or rationale.
That's exactly what I mean. At the end of the day, what they believe is what drives their behavior.
> At the end of the day, in my opinion it's right holder's call, regardless if their decision is based on emotion or rationale.
I'm not disputing that here.
Edit: oh, this isn't a response to the comment I though it was. The comment when I'm saying roughly the same as you are and I though was misinterpreted is this one: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39788265
There's a lot of people who want to play Nintendo games in a higher quality who use emulators for it.
If their device isn't good enough to put itself above others, it is not worth buying. The 1 or maybe 1.5 exclusive they have has zero worth these days. Every console has their exclusives. And among them you will always find something enjoyable. Just stop watching ads/campaigns, who decide for you, and you'll be happy to find many "under the radar" (aka not sold at full price so not marketed) titles.
Tangent - This is a disgusting practice to keep us paying for deprecated electronics. By them and the rest of the console companies. Arm wrestling law makers to vendor lock us is not a business model.
The Switch has been Nintendo's only game hardware since 2017
Say whatever else you will, the "every 2-3 years" argument does not hold water when complaining about Nintendo
Yes the Wii-U was very short lived, but it was partially because it was a massive flop no one was buying anyways
> The 1 or maybe 1.5 exclusive they have has zero worth these days.
Again, this holds no water for Nintendo. The Switch had more than that in exclusives on day one, games that are still exclusive now. I mean really the list is pretty long: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Nintendo_Switch-only_...
Whether or not those are all games you care about or want to play is a wholly separate issue
I'm not trying to fanboy for Nintendo here. I think their litigation tactics are massively awful, but it really seems like you're coming at Nintendo with complaints about Sony and Microsoft. At least make arguments about the stuff they actually are doing badly
There's the people who will never pay a penny to Nintendo anyways and there's the people who just want to run their own games in something better than a choppy 1280x720@30FPS
So you're saying that Nintendo's hard stance on emulation is working?
(I don't think this is the reason, but I can imagine someone in management deducing that from the facts).
Obviously not since this console has the highest quality emulators I've even seen during the console's lifetime. Usually you need to wait 5+ years after the console dies to get anything remotely as good.
So we can confidently say that emulation being available didn't affect the high sales of the console.
[0] https://www.scribd.com/document/709016504/Nintendo-of-Americ...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nintendo_Switch
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yuzu_(emulator)
[3] https://www.statista.com/statistics/687059/nintendo-switch-u...
I've never seen such a competition of very high quality emulators in the lifetime of a console. Usually you need to wait 5+ years after the console dies to get anything remotely useful.
I've sailed the sea a lot myself, but I don't believe the meme "pirates wouldn't have bought it anyways". It's not a 1:1 loss, but it's not zero either.
And for me, piracy used to be an accessibility issue. Living in the mountains I could wait for a week to get something by mail, or click download illegally and play immediately. With today's online stores that's no longer an excuse.
Yes, PC games usually have DRM, but Denuvo offers their services for the Switch platform too. In fact, they specifically claim that they can resist emulation of protected titles: https://irdeto.com/denuvo/nintendo-switch-emulator-protectio...
And yet, no commercial games have been released with this protection yet, probably because it isn't worth it for their bottom line.
These actions ensure that I'll never buy a Nintendo console or games anymore, even though I'd be their target audience (both myself and my three kids).
They'd have to have a string of probably 10 consecutive years putting out absolute dogshit before they'd get even close to feeling the pain.
I can still emulate the games even if they don't do this you know? It doesn't stop a motivated actor actor after all.
But Nintendo also has absolutely no incentive to care if it's used for pirating. Users want to put in term of morality, when it probably doesn't matter much.
Even if there was no pirating angle, emulation is a revenue drain from old title they could bundle in the Nintendo Online subscription and remix as remake games (what we saw with the old Zelda games remade for the Switch for instance).
Even if people were using the emulator after buying the Switch and the actual games, that's still a stream they don't control (can't check if the game is played on multiple consoles for instance, etc) and there's nothing positive for them coming out of it.
And in case of game consoles, that also means they have to buy the hardware even if they only want to play one game. This is very significant potential income for Nintendo.
All my friends that are into games have a PS4/5 just to play exclusives, even if they play games on PC 99% of the time. And non-trivial number of them play XB3 in emulators so they don't need to buy a Switch just for that. If there is no emulators, they probably would.
On the other one can argue that people pirating does not improve their economics either so why risk it ?
But it's not as if corporations acted rationally anyway, they are led by humans and as such they are mostly driven by emotions.
I get your point – I just feel like there’s not a lot of potential economic improvement to be had here, but apparently there is.
All Nintendo did is make it easier for people on the fence to decide if they want to financially support them or pirate.
If you download Higan and play pirated SNES games, not much of a threat. If you download Yuzu/Ryujinx and play pirated Switch games, that's an altogether different picture.
Nintendo, please sue me! I would love to help establish more case law here
Right now i have a laptop connected to my TV to play steam games that support controllers. I'd much rather just have another USB-C to HDMI converter plugged in to a device designed nearly completely to play games.
A huge use case for me would be using wemod/cheatengine and in general steam workshop. The second biggest reason is shovelware. On the switch if i buy a game because it looks good, AFAIK i can't refund it if it's actually a garbage game. On steam, i've requested refunds after playing (some*) games for several days.
* mostly incremental/clicker/idle games, because they're designed to be crappy to start out, so 2 hours isn't even enough time to expose 1% of the content or gameplay.
Citation: I own a steam deck and an ROG Ally. The Ally has the best controller on the market but it's hamstrung by the screen simply having too many pixels. Well, that and Windows.
I have a steam deck. So far, I have bought roughly 5 switches. One for myself that I gave away as a gift, and 4 OLED switch gifts.
After seeing what Nintendo is doing, I will never buy anything from them ever again, nor will I purchase Nintendo products as gifts for anyone.
They are greedy and immoral. This is the consequence of attacking open code.
Perhaps Nintendo should provide a better way to play their games themselves then?
Of course, my other view is that emulators should be perfectly fine and a great exercise in reverse-engineering, but Nintendo won't see it that way.
It would be an interesting experiment to release a high-performance emulator console that only worked with the physical (presumably legally-purchased) game. Perhaps it would fill a similar legal niche to DeCSS - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DeCSS
And I also love Nintendo, but I mostly play GBA and SNES games from my childhood.
I completely understand it too because I've been pirating since games were on tapes. But, surprisingly perhaps, I have the ability to view things from multiple perspectives. And clearly Nintendo don't want their titles to be pirated while they're still making sales.
At some point in the future, just like with GBA and SNES emulators, I'm sure we'll see the same for Switch emulators.
More importantly Yuzu was known to essentially have a culture of not caring about the DMCA themselves. I don’t think they did anything illegal in the emulator code but they did totally have a private pirated game stash and were selling TOTK compatible builds via Patreon before the game released which violates basically every rule of clean room disassembly.
They are a Dutch company (Gitlab B.V.). So why do they even bother with the DMCA?
In theory GitLab could decide to ignore the DMCA, as you suggest, but that would mean removing all US servers, firing all US staff and cancelling all contracts with US customers (including those that GitLab has with the US government itself). Even in that instance, you would just move the copyright lawsuit to Dutch courts.
The use of the code only becomes relevant with the US DMCA, with its stupid "infringing uses" clause. US law only applies inside the US though.
But a company like that, which does a lot of business in the US, can't afford to thumb its nose at the US's stupid copyright law, if they want to continue doing business there. So business and money take priority over copyright ethics.
Indeed, it's an easier case than in the US in many EU nations IMO, and with criminal rather than civil penalties in some of them.
There's also an international treaty, WIPO Copyright Treaty, that requires signatories to enact anti-circumvention provisions. The EU and the US both agreed and signed it before the DMCA.
https://www.ibanet.org/article/CF85E59E-6564-4AA3-9408-3F47C...
[0] https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1653482/000162828021...
Well, that really depends on where in the world you are.
If you are in a Western country, the US will probably find a way of getting to you.
If you are in China or Russia, maybe not – especially if your business isn't dependent on the US (and its allies) for its inputs or outputs.
Seems to me that Gitlab could just block US users from DMCA'd repos.
- The primary forums for Pokemon fangames [1]
- Youtube Creators playing games with mods that added Pokemon [2]
[1] https://twitter.com/RelicCastleCom/status/177090143586736135...
[2] https://www.techdirt.com/2024/03/20/pokemon-co-is-now-dmcain...
Even now, it's still seeing activity, and even has their actions and wiki migrated over. If there are problems with having this link here, let me know.
It’s a blunt force instrument. Always was.
Fun side effect is that you can use it as a blunt force instrument, too - don’t like what someone is saying online? DMCA. Competitor champing at your heels? DMCA.
I still think the best way to kill it is mass abuse of the process.
An expectation is that “wrongdoers” just do not bother to oppose and everything works faster.
Then there are corporate policies which make this weirder (like YouTube who says: “if people send too many dmca request towards you, we chose not to see you as a customer”. But this has nothing to do with law)
(f) Misrepresentations.—Any person who knowingly materially misrepresents under this section—
(1) that material or activity is infringing, or
(2) that material or activity was removed or disabled by mistake or misidentification,
shall be liable for any damages, including costs and attorneys’ fees, incurred by the alleged infringer, by any copyright owner or copyright owner’s authorized licensee, or by a service provider, who is injured by such misrepresentation, as the result of the service provider relying upon such misrepresentation in removing or disabling access to the material or activity claimed to be infringing, or in replacing the removed material or ceasing to disable access to it.
https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/512#f (scroll up slightly as the anchor-link places the top under the navbar)
Of course its on the proverbial me to prove that they're at fault and I dont have the money or time ...
I imagine one day they will kick the wrong horse though and someone will sue the company for it & GH/GL/whoever for not giving fair recourse or something.
My repo https://github.com/shawwn/llama-dl was taken down last March by Facebook. They asserted copyright over LLaMA, which is obviously bogus since it was trained on data they do not own the copyright to. I was bummed about this, but after I mentioned on HN that I was willing to fight Meta, an anonymous person named L contacted me and sent $20k of Monero to cover legal fees. I was also contacted by an amazing lawyer who wanted to represent me in this. I was absurdly fortunate on both counts.
He drafted a counternotice, we sent it, and then my repo was restored within a week or so.
GitHub had no choice in the matter. Legally this is a required process. Ditto for GitLab. Both are US companies.
When YouTube-dl was taken down some time ago by a DMCA, Nat went to bat and got it restored, and GitHub made some sort of pledge to cover legal fees associated with bogus takedown requests.
Here’s the shitty part for this particular situation. A case can be made that the emulator is for the purpose of circumventing copyright protection mechanisms. This, sadly, is a solid legal basis for issuing a lawful takedown, as much as we all absolutely despise that idea. It’s pretty clear cut; Nintendo doesn’t want Switch games to be run on non-Nintendo platforms, and the emulator seeks to enable Switch games to be run on any platform. Therefore, the intent of the emulator is to circumvent Nintendo’s protection mechanisms.
So where does this leave us? Well, the team can file a counternotice. GitLab will restore the repo. But that opens up the team to a lawsuit by Nintendo. And as much as I want to stand up to bullies, there’s a difference between standing up to a guy shoving a kid in a locker vs standing up to a Silverback gorilla charging at you. Nintendo’s legal history implies the latter.
Welcome to Nintendo pain. The Smash community has been dealing with Nintendo’s BS for decades now. They shut down tournaments that use emulators for Smash Melee. And no one can do anything, because it’s their legal right to do so.
EDIT: It’s horrible that GitLab disabled the accounts of the developers, though. My GitHub account was fine. This should be the focus of the outrage here.
Not saying I agree with FB here, but infringing on someone else's copyright doesn't suddenly void their own copyright to their contributions. A more sensible defense for you here is that copyright law likely doesn't give them any rights to any weights at all.
I don't believe the DMCA can be used to do anything but harass the team anyway.
If any Suyu devs are reading check out https://kycnot.me/
I've personally used these hosts to provide data to the public that was subject to constant takedowns
- UDN (Used before the invasion) which is based in Ukraine. Good way to support them I suppose.
- BuyVM in Luxembourg
- Incognet in NL (Probably reach out to them first to see if it's OK)
- PQ.hosting in RussiaSome more discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39783444
In short they are making money from enabling piracy of Nintendo games.
Nintendo has tried for ages to take down emulators, and this time it was tropical haze's fault for siding with Piracy.
It has nothing to do with console reverse engineering.
Their discord server was open to everyone last I looked, did you mean a patreons only channel on there?
What's the source for the claim about pirated content being distributed on it?
Quick, mirror everything :)
It's interesting that you named a bunch of very large corporations who have a vested interest in users not having the choice of decentralized systems (which they cannot control or profit from) as "proof" that decentralized systems are not desirable.
Young people today use centralized streaming sites more, because they're easier to use. That they're not p2p isn't something any of them know or care about.
Where are Gnutella and Bittorrent now?
Gone, in what non geeky users are concerned they never happened.
Take pirated switch games for example, the root cause of this whole discussion. For a given game, you'll find 10 sketchy but fully functional direct-download sites before you find a magnet link. (Yes I'm sure your favorite private tracker has a great selection, but private tracker users are an even smaller niche within a niche)
The success of p2p file sharing platforms rested on the fact that people like piracy and free stuff, it didn't compete on service quality. Which became evident when most content became cheap and people switched.
Same with Bitcoin, people buy into it because they want to speculate and buy a Lamborghini, I still can't go to any supermarket and pay in crypto because nobody really cares about making it a means of transaction for normal people.
Nah, it was absolutely about service quality. Absodefinitelutely.
Back in the day it was either buying things on physical media and adjusting your living situation accordingly (having meters of shelves just to store it and media player(s) set up to play the media), OR sail the seas and have "your" entire media library stored away on a media server in the closet, easily accessible from the media center PC connected to your TV. Netflix before Netflix was a thing, essentially.
Now, finally, they caught on and do provide a similar (in some ways higher) level of service as the "homebrew Netflix" solution from "þe aulde" days, and people are prepared to pay for it. I gladly pay the price for the different streaming services because of the convenience of having everything easily accessible in a format that doesn't take up all the space at my home. If that disappears though, I'll grumpily re-build the server in the closet and expand the sails again.
That makes me happy even though I'll still choose to pay, since I guess it will make it harder for the legal streaming providers to suddenly downgrade the experience.
It's sad that we need piracy to drive innovation and keep quality expectations up.
Cryptocurrency is a platform for trade. Not a miracle investment. Media piracy is alive because many simply don't have access to it, otherwise.
When Netflix came to my area. Yesthankyouplease signed up for the ultra whatever 4k package within days. When they started removing content, pumping woke shit and increased the price, ye nah cya wouldn't wanna be ya. And back to piracy. Who is the idiot who pays for a garbage streaming service that has no content? Let alone multiple streaming services? Just read a book, instead.
No. Piracy and crypto aren't alive because of your delusions.
The last feature piracy has is enabling game demos (Thank fuck more companies are releasing demos again). How many times do companies expect to fool people into shilling out hard cash for what, effectively, is just an unrelated CGI video reel nicked named "trailer"? Many times these trailers don't even include gameplay. Other times they straight up lie about the content of the game and release it with dumbed down graphics. Or a much more barren world.
Nah, piracy enables demos and it doesn't "hUrT tHe GaMiNg iNdUsTrY". https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2017/09/eu-study-finds-piracy...
Those corporations need users to buy their ideas, let's not blame corporations without blaming the users that embrace them with open arms.
> It has been proven multiple times since Compuserve, AOL and MSN, that users don't want decentralised systems.
Majority of users, sure. But they're dumb, and lazy, so fuck them.
Take Amazon for example. Steals product ideas. Undercuts them. Bans them from their platform. https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/amazon-i...
Replaces quality products with Chinese garbage. Injects fake reviews. https://odysee.com/@rossmanngroup:a/the-downfall-of-amazon-d...
With legalized gov corruption (lobbying) and media campaigns to brainwash us into thinking how amazing all these megacorps are, of course most people think a centralized internet is the bee's knees. These people don't have time to crawl through these niche information channels and find out how these user-hostile corporations operate. The people see pretty colors and drool in response. We're given enough time to work, make some babies and die.