I'm surprised GitHub honored these requests as they aren't valid to begin with. DMCA takedown notices can only be used for traditional copyright violations, not allegations of protection measure circumvention.
None of the big copyright distributing sites really play by DMCA. DMCA is just the formal, legal process.
Most sites are putting some sort of self-managed process in front of DMCA. They can remove anything they want because their terms allow it. It in turn makes copyright holders happy without any of the risk of false DMCA complaints.
Can this problem be solved by having 2 independent projects: one emulator that doesn't deal with decryption, and a convertor that allows to remove encryption from a legally obtained game?
Ah, the destruction of property rights by contract law. Sprinkle in some "technological protection measures" and all of a sudden exercising consumer rights is now a felony offense. As Cory Doctorow says, felony offense of business model. See Mark Lemley's two decade old Terms of Use, https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm
I love technology because I think it enriches & enhances individuals. Our ability to impact the local & broader world goes hand in hand with our tool-making & tech (often is the same thing). Technology is amazing & great.
But layer in Intellectual Property law & suddenly technology is the infernal machine, is the anchor sinking humanity & tyrannizing the spirit. I feel a religious obligation above that of my state's requirements to smash this hell.
I read this DMCA notice, and it's... completely reasonable. Emulators are legal. Distributing copyrighted crypto keys is not.
If Yuzu devs want their emulator to stay up, they shouldn't include those crypto keys. All they have to do is provide a user interface for users themselves to provide these keys.
Mind share issue. Russia, as most of Ex-USSR, is a PC gaming country. To have an active emulation community, there has to be a massive following around the certain console in the first place.
The most successful Nintendo items in the region were Chinese NES clones.
Has any specific Yuzu fork been established as the new standard yet? Early on there were a bunch of clout chasers announcing forks and then only making surface level tweaks to the branding, because they really had no idea what they were doing.
Nope. There was a bunch of hype around `Suyu`, even in the news, before it was discovered the developer was a minor who had no idea what he was doing.
No rational person is going to fight a DMCA from Nintendo. Nintendo would in no circumstances not file a DMCA against a Yuzu fork. Additionally, the settlement required that all of the core developers, who would know it best, are never permitted to work on a Nintendo emulator ever again. Thus, Yuzu is completely dead.
Well, at least we still have Ryujinx. Citra getting caught in the Yuzu crossfire is worse because there isn't another mature 3DS emulator to fall back on.
I mean it shouldn’t be a shocker that this happened. Nintendo made their case clear in court the DMCA is strongly in favor of copyright holders. Obviously people can file a counter-notice, but that immediately opens them up to a lawsuit from Nintendo, which, well, we all saw how that went with yuzu. If the yuzu developers didn’t want to risk the fight, would any rational person who forked it?
I'm surprised GitHub honored these requests as they aren't valid to begin with. DMCA takedown notices can only be used for traditional copyright violations, not allegations of protection measure circumvention.
None of the big copyright distributing sites really play by DMCA. DMCA is just the formal, legal process.
Most sites are putting some sort of self-managed process in front of DMCA. They can remove anything they want because their terms allow it. It in turn makes copyright holders happy without any of the risk of false DMCA complaints.
GitHub seems to prefer and recommend circumvention compalints be submitted through the DMCA takedown form https://docs.github.com/en/site-policy/content-removal-polic...
Can this problem be solved by having 2 independent projects: one emulator that doesn't deal with decryption, and a convertor that allows to remove encryption from a legally obtained game?
Even easier: just don't include the keys. The algorithms are likely fine to include.
Ah, the destruction of property rights by contract law. Sprinkle in some "technological protection measures" and all of a sudden exercising consumer rights is now a felony offense. As Cory Doctorow says, felony offense of business model. See Mark Lemley's two decade old Terms of Use, https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm
I love technology because I think it enriches & enhances individuals. Our ability to impact the local & broader world goes hand in hand with our tool-making & tech (often is the same thing). Technology is amazing & great.
But layer in Intellectual Property law & suddenly technology is the infernal machine, is the anchor sinking humanity & tyrannizing the spirit. I feel a religious obligation above that of my state's requirements to smash this hell.
I read this DMCA notice, and it's... completely reasonable. Emulators are legal. Distributing copyrighted crypto keys is not.
If Yuzu devs want their emulator to stay up, they shouldn't include those crypto keys. All they have to do is provide a user interface for users themselves to provide these keys.
Update: A redditor replied to this same comment (on reddit[1]) with an interesting response.
> That's what Yuzu does... You have to provide your own prod and title keys. They aren't providing these for you.
> Same for any Switch emulator.
This reddit comment is implying that the claims in the DMCA notice are fraudulent.
1. https://www.reddit.com/r/Android/comments/1cie1rv/github_nin...
"illegal numbers"
Yuzu is on archive.org https://archive.org/details/yuzu-windows-msvc-20240304-53729... .
It doesn't include the offending keys. This is the portion Nintendo is using as an excuse to strike the GitHub projects.
Are there any jurisdictions where emulators can be worked on without Nintendo having legal leverage? I'm surprised Russians aren't all over this.
>I'm surprised Russians aren't all over this.
Mind share issue. Russia, as most of Ex-USSR, is a PC gaming country. To have an active emulation community, there has to be a massive following around the certain console in the first place. The most successful Nintendo items in the region were Chinese NES clones.
Has any specific Yuzu fork been established as the new standard yet? Early on there were a bunch of clout chasers announcing forks and then only making surface level tweaks to the branding, because they really had no idea what they were doing.
Nope. There was a bunch of hype around `Suyu`, even in the news, before it was discovered the developer was a minor who had no idea what he was doing.
No rational person is going to fight a DMCA from Nintendo. Nintendo would in no circumstances not file a DMCA against a Yuzu fork. Additionally, the settlement required that all of the core developers, who would know it best, are never permitted to work on a Nintendo emulator ever again. Thus, Yuzu is completely dead.
Well, at least we still have Ryujinx. Citra getting caught in the Yuzu crossfire is worse because there isn't another mature 3DS emulator to fall back on.
These are the same devs who thought profiting tens of thousands off this project was a smart idea, right?
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Is this a false DMCA notice? See: https://www.reddit.com/r/Android/comments/1cie1rv/comment/l2...
I guess this means Yuzu works really well now :)
I mean it shouldn’t be a shocker that this happened. Nintendo made their case clear in court the DMCA is strongly in favor of copyright holders. Obviously people can file a counter-notice, but that immediately opens them up to a lawsuit from Nintendo, which, well, we all saw how that went with yuzu. If the yuzu developers didn’t want to risk the fight, would any rational person who forked it?
> we all saw how that went with yuzu.
To my knowledge, there hasn't been any judgement but a private settlement has been made.
It's true that you can't really defend your rights against a corporation as big as Nintendo though.
A private settlement of paying Nintendo $2.4M. How is that not a perfect example of "we all saw how that went"?
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