Radicle gives a decentralised Git network that is much more immune to any legal action.
This makes it much more difficult for Nintendo to take such action. Because it is a civil dispute, not a criminal one, the trick is to make it more costly for Nintendo to abuse the legal system (it is unlikely the legal system abuse will be fixed in long term, or ever). When DMCA and such laws were designed, it is unlikely the lawmakers intended it to be abused like this. There is no penalty for Nintendo to do as many takedown notes they want, whileas there is a headache for anyone involved in these projects to defend themselves.
Isn't radicle then the easy way to argue that participants actually distribute the program themselves, including an easily trackable IP, so lawyers can just add a client themselves and then sue all IPs that transfer a byte of the (illegal) program?
The same happens to media sharing via bittorrent in germany right now.
Having some site which gets closed instead seems to be preferable to me.
Of course copyright infringement is different from whatever emulators are doing but I imagine the effect might be the same
I guess they could just send people threatening letters - but even getting the ISPs to play along would be an uphill battle.
Germany is a special case as it's particularly bureaucratic and dominated by establishment interests. And even then it's only commonplace for Bittorrent because GEMA, etc. pushed to make that possible.
This is the same old story though, and nerds dont get this right: what about all the viruses/child porn games and other heinous shit people will host there? Decentralisation is only as good as its moderation and unpaid moderation is a hell of a weak link
The issue is accountability. A big centralised server has accountability built in to some extent, because you can find and sue or jail the bastards that own it. Decentralised, is often conflated with anonymity and hence zero accountability.
But it doesn’t have to be this way. For something like source control, must we have anonymity? You wouldn’t require all that much PII to deter most bad actors, I would have thought. Maybe the PII bits can be stored in a different system that provides cryptographically signed assertions. You remain anonymous, but can assert your identity is stored in X. Law enforcement have the power to recover the PII if there is a warrant. Like some of the proposals for asserted qualifications in Europe and such.
Why are emulators illegal? I understand that they are associated with piracy because people play pirates games on them. But it’s like banning BitTorrent because it allows you to pirate, or Windows because you can play pirates games on it as well.
The article mentions that emulators “illegally circumvent Nintendo’s technological protection measures and run illegal copies of Switch games.”. But which law makes it illegal to circumvent such systems? And what about Wii-only emulators? Surely they have nothing to do with the safety systems of the Switch.
In the US. The DMCA is only relevant because GitHub is operated by a US company. Nintendo would have to try to make the same arguments for EU law, e.g., if the software in question would be hosted in the EU. That might be more complicated.
If emulators in general were illegal, Nintendo would be in trouble too and would be obliged to remove the emulated games it sells on the Virtual Console.
This is a good question. In addition to an answer, if someone could give a high level but technical overview about how the Nintendo Switch encryption works and how the emulators work around it I'd be grateful.
DMCA makes it illegal to circumvent DRM. Whether or not it's good DRM is irrelevant. The classic example would be DVDs that are encrypted with CSS and 40-bit keys. Because you need to be able to decrypt the DVD to be able to play the video, if your software doesn't have permission to playback (encrypted) DVDs, you're circumventing DRM. A DVD ripping software maker has lost this in court: https://w.wiki/9yNu
So like how DVDs are encrypted, all Switch games are encrypted. Except with good AES encryption and proper key sizes. This started with games in the Wii/PS3 generation, so emulators for systems before that would be fine.
Also I've now learned that wikipedia has a URL shortener. Because Hacker News eats the period at the end of the wikipedia article title.
Nintendo is in an interesting position whereby they are actually selling emulators as a product to this day. Which gives them more of a leg to stand on in these sorts of efforts, regardless of whether or not I personally agree.
I would say the opposite, it gives them less of a leg to stand since they cannot say that there's never any justification for emulation anymore like they said in the past.
some aspects (not all aspects) of creating (not using) emulators are not illegal by way of copyright laws (but may be illegal by way of other laws such as trademarks, patents, DRM) in the US because of Sony vs Connectix.
Broadly speaking, it's inevitable that some jurisdiction will decide to observe the unclothed emperor here and create a legal framework without the yoke of all of this "intellectual property". Obviously, it will thrive, and everyone will flock to use services there.
They are probably talking about a "serverless" bittorrent. Some kind of Git-over-DHT. It would require this to be accepted: http://bittorrent.org/beps/bep_0050.html (Decentralized Mutable Torrent)
Git commit messages could be cryptographically signed. And git, the protocol is fully open source. Also there are many open source UI. Care to explain what is the usecase of git of torrent compared to gitlab?
Distributed hosting means there isn't a single point of failure. Even without DMCAs it's fairly common to try cloning a random gitlab or plain git repo only to find it's down.
Blockchain is just a slow database. What you want is a peer to peer system which actually has peers instead of a couple super nodes and ephemeral drive-by clients.
I agree, at least in theory (not sure if any existing blockchains could adequately solve the problem today). Someday, you could imagine essentially running gitlab on a blockchain. Actually, it's not a stretch to include access control such as public key management, "Issues", etc. It would be publicly readable, not censorable, no single point of failure, and unlike torrents, fully mutable. Obviously, today the cost would probably be prohibitive for most purposes.
They're DMCA'ing code they have no right to DMCA - it was released under a permissive OSS license. Sure they own the copyright but they also gave everyone a license to distribute it.
Adhering to these fraudulent DMCA requests endangers all of OSS.
Nintendo aren't using the DMCA takedown process for copyright-infringing material (the thing people normally mean by DMCA). They're sending letters to GitHub about how Yuzu is, in their view, a tool for circumvention of technological protection measures and therefore illegal in itself (under different provisions of the DMCA).
I've seen people post that the Yuzu devs had a Google Drive share that contained a bunch of pirate ROMs as well as a Nintendo Switch SDK, so it's possible that Yuzu did in fact have some Nintendo stuff in it.
> In keeping with its developer-friendly approach and branding, the Microsoft-owned platform...
Yes, because Microsoft has the other side where they take everyone's code and then repurpose it as a "coding aid as a service" kind of thing (copilot) without attribution or even permission in the first place.
That cat got out of the bag when Google was allowed to gobble up all copyrighted content to operate a commercial service without paying the copyright holders.
If you can demonstrate genuine benefit to society --of course, beyond mere access to copyrighted material-- even if during the course of a commercial enterprise, copyright does not apply.
Because others do it doesn't make it right and indeed, we're yet to see even remote benefit to society from the "AI" bots hype.
Eventually, one hopes to see _really good_ benefit, like... much greater than the cost and negative side effects of putting virtual pets on virtual, energy consuming hamster wheels.
Nintendo could have hired few of the yuzu devs and launched its own gamepass style service for PC and allow people to play games via emulation. People aren't using switch emulators only to pirate but because they actually perform better than the original console the games were developed for due to hardware limitations.
If Nintendo wanted its games playable on non-Nintendo platforms it would not need the yuzu devs to achieve that. Keeping their games exclusive is a deliberate strategy.
If their work warranted the prices they want to charge, they wouldn't need an elaborate state apparatus to buttress their business model.
The same is true of the west Nashville music-finance complex. And of Hollywood. And of every industry rent-seeking around the restrictions on speech and press which are branded as "intellectual property".
This just happens to be a transparently egregious example, as they are literally trying to censor a FOSS project and make its contributors' speech invisible / illegal.
While patent protection expire in 20 years, but this absurd rule lasts an eternity? Not right! There should most definitely be a time limit in it’s applicability.
How is an emulator different from things like libdvdcss? (videolan lib used to break DVD protection). Or is libdvdcss still illegal in the US? Because I feel it's the same, in both cases I want to be able to play things (movies or games) I legally acquired.
There are Library of Congress approved reasons to bypass DVD DRM, putting libdvdcss in a gray area. Any exemptions that could apply to emulators either expired or are limited in scope to things not being sold.
Your use of libdvdcss is almost certainly illegal under US law though, as absurd and ridiculous as that is.
Emulator developer here (not for videogame consoles but IoT and Honeypots). The DRM circumvention that Yuzu implements can be attacked legally twofold. The decryption process to run a game in the Nintendo Switch uses some alphanumerical keys stored in 2 files if I remember correctly, called "prod.keys" and "title.keys".
Yuzu did not distribute those.
However it did implement the code to use those keys and decrypt a game. So you could say the final compiled binary "implements a way to circumvent DRM". Although you could also defend it by saying "it just models what the hardware does".
Regardless, for the whole "emulators are illegal" discussion, you could technically distribute code for an emulator that does not include that piece of code. Then "ask" your users to "search" for it (kinda like with prod and title keys) and "tell" them to compile it.
But these are very technical arguments you would need to pass in front of a non-technical judge. So good luck.
How did Tropic Haze make money if Yuzu and Citra were free. I could not find other products they sell. In consequence, how could they pay millions to Nintendo?
They had a Patreon that pulled in tens of thousands per month. If I recall correctly, some features were locked to early access that required being a Patreon member.
The early access was also open though (the whole repo was FOSS and up to date in the end) - you just had to build it manually.
This situation really sucks because soon there will be the Switch 2, and then maybe in 5 years or so you won't be able to play a lot of these games easily anymore (nevermind at good resolutions, etc.).
They've been waging a disconnected war against their loyal fan base for years. See, for example, them suing people over hosting Super Smash Brothers tournaments.
edit: ah, the number of 8,535 is in the beginning of the notice itself, but due to the large number they did not list all of the forks, I guess the listed ones are the only non-forked repos.
The solution is decentralised Github:
https://radicle.xyz
Radicle gives a decentralised Git network that is much more immune to any legal action.
This makes it much more difficult for Nintendo to take such action. Because it is a civil dispute, not a criminal one, the trick is to make it more costly for Nintendo to abuse the legal system (it is unlikely the legal system abuse will be fixed in long term, or ever). When DMCA and such laws were designed, it is unlikely the lawmakers intended it to be abused like this. There is no penalty for Nintendo to do as many takedown notes they want, whileas there is a headache for anyone involved in these projects to defend themselves.
Isn't radicle then the easy way to argue that participants actually distribute the program themselves, including an easily trackable IP, so lawyers can just add a client themselves and then sue all IPs that transfer a byte of the (illegal) program?
The same happens to media sharing via bittorrent in germany right now. Having some site which gets closed instead seems to be preferable to me.
Of course copyright infringement is different from whatever emulators are doing but I imagine the effect might be the same
It's pretty easy to safely get away with piracy with a VPN. In most countries even that isn't required. I'd imagine it's the same here.
Of course the goal for the lawyers then is different, it's just extracting money instead of preventing distribution
Good luck getting that through the court.
I guess they could just send people threatening letters - but even getting the ISPs to play along would be an uphill battle.
Germany is a special case as it's particularly bureaucratic and dominated by establishment interests. And even then it's only commonplace for Bittorrent because GEMA, etc. pushed to make that possible.
The solution is legal reform, because these laws are bullshit.
It’s the wanted outcome, but it is hard to see a path of event that would lead to this.
This is the same old story though, and nerds dont get this right: what about all the viruses/child porn games and other heinous shit people will host there? Decentralisation is only as good as its moderation and unpaid moderation is a hell of a weak link
The issue is accountability. A big centralised server has accountability built in to some extent, because you can find and sue or jail the bastards that own it. Decentralised, is often conflated with anonymity and hence zero accountability.
But it doesn’t have to be this way. For something like source control, must we have anonymity? You wouldn’t require all that much PII to deter most bad actors, I would have thought. Maybe the PII bits can be stored in a different system that provides cryptographically signed assertions. You remain anonymous, but can assert your identity is stored in X. Law enforcement have the power to recover the PII if there is a warrant. Like some of the proposals for asserted qualifications in Europe and such.
1 reply →
Why are emulators illegal? I understand that they are associated with piracy because people play pirates games on them. But it’s like banning BitTorrent because it allows you to pirate, or Windows because you can play pirates games on it as well.
The article mentions that emulators “illegally circumvent Nintendo’s technological protection measures and run illegal copies of Switch games.”. But which law makes it illegal to circumvent such systems? And what about Wii-only emulators? Surely they have nothing to do with the safety systems of the Switch.
> But which law makes it illegal to circumvent such systems?
DMCA section 1201
You are right, it says it right there:
No person shall circumvent a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title.
https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/1201
Can the emulators remove the circumvention code to avoid the DMCA takedown?
19 replies →
In the US. The DMCA is only relevant because GitHub is operated by a US company. Nintendo would have to try to make the same arguments for EU law, e.g., if the software in question would be hosted in the EU. That might be more complicated.
Overriding DMCA it's legal for interoperation purposes.
4 replies →
>> But which law makes it illegal to circumvent such systems?
> DMCA section 1201
...which is an unambiguous observation that DMCA section 1201 is in conflict with the 1st amendment.
Emulators per se are not illegal. Most likely.
If emulators in general were illegal, Nintendo would be in trouble too and would be obliged to remove the emulated games it sells on the Virtual Console.
4 replies →
some argue that emulation infringes on their patents, but i am not big on the concept of monopolizing ideas myself.
1 reply →
This is a good question. In addition to an answer, if someone could give a high level but technical overview about how the Nintendo Switch encryption works and how the emulators work around it I'd be grateful.
DMCA makes it illegal to circumvent DRM. Whether or not it's good DRM is irrelevant. The classic example would be DVDs that are encrypted with CSS and 40-bit keys. Because you need to be able to decrypt the DVD to be able to play the video, if your software doesn't have permission to playback (encrypted) DVDs, you're circumventing DRM. A DVD ripping software maker has lost this in court: https://w.wiki/9yNu
So like how DVDs are encrypted, all Switch games are encrypted. Except with good AES encryption and proper key sizes. This started with games in the Wii/PS3 generation, so emulators for systems before that would be fine.
Also I've now learned that wikipedia has a URL shortener. Because Hacker News eats the period at the end of the wikipedia article title.
4 replies →
Nintendo is in an interesting position whereby they are actually selling emulators as a product to this day. Which gives them more of a leg to stand on in these sorts of efforts, regardless of whether or not I personally agree.
Oracle v Google determined this in my mind, the emulator is implementing an API, the API is not protected by copyright law.
FWIW that case was about whether copying the interface file almost verbatim was fair use, not about the API itself, IIRC.
1 reply →
I would say the opposite, it gives them less of a leg to stand since they cannot say that there's never any justification for emulation anymore like they said in the past.
Usually the justification for emulation is "the company doesn't sell this product anymore, it's abandonware"
8 replies →
That’s like saying I can’t make photocopies of my own ID because I’ve said in the past that identity thieves shouldn’t make photocopies of my ID.
1 reply →
Why would the owners of the copyright be restricted from selling their copyrighted works in whatever way they want?
3 replies →
Emulators are legal in the US because of Sony v Connectix
some aspects (not all aspects) of creating (not using) emulators are not illegal by way of copyright laws (but may be illegal by way of other laws such as trademarks, patents, DRM) in the US because of Sony vs Connectix.
Sorry?
Don’t worry about it.
I wonder if there’s a “git over BitTorrent”.
Having a cryptographically signed (by authors, not by GitHub) and fully open source git hosting network would be a boom for FOSS security in general.
https://radicle.xyz/
close but it does not use Bittorrent for the P2P part?
2 replies →
IPFS can do that
https://docs.ipfs.tech/how-to/host-git-repo/
Or we can simply have a git hoster which is not in the US and as such is not impacted by DCMA
The overarching terms of the DMCA are specified by the 1996 WIPO Copyright Treaty, which every developed country has implemented.
2 replies →
US copyright tends to be less restrictive and more relaxed than many other countries.
3 replies →
Seriously. When is this happening?
Broadly speaking, it's inevitable that some jurisdiction will decide to observe the unclothed emperor here and create a legal framework without the yoke of all of this "intellectual property". Obviously, it will thrive, and everyone will flock to use services there.
What then?
We need rutracker of github
What’s stopping you from making torrents of your repos now?
(Not as a rhetorical question; I don’t quite understand your vision, so I’m hoping you’ll clarify the usage.)
They are probably talking about a "serverless" bittorrent. Some kind of Git-over-DHT. It would require this to be accepted: http://bittorrent.org/beps/bep_0050.html (Decentralized Mutable Torrent)
3 replies →
The torrents would be snapshots of the repo at a particular point in time. Updates couldn't be fetched through the torrent via git pull.
I'd assume that op wants a torrent that can be pushed/pulled from.
3 replies →
Git is a decentralized service.
We have https://radicle.xyz/
Often discussed here.
However, many Hacker News commenters love to bash it because it is associated with cryptocurrencies.
Git commit messages could be cryptographically signed. And git, the protocol is fully open source. Also there are many open source UI. Care to explain what is the usecase of git of torrent compared to gitlab?
Distributed hosting means there isn't a single point of failure. Even without DMCAs it's fairly common to try cloning a random gitlab or plain git repo only to find it's down.
2 replies →
As much as it pains me to say this this might be a good use of blockchain
Blockchain is just a slow database. What you want is a peer to peer system which actually has peers instead of a couple super nodes and ephemeral drive-by clients.
3 replies →
Care to explain? If you just mean verified tree, git already is that.
2 replies →
I agree, at least in theory (not sure if any existing blockchains could adequately solve the problem today). Someday, you could imagine essentially running gitlab on a blockchain. Actually, it's not a stretch to include access control such as public key management, "Issues", etc. It would be publicly readable, not censorable, no single point of failure, and unlike torrents, fully mutable. Obviously, today the cost would probably be prohibitive for most purposes.
So are people going to make t-shirts with the cryptographic keys? I.E. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AACS_encryption_key_controvers...
2007 was a different time. Can't imagine that happening today
I thought this was going to be all Nintendo emulators, thankfully it is only yuzu (switch emulator) related.
They're DMCA'ing code they have no right to DMCA - it was released under a permissive OSS license. Sure they own the copyright but they also gave everyone a license to distribute it.
Adhering to these fraudulent DMCA requests endangers all of OSS.
Nintendo aren't using the DMCA takedown process for copyright-infringing material (the thing people normally mean by DMCA). They're sending letters to GitHub about how Yuzu is, in their view, a tool for circumvention of technological protection measures and therefore illegal in itself (under different provisions of the DMCA).
3 replies →
I've seen people post that the Yuzu devs had a Google Drive share that contained a bunch of pirate ROMs as well as a Nintendo Switch SDK, so it's possible that Yuzu did in fact have some Nintendo stuff in it.
For now, Nintendo won the lawsuit against Yuzu, on grounds of piracy.
Given how most emulators can allow playing pirated games, the others might be next.
Well, no, it never went to court.
Read up on Sony vs Connectix. This is basically FUD. Yuzu is cooked but that doesn’t mean all emulation of Nintendo consoles is.
The Yuzu devs settled, and among the allegations in Nintendo’s filing was that they, the developers themselves, engaged in piracy.
3 replies →
We've been hearing that for decades, and we still out here emulating
Why does that make a difference?
> In keeping with its developer-friendly approach and branding, the Microsoft-owned platform...
Yes, because Microsoft has the other side where they take everyone's code and then repurpose it as a "coding aid as a service" kind of thing (copilot) without attribution or even permission in the first place.
That cat got out of the bag when Google was allowed to gobble up all copyrighted content to operate a commercial service without paying the copyright holders.
If you can demonstrate genuine benefit to society --of course, beyond mere access to copyrighted material-- even if during the course of a commercial enterprise, copyright does not apply.
Because others do it doesn't make it right and indeed, we're yet to see even remote benefit to society from the "AI" bots hype.
Eventually, one hopes to see _really good_ benefit, like... much greater than the cost and negative side effects of putting virtual pets on virtual, energy consuming hamster wheels.
1 reply →
Nintendo could have hired few of the yuzu devs and launched its own gamepass style service for PC and allow people to play games via emulation. People aren't using switch emulators only to pirate but because they actually perform better than the original console the games were developed for due to hardware limitations.
If Nintendo wanted its games playable on non-Nintendo platforms it would not need the yuzu devs to achieve that. Keeping their games exclusive is a deliberate strategy.
At that point, you should argue for platform exclusivity being illegal anticompetitive behavior.
1 reply →
that kind of PR stunt is for failing companies, nintendo will remain rich doing its thing for the foreseeable future
[dupe]
More discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40236699
Out of sheer spite, I have long decided to never give any money to Nintendo.
I pirate. And if I can't pirate, I won't play.
I love their products and happily give them money in exchange.
Yes, what an absurd notion they have that they must get paid for their (excellent) work.
If their work warranted the prices they want to charge, they wouldn't need an elaborate state apparatus to buttress their business model.
The same is true of the west Nashville music-finance complex. And of Hollywood. And of every industry rent-seeking around the restrictions on speech and press which are branded as "intellectual property".
This just happens to be a transparently egregious example, as they are literally trying to censor a FOSS project and make its contributors' speech invisible / illegal.
4 replies →
Oh they deserve it. But, as a player, I feel deeply hated by them. And i Do not give money to people who hate me.
7 replies →
Vote with your wallets! Stop purchasing their products!
While patent protection expire in 20 years, but this absurd rule lasts an eternity? Not right! There should most definitely be a time limit in it’s applicability.
This! Copyright is just absurdly overinflated.
How is an emulator different from things like libdvdcss? (videolan lib used to break DVD protection). Or is libdvdcss still illegal in the US? Because I feel it's the same, in both cases I want to be able to play things (movies or games) I legally acquired.
There are Library of Congress approved reasons to bypass DVD DRM, putting libdvdcss in a gray area. Any exemptions that could apply to emulators either expired or are limited in scope to things not being sold.
Your use of libdvdcss is almost certainly illegal under US law though, as absurd and ridiculous as that is.
I don't think it's different, there's a note about it on VLC's wiki: https://wiki.videolan.org/Frequently_Asked_Questions/#Is_lib...
Emulator developer here (not for videogame consoles but IoT and Honeypots). The DRM circumvention that Yuzu implements can be attacked legally twofold. The decryption process to run a game in the Nintendo Switch uses some alphanumerical keys stored in 2 files if I remember correctly, called "prod.keys" and "title.keys".
Yuzu did not distribute those.
However it did implement the code to use those keys and decrypt a game. So you could say the final compiled binary "implements a way to circumvent DRM". Although you could also defend it by saying "it just models what the hardware does".
Regardless, for the whole "emulators are illegal" discussion, you could technically distribute code for an emulator that does not include that piece of code. Then "ask" your users to "search" for it (kinda like with prod and title keys) and "tell" them to compile it.
But these are very technical arguments you would need to pass in front of a non-technical judge. So good luck.
Nintendo in arguing that the people behind Yuzu actually did distribute them, just not very openly
Reminder when the youth take power the first thing we should do at this point is fully repeal the DMCA.
How did Tropic Haze make money if Yuzu and Citra were free. I could not find other products they sell. In consequence, how could they pay millions to Nintendo?
They had a Patreon that pulled in tens of thousands per month. If I recall correctly, some features were locked to early access that required being a Patreon member.
https://graphtreon.com/creator/yuzuteam
The early access was also open though (the whole repo was FOSS and up to date in the end) - you just had to build it manually.
This situation really sucks because soon there will be the Switch 2, and then maybe in 5 years or so you won't be able to play a lot of these games easily anymore (nevermind at good resolutions, etc.).
I only expect this to amplify the Streisand effect. Funny to see how disconnected corporations (and their legals) are from the world.
They've been waging a disconnected war against their loyal fan base for years. See, for example, them suing people over hosting Super Smash Brothers tournaments.
why over 8k??? The linked [dmca notice](https://github.com/github/dmca/blob/master/2024/04/2024-04-2...) lists exactly 12 repos, not 8000. Where did they get this info from?
edit: ah, the number of 8,535 is in the beginning of the notice itself, but due to the large number they did not list all of the forks, I guess the listed ones are the only non-forked repos.
I can see the cost of second hand Wii U’s going up.
[dead]