Comment by miohtama
2 years ago
The solution is decentralised Github:
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.
The question is, are emulator authors good actors or bad actors. It is subjective and we should not let Nintendo to decide.