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.
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.
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.
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.
You get a few exemptions for research for security reasons, but it does require it to be on "a lawfully acquired device or machine on which the computer program operates solely". So an emulator doesn't fit the bill at all.
Video games are mentioned: you're allowed to circumvent DRM for games that no longer have their online servers running.
That is interesting. I wonder if there are any Switch games which have had their servers turned of and if an emulator can be argued to be made for the purpose of supporting that game only (that it then happens to play other games...)
DMCA § 1201 makes reverse engineering modern consoles illegal.
Any modern game console has some form of decryption, which can be argued to prevent access.
This is when we run into the chicken/egg problem because you can't write emulation without violating 1201. It is also in part the argumentation Nintendo used in the yuzu case.
The difference is those security chips were used to prevent unlicensed games, not to prevent the games from being played on unlicensed consoles (emulators).
One argument that I’d like to see made is that DMCA takedown requests, which are intended to enforce copyright is the wrong enforcement mechanism because the 9th Circuit, in SONY v. CONNECTIX said that the functional aspects of emulation can only be protected under patent law.
Ok, what if the emulator that is distributed is not functional, but to make it into a functional emulator, you have to (1) compile it, OR (2) make small modifications to it (that are distributed through a different channel), or both.
EU resident here. Reverse engineering in general is allowed, but decompiling software adds a good number of restrictions[1].
Disclaimer: I have talked to lawyers. Our company makes industrial IoT loggers and during my career I have only been given appropriate documentation twice by manufacturers. Most of the systems have been reverse engineered through packet capture.
Even with documentation you still get garbadge. I've had to decompile a HSM firmware to figure out what the actual input of functions was since the manufacturer kept claiming the documentation was correct. It wasn't even close. Only after I provided the solution to my own support ticket they changed the documentation (why bother paying for full support...).
I've gotten a bit of empathy for the poor front support guy since he'd have to keep complaining to the developers which kept saying "no it's fine as documented".
Brazil also allows non-clean room reverse engineering (I still don't understand why we're not a rev-eng tech hub, come to Brazil my Ghidra/IDA users) and have much saner laws regarding piracy (like it being legal for 24h for testing), I've only ever seen big pirates (those who have piracy streaming websites) getting busted, I don't ever use a VPN and had no issues whatsoever with my piracy (have been a pirate for almost 20yrs now).
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.
Well no, any theory of emulators being illegal would be under the DMCA, which bans DRM circumvention without the authority of the copyright owner. But Nintendo is selling games with said authority, so it wouldn't apply.
There's a difference between if I try and sell you a digital copy of Super Metroid and if Nintendo does, right? Nintendo's argument would be that the emulator itself is no different.
Well, yeah, the best precedent we have is the Sony and Bleem case. But the funny thing about common law systems is the precedents are really important until someone tries again and the precedent is suddenly thrown out.
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.
It applies to Yuzu because it breaks the encryption on Switch games without the copyright holder's permissions. And it's simple to argue that the encryption is for DRM purposes, like CSS for DVDs.
Nintendo's argument in the filing was that it effectively did, as the website instructed people on how to extract the keys, and that the software did real time decryption for which there was no legitimate source of keys.
That didn't get tested in court, but I suspect it would have succeeded (this is not legal advice).
So, the emulator did not contain the key but it made it easy to use one if you had one? Is that a suitable description?
How useful would the emulator without the key be? I guess you could still write and play (and share) your own software. Is that what people call "homebrew" in the Nintendo Switch context?
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.
I think the point is that the audience might like to know whether confident claims that something is legal or illegal are backed by actual expertise or just vibes, not that things people say on a web forum are legally binding.
There’ve been lawsuits. Anything can happen in court, but emulators are currently about as settled as “legal” as anything. Including commercial ones. Sure, in the US.
Can’t distribute games or other copyrighted software with them, though. Of course that’s still highly likely to get you in trouble. And with the same caveat as anything legal in the US: it’s as legal as your ability to weather a series of failing lawsuits against you.
Nintendo historically took a harder stance than that basically saying that emulation destroys the player experience and even copying your own games isn't legal.
Seems like emulation is only fine if they make money out of it.
my justification is that intellectual property is an absolutely ridiculous concept and my actions are driven by my morals and values and not the frequently ridiculous laws of this country
In the past they said that there's never any justification for emulation and that it ruins the player experience, seems like it depends on how much money they make out of it.
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.
As I understand, Bittorrent is not a persistent data structure. Git and IPFS are. Radicle is another interesting approach. They used IPFS but switched to a custom protocol, as I understand, for performance.
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)
Ooh, I really like this idea! A decentralized form of pub-sub based git sounds fantastic. Of course, much of what makes github et.al. desirable, is the extras on top. Pull Requests, Issues, Wiki, search, etc. Making a “local first” decentralized GitHub would be much work.
No. With BitTorrent, I can tell a client to go fetch this torrent or hash (magnet link) and it can do that without any specific hardcoded server. Centralized trackers help but there’s always the DHT. With git you need to give the client an exact host, which can be gone for any number of reasons.
I think he means uncensorable or at least very very hard to censor.
The problem is it could be very expensive. Think NFT but the metadata is the source code of the emulator. You're not removing that from the blockchain, ever. It also needs to be a popular blockchain, like ETH, BTC, SOL or whatever people still use today.
There are "coins" where your stake is disk space but if it's not a widespread thing it just dies off (conway GoL style)
I think he's referring to the distributed portion of a blockchain. A centralized github-type for profit business is required to respond to these takedown requests. Nintendo's lawyers would need to go after every individual node hosting this vc 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.
"Just" a slow database that allows coordinated writes in a decentralized way, effectively solving the Byzantine Generals problem. That's what made Bitcoin a novel idea.
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.
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.
Nobody is arguing that, but it's certainly less likely to go down or be lost than a typical direct download link. It's also easier/cheaper to self-host very popular repos with P2P, because it scales nicely.
The DMCA is crazy though, you can just request a takedown and the onus is on the host. And then if it turns out you didn't actually have the right to do that... well that has to be sorted out later.
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.
Second, the DMCA has nothing in it that explicitly targets emulators. Now what some hardware makers have done is include some kind of cryptography and called it an anti-circumvention method, but that is a later phenomenon and the earlier attempts at this didn’t amount to much in most cases.
Third, the Yuzu Devs brought the wrath of Nintendo of America down upon them through means other than merely writing an emulator, in particular they were likely engaged in actual piracy. They probably knew they were cooked and chose to settle rather than go to trial.
So again, FUD. There’s been a lot of it everywhere on this specific topic, so quit spreading it around like so much manure to nurture Nintendo of America’s basic stance towards emulation. They can have their opinion, but it doesn’t overrule judicial precedent.
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).
The whole "technical protection measures" clause is in my view the most atrocious part of the DMCA, more so than the actual copyright stuff - because this communicates that the state is not just ok with vendors using their devices against their own users but actively endorses and encourages it.
This is basically the legal basis for Doctorow's "war on general computation".
To all intents and purposes every country in the world has an anti-circumvention provision since membership of TRIPS and the WTO requires you to have one.
The US one is actually pretty toothless compared to many.
You're effectively left with rogue states, who tend not be to very good hosting partners.
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.
Enabling compatibility/format shifting has been a successful fair-use argument for DRM circumvention in the past, but it would be nice to have an official carve-out.
It's a perfectly reasonable position to not give them your money. I thought we were talking about pirating their games though, which is worlds apart from voting with your wallet.
However, I do not see any good reason to not enjoy their games.
Yeah, if everyone does as I do, they go bankrupt. I do not care. Try not to be hated by people using your product, I guess.
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.
Can you elaborate how not wanting you to pirate the games they spent tons of money and labor in making is "rent-seeking" and a restriction on free speech? It seems like a stretch.
"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"
Give me a break. The only reason this software was FOSS, was for the creators to receive protection from useful idiots like you. We all know that the purpose of this project was to profit from piracy.
At some level, isn't the whole exercise of characterizing the copying of bytes as "piracy" just a way to justify invasive state policy?
We can observe that the nature of information is that it is free to copy. This is not a new observation; the myth of Prometheus tells us of this nature, and of the power that the gods foolishly attempt to shore up by pretending that it can't be copied.
Of course I agree that solid games are worth money, but if you have to avert your eyes to the entire evolution of the way information propagates in the universe in order to achieve that, you've gone down an incorrect path.
And yes, building entire media empires designed to leverage your right to distribute bytes as you see fit, while prohibiting others from distributing them under threat of violence, is most certainly rent-seeking.
The silly fiction that someone "owns" that information because of a previous historical event is not in keeping with any part of nature that I'm able to observe.
What makes anyone think that on sufficiently long time scales the internet will continue to abide this?
Ah I see, you've created an entire ideobabble to justify free-riding, on an absurd premise as well that "We can observe that the nature of information is that it is free to copy". This is the equivalent of "We can observe that the nature of animals is to kill each other for calories, so it's morally justified to murder other people and eat them."
...I mean, maybe there is some moral imperative toward vegetarianism. I don't see the connection with cannibalism; seems like you're just being a bit silly.
But I think we can make that decision without needing onerous and obstructive state infrastructure, so I don't think the comparison is particularly germane. Unless you are suggesting that it's the role of the state to stop animals from eating each other? (Isn't that the same impetus as suggesting it's the role of the state to stop data from replicating?)
Lastly, I think you've misunderstood the role of the free-rider problem in public goods, particularly in the application of building non-rivalrous markets; in fact, you have it exactly backwards.
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.
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.
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
Of course the goal for the lawyers then is different, it's just extracting money instead of preventing distribution
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.
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.
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?
Isn't the whole emulator a circumvention? It circumvents the hardware which "effectively controls access to a work", which is the console itself.
Not exactly. Clean room reimpmentations are fine, and has been upheld in court. I think the copyright office even has a published exemption for it.
The issue is when you bypass encryption keys and systems.
Thanks for the clarification and the info.
my mouse and keyboard is circumventing me manually flipping transistors in my processor
Could "effectively controls access" be attacked here? The purpose of the hardware is not to control access.
It’s not hardware, it’s encryption and decryption systems.
A Nintendo Switch is a non-hardware decryption system?
Not even for research purposes?
Research would be considered fair use. But you can’t just claim research and get a pass, it has to hold up in court.
There are exemptions that get updated by the Library of Congress every few years. The current one is from 2021: https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/FR-2021-10-28/pdf/2021-2...
You get a few exemptions for research for security reasons, but it does require it to be on "a lawfully acquired device or machine on which the computer program operates solely". So an emulator doesn't fit the bill at all.
Video games are mentioned: you're allowed to circumvent DRM for games that no longer have their online servers running.
That is interesting. I wonder if there are any Switch games which have had their servers turned of and if an emulator can be argued to be made for the purpose of supporting that game only (that it then happens to play other games...)
DMCA § 1201 makes reverse engineering modern consoles illegal.
Any modern game console has some form of decryption, which can be argued to prevent access.
This is when we run into the chicken/egg problem because you can't write emulation without violating 1201. It is also in part the argumentation Nintendo used in the yuzu case.
Not just modern consoles. Nintendo has had ‘security’ hardware built in since the NES (the CIC chip)
The difference is those security chips were used to prevent unlicensed games, not to prevent the games from being played on unlicensed consoles (emulators).
A NES clone without a CIC will play games fine.
One argument that I’d like to see made is that DMCA takedown requests, which are intended to enforce copyright is the wrong enforcement mechanism because the 9th Circuit, in SONY v. CONNECTIX said that the functional aspects of emulation can only be protected under patent law.
Ok, what if the emulator that is distributed is not functional, but to make it into a functional emulator, you have to (1) compile it, OR (2) make small modifications to it (that are distributed through a different channel), or both.
> that effectively controls access
Not very effective, is it?
I assume this means something else in lawyer speak.
Effective means "has an effect".
i.e. you cannot put a piece of paper in the box with the words "this is a technical protection mechanism" and claim it is.
But it doesn't mean that what you do has to be infailable, or meet some arbitrary level of doing it's job well, no.
Overriding DMCA it's legal for interoperation purposes.
IANAL; Afaik only in the EU, it even allows non-cleanroom reverse engineering.
EU resident here. Reverse engineering in general is allowed, but decompiling software adds a good number of restrictions[1].
Disclaimer: I have talked to lawyers. Our company makes industrial IoT loggers and during my career I have only been given appropriate documentation twice by manufacturers. Most of the systems have been reverse engineered through packet capture.
[1] https://vidstromlabs.com/blog/the-legal-boundaries-of-revers...
> given appropriate documentation
Even with documentation you still get garbadge. I've had to decompile a HSM firmware to figure out what the actual input of functions was since the manufacturer kept claiming the documentation was correct. It wasn't even close. Only after I provided the solution to my own support ticket they changed the documentation (why bother paying for full support...).
I've gotten a bit of empathy for the poor front support guy since he'd have to keep complaining to the developers which kept saying "no it's fine as documented".
Brazil also allows non-clean room reverse engineering (I still don't understand why we're not a rev-eng tech hub, come to Brazil my Ghidra/IDA users) and have much saner laws regarding piracy (like it being legal for 24h for testing), I've only ever seen big pirates (those who have piracy streaming websites) getting busted, I don't ever use a VPN and had no issues whatsoever with my piracy (have been a pirate for almost 20yrs now).
>> 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.
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.
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.
You believe the sword is double edged, fair and cuts both ways.
It does not.
Beautiful, that is poetry man!
Well no, any theory of emulators being illegal would be under the DMCA, which bans DRM circumvention without the authority of the copyright owner. But Nintendo is selling games with said authority, so it wouldn't apply.
There's a difference between if I try and sell you a digital copy of Super Metroid and if Nintendo does, right? Nintendo's argument would be that the emulator itself is no different.
some argue that emulation infringes on their patents, but i am not big on the concept of monopolizing ideas myself.
Well, yeah, the best precedent we have is the Sony and Bleem case. But the funny thing about common law systems is the precedents are really important until someone tries again and the precedent is suddenly thrown out.
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.
Yes, but how does that apply to the Nintendo Switch and Yuzu. Did they actually extract the AES key from real hardware and include it in the emulator?
It applies to Yuzu because it breaks the encryption on Switch games without the copyright holder's permissions. And it's simple to argue that the encryption is for DRM purposes, like CSS for DVDs.
Nintendo's argument in the filing was that it effectively did, as the website instructed people on how to extract the keys, and that the software did real time decryption for which there was no legitimate source of keys.
That didn't get tested in court, but I suspect it would have succeeded (this is not legal advice).
So, the emulator did not contain the key but it made it easy to use one if you had one? Is that a suitable description?
How useful would the emulator without the key be? I guess you could still write and play (and share) your own software. Is that what people call "homebrew" in the Nintendo Switch context?
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.
Sorry?
Don’t worry about it.
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"
Emulation’s legal whether or not some of the software on a platform is abandonware (which doesn’t justify anything legally, anyway)
When you make this kind of claim, please make sure to 1) disclose whether you're a lawyer, and 2) your jurisdiction.
No. This is not legally binding. This is not the United States Of America where we speak officially, this is a random web forum.
I think the point is that the audience might like to know whether confident claims that something is legal or illegal are backed by actual expertise or just vibes, not that things people say on a web forum are legally binding.
The same as when you talk to a random person at a pub. All illegal and just vibes, always - that is the default.
There’ve been lawsuits. Anything can happen in court, but emulators are currently about as settled as “legal” as anything. Including commercial ones. Sure, in the US.
Can’t distribute games or other copyrighted software with them, though. Of course that’s still highly likely to get you in trouble. And with the same caveat as anything legal in the US: it’s as legal as your ability to weather a series of failing lawsuits against you.
Nintendo historically took a harder stance than that basically saying that emulation destroys the player experience and even copying your own games isn't legal.
Seems like emulation is only fine if they make money out of it.
my justification is that intellectual property is an absolutely ridiculous concept and my actions are driven by my morals and values and not the frequently ridiculous laws of this country
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.
Except they explicitly said that any emulation is bad. With your analogy it's like claiming ID photocopies are bad and then making your own.
And then emulation isn't stealing anyways.
Why would the owners of the copyright be restricted from selling their copyrighted works in whatever way they want?
In the past they said that there's never any justification for emulation and that it ruins the player experience, seems like it depends on how much money they make out of it.
Nintendo probably doesn’t think their virtual console counts as emulation if that is the case.
Or it’s just different corporate policies at different times being applied inconsistently.
To me it's just corporate hypocrisy.
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.
Right because an API is too abstract for copyright law, it has to literally be copied works.
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.
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?
Bittorrent as a distribution protocol is not suitable for Git-like traffic, so Radicle is doing their own p2p.
As I understand, Bittorrent is not a persistent data structure. Git and IPFS are. Radicle is another interesting approach. They used IPFS but switched to a custom protocol, as I understand, for performance.
IPFS can do that
https://docs.ipfs.tech/how-to/host-git-repo/
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)
Ooh, I really like this idea! A decentralized form of pub-sub based git sounds fantastic. Of course, much of what makes github et.al. desirable, is the extras on top. Pull Requests, Issues, Wiki, search, etc. Making a “local first” decentralized GitHub would be much work.
Is it? I imagine you only really have to build a different persistence backend. Then, everything else can go through that.
Git in itself is designed to be distributed.
Check out Fossil SCM, from the creator of SQLite.
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.
git is decentralized by design. you dont need bittorrent.
No. With BitTorrent, I can tell a client to go fetch this torrent or hash (magnet link) and it can do that without any specific hardcoded server. Centralized trackers help but there’s always the DHT. With git you need to give the client an exact host, which can be gone for any number of reasons.
So then just like with music and movies, I'll get letters from law firms for hosting illegal git repos via BitTorrent.
As much as it pains me to say this this might be a good use of blockchain
Care to explain? If you just mean verified tree, git already is that.
I think he means uncensorable or at least very very hard to censor.
The problem is it could be very expensive. Think NFT but the metadata is the source code of the emulator. You're not removing that from the blockchain, ever. It also needs to be a popular blockchain, like ETH, BTC, SOL or whatever people still use today.
There are "coins" where your stake is disk space but if it's not a widespread thing it just dies off (conway GoL style)
I think he's referring to the distributed portion of a blockchain. A centralized github-type for profit business is required to respond to these takedown requests. Nintendo's lawyers would need to go after every individual node hosting this vc 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.
"Just" a slow database that allows coordinated writes in a decentralized way, effectively solving the Byzantine Generals problem. That's what made Bitcoin a novel idea.
How does it solve the Byzantine generals problem?
By proof-of-work consensus. This makes attacks costly, basically they have to spend more resources than half the network, hence the name "51% attack".
The Bitcoin whitepaper [0] is a very accesible read, but the revolutionary ideas are not immediately obvious.
[0] https://www.bitcoin.com/bitcoin.pdf
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.
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.
I have multiple torrent downloads pending for more than an year. Just because it is distributed doesn't mean it is safe from being lost.
Nobody is arguing that, but it's certainly less likely to go down or be lost than a typical direct download link. It's also easier/cheaper to self-host very popular repos with P2P, because it scales nicely.
Or we can simply have a git hoster which is not in the US and as such is not impacted by DCMA
US copyright tends to be less restrictive and more relaxed than many other countries.
Not true as you can see here.
The DMCA is crazy though, you can just request a takedown and the onus is on the host. And then if it turns out you didn't actually have the right to do that... well that has to be sorted out later.
Yeah... presumed guilty
The overarching terms of the DMCA are specified by the 1996 WIPO Copyright Treaty, which every developed country has implemented.
It might be, but enforcement is a different thing. For example russian search engines are not blocking streaming websites like US/EU ones do.
Countries don't care about copyright until they make stuff worth stealing.
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
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.
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.
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.
Problem is that was before DMCA. New law can override judicial precedent.
First, no it wasn’t.
Second, the DMCA has nothing in it that explicitly targets emulators. Now what some hardware makers have done is include some kind of cryptography and called it an anti-circumvention method, but that is a later phenomenon and the earlier attempts at this didn’t amount to much in most cases.
Third, the Yuzu Devs brought the wrath of Nintendo of America down upon them through means other than merely writing an emulator, in particular they were likely engaged in actual piracy. They probably knew they were cooked and chose to settle rather than go to trial.
So again, FUD. There’s been a lot of it everywhere on this specific topic, so quit spreading it around like so much manure to nurture Nintendo of America’s basic stance towards emulation. They can have their opinion, but it doesn’t overrule judicial precedent.
You're right, I was confusing it with Sega v. Accolade.
We've been hearing that for decades, and we still out here emulating
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).
Very good point.
The whole "technical protection measures" clause is in my view the most atrocious part of the DMCA, more so than the actual copyright stuff - because this communicates that the state is not just ok with vendors using their devices against their own users but actively endorses and encourages it.
This is basically the legal basis for Doctorow's "war on general computation".
if we had a github-like system outside of the US, would Nintendo be able to do anything since the DMCA does not apply?
To all intents and purposes every country in the world has an anti-circumvention provision since membership of TRIPS and the WTO requires you to have one.
The US one is actually pretty toothless compared to many.
You're effectively left with rogue states, who tend not be to very good hosting partners.
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.
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.
This was for Google Books not AI, but it also applies to AI training nonetheless.
https://www.edsurge.com/news/2017-08-10-what-happened-to-goo...
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.
that kind of PR stunt is for failing companies, nintendo will remain rich doing its thing for the foreseeable future
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.
Enabling compatibility/format shifting has been a successful fair-use argument for DRM circumvention in the past, but it would be nice to have an official carve-out.
[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.
Yes, what an absurd notion they have that they must get paid for their (excellent) work.
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.
It's a perfectly reasonable position to not give them your money. I thought we were talking about pirating their games though, which is worlds apart from voting with your wallet.
They are not getting my money anyway.
However, I do not see any good reason to not enjoy their games. Yeah, if everyone does as I do, they go bankrupt. I do not care. Try not to be hated by people using your product, I guess.
The reason might be that you are being a complete hypocrite?
I would be an hypocrite if I pretended that I care.
Not from anybody else's standing point.
Not from your standing point you mean. It is not very polite to talk for other people.
I don't really care about your standing point anyway.
Discussion is over for me. Goodbye
Well it's not a great look for you to be selfish either, but I guess I'm the one at fault for being "impolite".
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.
Can you elaborate how not wanting you to pirate the games they spent tons of money and labor in making is "rent-seeking" and a restriction on free speech? It seems like a stretch.
"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"
Give me a break. The only reason this software was FOSS, was for the creators to receive protection from useful idiots like you. We all know that the purpose of this project was to profit from piracy.
At some level, isn't the whole exercise of characterizing the copying of bytes as "piracy" just a way to justify invasive state policy?
We can observe that the nature of information is that it is free to copy. This is not a new observation; the myth of Prometheus tells us of this nature, and of the power that the gods foolishly attempt to shore up by pretending that it can't be copied.
Of course I agree that solid games are worth money, but if you have to avert your eyes to the entire evolution of the way information propagates in the universe in order to achieve that, you've gone down an incorrect path.
And yes, building entire media empires designed to leverage your right to distribute bytes as you see fit, while prohibiting others from distributing them under threat of violence, is most certainly rent-seeking.
The silly fiction that someone "owns" that information because of a previous historical event is not in keeping with any part of nature that I'm able to observe.
What makes anyone think that on sufficiently long time scales the internet will continue to abide this?
Ah I see, you've created an entire ideobabble to justify free-riding, on an absurd premise as well that "We can observe that the nature of information is that it is free to copy". This is the equivalent of "We can observe that the nature of animals is to kill each other for calories, so it's morally justified to murder other people and eat them."
I'm done.
...I mean, maybe there is some moral imperative toward vegetarianism. I don't see the connection with cannibalism; seems like you're just being a bit silly.
But I think we can make that decision without needing onerous and obstructive state infrastructure, so I don't think the comparison is particularly germane. Unless you are suggesting that it's the role of the state to stop animals from eating each other? (Isn't that the same impetus as suggesting it's the role of the state to stop data from replicating?)
Lastly, I think you've misunderstood the role of the free-rider problem in public goods, particularly in the application of building non-rivalrous markets; in fact, you have it exactly backwards.
I love their products and happily give them money in exchange.
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.
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...
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.
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.