This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
I didn’t think emulators were copyright infringement since they’re built from scratch. Why isn’t GitHub telling them to get fucked?
Why isn’t ~~GitHub~~ Microsoft telling them to get fucked?
They don't wanna be sued. Emulators are technically legal but Nintendo likes to abuse every loophole in the book to argue otherwise.
Nintendo eternally sucks but the Yuzu team handed their asses to the lawyers on a silver platter. Taking donations is one thing but a paywall to play the latest big first-party games is legal bait.
Emulators have been a coding exercise that came with a nice side benefit. Devs were deliberate about separately the work from piracy. Then a group like Tropical Haze makes money on writing an emulator and release a 0-day update that runs Tears of the Kingdom.
Emulation isn't a place for entrepreneurs.
I don't think taking money for making an emulator is the problem per se, and it's unlikely it had anything to do with why Nintendo took action against them. It's... everything else you mention. The brazen, unquestionable, open piracy, and the publicity of being able to play a game that hadn't even been released as you say. And the DMCA in the US makes switch emulation itself a more viable legal target, because in this form it circumvents Nintendo's encryption like the article you link points out. You can sell an NES emulator, no problem.
It... It does not "circumvent" Nintendo's encryption. It applies a decryption algorithm to an arbitrary file with an arbitrary key
I suppose it's true decrypting the files is not so much "circumventing" the encryption as it is... decrypting it, but I think for the purpose of the DMCA it's the process of "circumventing" Nintendo's attempt to keep unauthorized people from playing these games that it's referencing. Encrypting those files is a part of their DRM scheme, so they say undoing it without their authorization violates the law. That's my understanding of their claim, anyway, and part of the basis for their previous DMCA takedown notices to github. I don't think this specific claim has ever been tested in court.
If anyone can afford the lawyers and has an incentive to challenge Nintendo, surely it’s Microsoft…..
I think they don't really care actually. Sure, they could afford to defend the people who voluntarily spent 100+ hours to build a repository using their tools but what's in it for them?
They don't have much money, as they need to pump every cent into their aiOS
What's their incentive?
A little good press for GitHub to offset all the bad press from downtime.
This is good press for GitHub. Corporations are their customers, not us. They want to show how friendly and easy to work with they are to corporations.
Doesn't seem worth the time or effort to lawyer up over.
I don't see an incentive for them here.
Maybe we could build a distributed Github you can't just delete with something decentralized and versioning, like Hypercore protocol or IPLD (InterPlanetary Linked Data), Ceramic Network?
About legality: that's (japanese) Nintendo using US media laws gone rogue to swipe repos on a US hoster (Github). Maybe don't use a US hoster next time.
And yeah, Europe isn't much better there.
Github =/= git.
Just stop using Github already.
and also we have a generic term for GitHub like things, they are called forges, in this case (GitHub) it is a forge for git (the underlying SVC powering it) only
I am not so sure this situation would be much better on other services. Nintendo could steamroll smaller companies.
You can host it on servers outside of their jurisdiction or with laws that better protect or prevent companies abuse. Anyone can host git is the point, you dont have to use GitHub.
Have you seen what happens to ANY website hosting pirated Nintendo content? How many of them are still online?
Lots are. Just because you see a lot of media articles about it, doesnt mean they are actually making a dent.
Presumptuous and incorrect. They have made a big dent already. Entire communities abandoned and dev teams disbanded. No-one is willing to share links publicly anymore. Thus my point - hosting their pirated content on any site that wishes to operate or be accessed from US, EU or the UK would be committing a suicide by defending, or even not taking action on their dmca requests.
But it exists, many sites!
Keep living in your fantasy world!
Git is meant to be decentralised
And it is.
Github isn't.
Yeah, but it needs a address to point to, to work with others repositories. Which with http is centralized. Wouldn't be with a distributed protocol.
I don’t think you know how git works
I do know that it keeps a local copy of the repo. But it's not designed to work with a pool, so it needs a specific address to work together/clone/share repos.
I'm by no means an expert in git, did i overlook something?
Technically you can add as many remotes to a repo as you want and push/pull to any/all of them. Might be annoying though
Its quite common in some industries. Lots of different git remote references no github. It works well when you dont care or dont want piulic repos out in the wild.
I used to do a ton of contract work that way. It went away forva bit but about 3 years ago its coming back. Ive heard complaits about ai and that github is much less stable.
You cant have downtime in some industries.
I have not tried/used it (yet?), but the kids are building Radicle for this very purpose. It gets a fair amount of techie coverage (blogs, comments, etc.) but sits in unique space compared to, say, Forgejo (classic self-hosted git).
Looks interesting, thanks!
But i thought more, like; since IPFS doesn't delete data, writes changes separately. If we had that with protocolozing (which IPLD seems to do), we would have something like a decentral git.
There are already alternatives to GitHub and I think Forgejo is still working on federation. The most active Yuzu fork (as far as I'm aware) is Eden and that has its own Forgejo instance.
There's also a p2p "plugin" to git, but things like that always feel like a workaround to me. The random hacker in India also doesn't know about it.
I don't really see what that solves tbh. Not having a central source of truth seems like it could cause issues and git is already pretty much decentralized because everyone who's working on a repo will have a copy on their own device and cam upload that to whatever forge they want. Aside from that, you lose all the features a git forge gives you, especially the ability for people to actually find the repo.
especially the ability for people to actually find the repo.
Vs. a random git URL or a centralized repo everyone knows?
Everything you can find on the internet is a "random URL" in that sense but that URL can be searched on search engines and shared. But I don't know how that p2p git thing works, so maybe I'm assuming it's more complicated than it actually is.
It'd be interesting to see something built ontop of things like IPLD or IPFS (which uses IPLD)
Speed isn't really a important factor for something like this.
I know Nintendo=bad, but also, if their only leg to stand on is "these are distributing our keys" then just don't include the keys. Plenty of others don't.
I feel like all these repos knew their days were numbered because of that that, but they probably didn't care. It's easier to get everyone from one place than to look around online for the keys separately. May as well include the keys until Nintendo does something about it.
They don't include the keys. Their argument is stretched really thin. They're saying that because it can use prod.keys that are obtained illegally then the program is legal. They phrase this implying that getting these keys is always illegal, which it's not.
Nintendo doesn't seem to care about all other emulators of their previous consoles nearly as much, hopefully it stays that way
If emulators are not illegal, why Microsoft take them down? This should be illegal, the same way information was censored in COVID times.
I hate big tech.
It's not because they're emulators, it's because they're including Nintendo's cryptographic keys.
Where? Where are they? Point to the file. Oh wait you can't because they're not there.
I dream of a Nintendo where the artists are free from their work being used as a legal bludgeon against people who enjoy their work. You can't tell me the people behind tears of the kingdom were happy that their game was basically unable to be run on launch, and having to work within the constraints of a chip from 2018.
Every time I read stories like that I wonder if I should do more stuff with the hyphanet.
