Gitlab has just told the world that they disable the accounts of people who contribute to a repository which receives a DMCA. You just need to send a reasonably complete DMCA takedown request to get the accounts of the contributors blocked and the repository removed. It doesn't have to be legitimate or even mention what content violates someone's intellectual property, who owns it or how it's actually violated.
I’ve always wondered this (specifically for my situation with music copyright) how do you only give access to takedown requests from the actual copyright holder? How do you know they are who they say they are? Music company email address or KYC checks and then sue people who try to do this as a joke?
I wish copyrighted music was a fair price and easy to use, currently for sync licensing the music industry claim to want around 16% of REVENUE which seems insane to me.
So when I worked at an ISP, we received tons of DMCA requests for customers doing torrent. All of them were redirected to the trash. We won't obey to some random email.
Under DMCA to file a takedown request you must attest under penalty of purgery that you represent the copyright holder.
Also the service provider is protected under law if they restore the content due to a counterclaim by the user that the work is not actually infringing.
I'm not part of that industry. My impression has always been that artists from big labels get most of the money. The not so popular ones are probably not getting that much since they likely get worse deals.
Which is kind of funny, as GitLab reason d'être was copying another product features verbatim while saving development money by leveraging the open source community.
In youtube there are people who takes ownership of songs that do have copyright owner but the owner don't give crap of people using their music (example, an intro song for a 80s cartoon).
The thing, is as long as those people have the ownership, they can demonetise your video and take it down, but you cant remove their claim of ownership unless you are the legal owner of the copyright, who as I said, does not care about it...
I didn't meant to discuss how this should be done or not done, nor the merits of taking down this emulator's repo. I was mostly making a point that one can maliciously take down Gitlab projects and get the accounts of all the contributors blocked immediately without actual proof of wrongdoing. It's not a platform or company which can be trusted. Imagine you start a successful open source project or a company does that. A competitor or someone who wants to do harm can just instantly take down your project and get everyone banned immediately.
Yep, it's a major security and data residency issue. They're going to get in some SERIOUS trouble the minute one troll tries this and any legitimate business is going to recognize the risk and bail long before that happens.
This and maybe there can be a layer of personal trust and vouching involved as well. Sprinkle in some I2P-like obfuscation and nintendoesn't get access to the files nor the participants. Basically a giant copy party that lawyers are not invited to.
In what sense? You need a true peer-to-peer internet before you can think about decentralized. The current internet is a highly centralized place and every effort to change that failed so far for various reasons. See the Skype story as an example.
Already today, people share the hot stuff on decentralized services (matrix, torrents, ipfs). There was recently a hn submission about a decentralized github. Of course this has tradeoffs, for example matrix doesn't have the fast cdn's discord has, but many people are ready to pay that price.
Did you tell Hollywood your secret? They're dying to know how to "trivially shut down" all the decentral media sharing going on for decades. Even China's Great Firewall has its hole-punchers (https://github.com/barry-far/V2ray-Configs). Maybe they have an opening for Grand Master of Reality position you can apply to.
That was a nice change of direction from "it's trivial to shut down" to "how many users are capable". And the answer is - basically every single one of them is capable, it's just a matter of motivation. The right tools exist, the learning curve is somewhat steep, but this is irrelevant.
What is interchangeable, your lie about "it's trivial to shut down" and your bs about "oh but that's too difficult"? Those are two different things, even though both of them are not true.
And sure, you missed my point about motivation, probably on purpose. If (for example) for your mother using these tools was the only way to contact her close relatives I'm sure she would have found the way. Mine would.
Making something illegal isn't "shutting it down".
Your IPFS link is a screenshot of someone failing to access docs.ipfs.io in a standard webbrowser over HTTP.
Are you aware how many people use VPNs? Also take a look at how Tor Project hand out unlisted entry points into their network - IPFS could take a similar approach if it really came to it.
I think they're saying the actual Internet that underlies all those peer-to-peer protocols needs to itself become a decentralized network ("a true peer-to-peer network").
Internet is decentralized as in - it's divided into multiple autonomous systems under local control of the owners. Your examples are most likely about some github repo or a steam app blocked, but the thing is - that's not Internet, that's corporations that apply strict rules to their content. This is a completely different story.
The internet has tier 1 network providers that have to obey the law in every country they operate. It is not decentralized at all. Meaning, if I filter your internet at your local provider level you do not have another mean to get to the internet without filtering.
It is possible to block pretty much anything that the country wants to block. It would be impossible to bloack content with a truly decentralized (meaning only peer-to-peer network access) system.
As of today the only thing that comes to close to this is something like Meshstatic. Obviously it is only good for messaging and nothing more at this stage.
I'd recommend you to read on what exactly these tier 1s are doing. Hint: they provide transport. It's technically impossible for them to control L7 for the most of the apps traffic. But that actually doesn't matter in the context of decentralization. Internet networks are decentralized by design. That doesn't mean though there's no control and regulations, but that's irrelevant - something you don't seem to realize.
Certainly not. Cue FAAMG being repeatedly beaten to submission.
GitLab Inc. is a U.S jurisdiction company hosting on U.S providers. DMCA probably won't apply to e.g Codeberg e.V, although they might need to stop serving content to U.S clients based on geo the same way non-EU companies have to comply with GDPR when serving EU clients.
Is this really true though? We hear about fines that are less than 1% of the revenue of these companies even after repeat rule violations. Also we only hear about the fine amount BEFORE collection. By the time push comes to shove I'm willing to be they (ab)used the legal system to knock down even that small amount to something even smaller.
Pretty good? They slipped through the cracks in between the words of the DMA directive in a way that nothing in particular will change. I still can't publish an unnotarized .ipa so people can install it like they can install software on every other major operating system.
They will still collect rent on apps they do not host or have anything to do with in alternative app stores. Which is absolutely hilarious. Speaking of alternative apps stores, the bar is so high that an F-Droid alternative just cannot exist. Tim Epic got his wish though.
For clarity's sake: the Yuzu repository is most likely radioactive in general. As part of the settlement, the judge issued an injunction to declare Yuzu as software to exist solely to bypass TPMs. That gives Nintendo the legal right to issue takedowns (and pursue legal action) against Yuzu code. It doesn't set any precedent for other emulators though.
As far as I can tell, yes, injunctions like that extend beyond the person they've been issued against. Sure, it may not be fully correct assuming you modify the Yuzu code to take out everything to do with bypassing TPMs, but Nintendo has a strong legal team and the ability to drag out a court case if you want to test that. I don't think most people will want to do that.
I’m guessing the future of the Yuzu codebase is being self hosted in China or another country that doesn’t care about IP law and all contributions being anonymous.
to be frank, I'd say that judge knows nothing. the Protection measures, like encryption need keys, these are bot included, so yuzu cannot exactly bypass them. you need to get the keys to decrypt the roms.
I love Nintendo for their products, habing grown up with them. I have a really hard time understanding this hardball stance against emulators. How is this a threat to their business? Feels more like they’re alienating a lot of people that might harbor good will towards them.
People have gotten cease-and-desists from their lawyers for drawing fan-art of their characters. Streamers will get strikes/takedowns for playing their games. And similar stuff...
If you don't want to get legal threats, I recommend to never mention their name, any of their trademarks, or even ever publicly acknowledge their existence.
They have become the-company-which-may-not-be-named.
They have always been. I'd seen and heard them mentioned as "the Kyoto card dealer(京都の花札屋)" than by the name, online and offline. Same people would just mention Sony or Toshiba or JAL, but not always Nintendo. Personally I don't do this, but that's how it always was.
The Streisand effect is named after when Barbara Streisand's attempts to get a picture of her private house and garden removed from the internet, instead causing it to go viral.
Nintendo as a company does greatly benefit from people talking about it and it's products. That's publicity, word of mouth, free advertising basically.
When they abuse takedowns, strikes and other measures, they do not want to stop that free publicity and word of mouth advertising. They are attempting to control it, manipulate it, and limit it to company approved screenshots, videos and information only.
If those attempts generate more publicity - including making the taken down screenshots go viral (Streisand effect style) - that's beneficial publicity and word-of-mouth for them and their products. And it also amplifies the message sent to others: use only approved materials, or face our wrath!
Therefore providing them with improved visibility and publicity - more word of mouth - and helping them spread their "fall in line!" message, can be seen as "rewarding" what they are doing. If instead most people were to completely ignore them and stop talking about them (out of fear)... THAT would hurt their publicity.
One reason is that playing the emulated version is a better experience. Why would you play Breath of the Wild at 900p/30fps, when you can play it at 4k/60fps AND have all the customizability of running it on a PC.
Emulators illustrate that Nintendo forces you to buy an outdated tablet to play an intentionally hamstrung version of their game, so that once you are bought in to the hardware, you are more likely to buy more of their games.
How is it not? By having a good emulator, one can easily play Switch games without paying. I'm aware emulator devs don't provide game ROMs and usually have certain mechanisms to ensure you have a "legal copy", but these are all very trivial to bypass historically.
(I'm also aware there are claims that piracy does not hurt revenue of copyright holder. I can get behind some points in these claims, but not entirely.)
I even own a Switch and a bunch of games and I still emulate it on my PC instead because the experience is so much better. Meanwhile, the Switch is the most successful console of this generation.
It simply isn't a threat to their business in any way. Also, that argument leads to a lot of insane consequences once you start arguing that you're not allowed to do things because they're vaguely, potentially a threat to a company.
i had never pirated/emulated switch games before but after this all settles down and a switch emulator exists for more than a day, i certainly will now.
> I'm also aware there are claims that piracy does not hurt revenue of copyright holder. I can get behind some points in these claims, but not entirely
IIRC, a significant fraction of the studies of the subject tend to show that it even positively affects revenues of IP rights holders.
I can believe that, but revenue may not be the only thing the author cares (not saying it is the case for Nintendo or any large companies, but in general).
I subscribe to Patreon artists frequently. Lots of them, especially Japanese artists, have expressed that they hate piracy (i.e. repost their paid rewards on interweb) simply because it's (in their opinion) wrong. They're fully aware people who pirate is unlikely to pay a single penny regardless, or that piracy actually increases their "exposure".
At the end of the day, in my opinion it's right holder's call, regardless if their decision is based on emotion or rationale.
> Lots of them, especially Japanese artists, have expressed that they hate piracy (i.e. repost their paid rewards on interweb) simply because it's (in their opinion) wrong.
That's exactly what I mean. At the end of the day, what they believe is what drives their behavior.
> At the end of the day, in my opinion it's right holder's call, regardless if their decision is based on emotion or rationale.
I'm not disputing that here.
Edit: oh, this isn't a response to the comment I though it was. The comment when I'm saying roughly the same as you are and I though was misinterpreted is this one: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39788265
The real question becomes - is it used more by people who want to pirate the game, or people who don't want to buy a Switch? I've never bought anything from Nintendo before, but started considering getting one game because I could run it on Streamdeck/Yuzu. Now I'm definitely not buying it.
There's a lot of people who want to play Nintendo games in a higher quality who use emulators for it.
Their business belongs to the 80s. Where one or two companies made consoles. Today, these companies expect me to buy a new device every 2-3 years. What am I, an electronic dump heap?
If their device isn't good enough to put itself above others, it is not worth buying. The 1 or maybe 1.5 exclusive they have has zero worth these days. Every console has their exclusives. And among them you will always find something enjoyable. Just stop watching ads/campaigns, who decide for you, and you'll be happy to find many "under the radar" (aka not sold at full price so not marketed) titles.
Tangent - This is a disgusting practice to keep us paying for deprecated electronics. By them and the rest of the console companies. Arm wrestling law makers to vendor lock us is not a business model.
Whether or not those are all games you care about or want to play is a wholly separate issue
I'm not trying to fanboy for Nintendo here. I think their litigation tactics are massively awful, but it really seems like you're coming at Nintendo with complaints about Sony and Microsoft. At least make arguments about the stuff they actually are doing badly
You are going to have a hard time arguing that the Switch, one of the most successful console of all times is losing money because of emulation.
There's the people who will never pay a penny to Nintendo anyways and there's the people who just want to run their own games in something better than a choppy 1280x720@30FPS
> So you're saying that Nintendo's hard stance on emulation is working?
Obviously not since this console has the highest quality emulators I've even seen during the console's lifetime. Usually you need to wait 5+ years after the console dies to get anything remotely as good.
So we can confidently say that emulation being available didn't affect the high sales of the console.
That argument does not hold water because Switch was already one of the most successful consoles of all time before they even lifted a finger againt Yuzu. Switch's sales/success did not substantially change in the <1 month period that passed since they started the lawsuit against Yuzu.
Lawsuit filed on Feb 26 2024 [0]. Switch launched on March 3 2017 [1]. Yuzu's first release on Jan 14 2018 [2]. Therefore, a Switch emulator existed for the vast majority of the Switch's lifetime and the lawsuit is a very recent development compared to the lifetime of the Switch and the emulator. Hence, if Yuzu was so gravely damaging to Nintendo, we would not see the Switch become one of the most successful consoles of all time by selling over 115M units in the Q1 2018 - Q3 2023 timeframe [3]
Not relevant to the point. There's been multiple takedowns over the years, and Nintendo's known stance on this has probably stopped it from being a free-for-all. So you must compare it to what it could have been.
Well that didn't succeed then because it's also the most emulated console of all times after launch.
I've never seen such a competition of very high quality emulators in the lifetime of a console. Usually you need to wait 5+ years after the console dies to get anything remotely useful.
How is it not a threat to their business? People don't use these emulators to play 20 year old abandonware, but to play Switch games even before they've been officially released through leaks.
I've sailed the sea a lot myself, but I don't believe the meme "pirates wouldn't have bought it anyways". It's not a 1:1 loss, but it's not zero either.
And for me, piracy used to be an accessibility issue. Living in the mountains I could wait for a week to get something by mail, or click download illegally and play immediately. With today's online stores that's no longer an excuse.
> Feels more like they’re alienating a lot of people that might harbor good will towards them.
These actions ensure that I'll never buy a Nintendo console or games anymore, even though I'd be their target audience (both myself and my three kids).
Nintendo evaporating community goodwill by using our money to take aggressive action against supposed piracy enablers makes it easy to justify actual piracy.
What amount of goodwill Nintendo burns away is more than made up for by them continuing to make good games. I am confident that there is quite literally nothing they can do as a company to hurt their reputation enough to be fiscally damaging, save from actually making bad games. And even that doesn't seem to be an impediment to them (see also: the Pokemon mainline games).
They'd have to have a string of probably 10 consecutive years putting out absolute dogshit before they'd get even close to feeling the pain.
So because you can't pirate you won't buy? Why should Nintendo care? Not like they would've made money on you anyways. I'm sure your kids appreciate your moral stronghold when you explain to them why they can't play Mario with their friends.
No, I won't buy because I find their current (and past) actions morally reprehensible. If they didn't do shit like this I would already have (more) of their games and consoles.
I can still emulate the games even if they don't do this you know? It doesn't stop a motivated actor actor after all.
They probably have no ways of _knowing_ that. They might assume.
But Nintendo also has absolutely no incentive to care if it's used for pirating. Users want to put in term of morality, when it probably doesn't matter much.
Even if there was no pirating angle, emulation is a revenue drain from old title they could bundle in the Nintendo Online subscription and remix as remake games (what we saw with the old Zelda games remade for the Switch for instance).
Even if people were using the emulator after buying the Switch and the actual games, that's still a stream they don't control (can't check if the game is played on multiple consoles for instance, etc) and there's nothing positive for them coming out of it.
And in case of game consoles, that also means they have to buy the hardware even if they only want to play one game. This is very significant potential income for Nintendo.
All my friends that are into games have a PS4/5 just to play exclusives, even if they play games on PC 99% of the time. And non-trivial number of them play XB3 in emulators so they don't need to buy a Switch just for that. If there is no emulators, they probably would.
Hardware developers should not care and that's what the emulator is attempting to actually emulate. They're using their position to benefit their licensing operation, which has strict controls about distribution, which ironically are probably most responsible for the type of piracy that actually eats into their bottom line.
Nintendo is a bit unusual in that their first-party games are a big deal, and there aren't a ton of interesting non-Nintendo games on Switch. Obviously it will vary but plenty of people have one for Zelda and Mario Kart primarily.
I imagine that they're against Switch emulators when the Switch is still their primary business. I also don't imagine their hardline stance against Switch emulators will change anytime soon if the Switch 2 is backwards compatible.
It just seems to me that having a great Switch emulator present would deter only a tiny fraction of Nintendo‘s customer base from buying the real thing. Still more than the cost of legal action, probably.
Well, if you have a reputation for suing anyone who even breathes funny, suing one group or two high-profile groups every so often is cheaper than suing hundreds of smaller things that might be more prevalent if you didn't have a reputation of landing on people.
If you download Higan and play pirated SNES games, not much of a threat. If you download Yuzu/Ryujinx and play pirated Switch games, that's an altogether different picture.
I have personally pirated $500+ worth of Switch games plus the $300 console I would have otherwise bought since I own a Steam Deck. This is a very common use-case.
I have bought 3 switch consoles and i still want something like a steam deck because steam EOL'd their remote play box. I want something i can play PC games on on a TV that i can also take with me to boring things like waiting rooms. The switch screen (i have the original switch) is too tiny, and it's a very heavy console. Switch lites have even smaller screens, but they weigh much less - it is possible the controllers i use undocked are just heavier, but either way. The steam deck has a higher resolution screen, and i'm sure some devices have greater than FHD resolution with greater than 60FPS "refresh". That's kind of a big deal to my crappy eyes.
Right now i have a laptop connected to my TV to play steam games that support controllers. I'd much rather just have another USB-C to HDMI converter plugged in to a device designed nearly completely to play games.
A huge use case for me would be using wemod/cheatengine and in general steam workshop. The second biggest reason is shovelware. On the switch if i buy a game because it looks good, AFAIK i can't refund it if it's actually a garbage game. On steam, i've requested refunds after playing (some*) games for several days.
* mostly incremental/clicker/idle games, because they're designed to be crappy to start out, so 2 hours isn't even enough time to expose 1% of the content or gameplay.
The problem with 1080p and higher on mobile devices like that is that the chips available for these devices physically cannot give a good experience at that resolution. The main limitation is memory bandwidth. It works great at 720p. Anything higher and it starts to break down.
Citation: I own a steam deck and an ROG Ally. The Ally has the best controller on the market but it's hamstrung by the screen simply having too many pixels. Well, that and Windows.
I would have bought the Steam Deck regardless but the switch is optional since there are games the steam deck can play but the switch cannot, but the inverse isn’t true since I can play switch games for free on the steam deck.
It was one thing when enthusiasts were emulating systems near or past EOL, but at this point a Nintendo system is often not the best way to enjoy a Nintendo game.
I agree, but my point is still that an emulator could reduce Nintendo hardware sales. (And realistically speaking who's going to buy Tears of The Kingdom when they're running it on an emulator?)
Of course, my other view is that emulators should be perfectly fine and a great exercise in reverse-engineering, but Nintendo won't see it that way.
It would be an interesting experiment to release a high-performance emulator console that only worked with the physical (presumably legally-purchased) game. Perhaps it would fill a similar legal niche to DeCSS - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DeCSS
This is the Switch, not the GBA or SNES, it's their current product lineup. I really have a hard time understanding why you have a hard time understanding this.
And I also love Nintendo, but I mostly play GBA and SNES games from my childhood.
You're delusional if you think it's for archiving. I don't even know what you mean by that, as in archiving ROMs online for posterity? It's clearly for emulating their games with pirated ROMs.
I completely understand it too because I've been pirating since games were on tapes. But, surprisingly perhaps, I have the ability to view things from multiple perspectives. And clearly Nintendo don't want their titles to be pirated while they're still making sales.
At some point in the future, just like with GBA and SNES emulators, I'm sure we'll see the same for Switch emulators.
It was trivially easy to set up Yuzu or Ryujinx to play switch games that haven’t even launched yet without even owning a switch. That definitely has some sort of impact on Nintendo’s business.
More importantly Yuzu was known to essentially have a culture of not caring about the DMCA themselves. I don’t think they did anything illegal in the emulator code but they did totally have a private pirated game stash and were selling TOTK compatible builds via Patreon before the game released which violates basically every rule of clean room disassembly.
Nintendo corporate has always been like that. It values their face and continuity over growth and profit, listens to complaints but refuses demands. Being a family-owned Kyoto company the behaviors are slightly different to standard Tokyo entity thinking.
self replying: specifically, Nintendo triggers a brittle "I'm not gonna let you have it" behavior when someone tries to take advantage of situation and makes demands. The response switches to denying accesses and terminating communications. It tend not to repeat nonpologies while talking down demands and accepting new businesses like most B2C companies do.
These videos talk about it a little:
https://youtu.be/zvPkAYT6B1Q?si=99J7GUo3l_ggQCjMhttps://youtu.be/xgKY9hmbfgo?si=GzBOx9p-sLPchKL1https://youtu.be/yj9Gk84jRiE?si=FmhiSO9Qd8WIsVzS
TL;DR: forming a hydra-summary of the three: Nintendo’s strategy has been to position themselves as a premium video game brand since the 1980’s. They use high pricing, exclusivity, and close integration with hardware to distance themselves from other companies. Because they want to position themselves as the one and only Nintendo, knockoffs and copycats represent an existential threat to their brand. They also want parents to have absolute trust in the family friendliness of their games and knockoffs could diminish that as well. Because of this they do literally every scummy thing in their power to aggressively pursue and litigate anything from piracy to fan projects. Control of their image is their biggest asset.
As someone who didn’t really grow up playing Nintendo games I have a slight fascination with how people worship this company and continually make excuses for them, so I really like these videos, even if they’re probably not 100% accurate.
Because a user sitting in the United States could be served copyrighted content by GitLab. It would likely even come from one of GitLab's servers in the US. In that hypothetical instance, GitLab is in clear violation under US law.
In theory GitLab could decide to ignore the DMCA, as you suggest, but that would mean removing all US servers, firing all US staff and cancelling all contracts with US customers (including those that GitLab has with the US government itself). Even in that instance, you would just move the copyright lawsuit to Dutch courts.
I'm no expert on Dutch copyright law, but it seems like such a lawsuit would go nowhere. Presumably, there's no copyright violation at all here: the emulator's source code is FOSS and contains no Nintendo source code, as is usually the case with emulators. What it's used for is irrelevant; the only thing that matters is whether someone actually copied something without authorization from Nintendo, which (I assume) they did not.
The use of the code only becomes relevant with the US DMCA, with its stupid "infringing uses" clause. US law only applies inside the US though.
But a company like that, which does a lot of business in the US, can't afford to thumb its nose at the US's stupid copyright law, if they want to continue doing business there. So business and money take priority over copyright ethics.
My understanding of the DMCA is that whether or not there's any infringing actually going on is irrelevant, you have to take the content down first and then have a court battle to decide whether you can put it back up.
Only if the entity who published the content does not oppose. And then it doesn’t have to go to the court. But if they oppose, the content should stay online until the court decision
There's this weird thing where people don't understand that Europe has a long history of very strong copyright law. The life + 70 years term of copyright comes from Germany, not the US, and globally companies harmonised there.
There's also an international treaty, WIPO Copyright Treaty, that requires signatories to enact anti-circumvention provisions. The EU and the US both agreed and signed it before the DMCA.
Well, like others here, I was under the impression that GitLab was a Dutch company but it turns out that they are actually incorporated in the US, which makes that whole line of thinking pointless.
It's apparently not the end for this project. This basically made it unavailable on Gitlab, but the source code itself didn't disappear. They already have their own Git repository (running on Forgejo) at: https://git.suyu.dev/suyu/suyu
Even now, it's still seeing activity, and even has their actions and wiki migrated over. If there are problems with having this link here, let me know.
Ex post facto. Takedown happens first, then you can appeal - but generally hosts err on the side of caution.
It’s a blunt force instrument. Always was.
Fun side effect is that you can use it as a blunt force instrument, too - don’t like what someone is saying online? DMCA. Competitor champing at your heels? DMCA.
I still think the best way to kill it is mass abuse of the process.
No one is supposed to. It goes like this: 1. DMCA request (take them down, they use our copyrighted stuff!), 2. opposition (no, we do not agree! Do not take us down), 3. the process with lawyers and judges starts
An expectation is that “wrongdoers” just do not bother to oppose and everything works faster.
Then there are corporate policies which make this weirder (like YouTube who says: “if people send too many dmca request towards you, we chose not to see you as a customer”. But this has nothing to do with law)
(f) Misrepresentations.—Any person who knowingly materially misrepresents under this section—
(1) that material or activity is infringing, or
(2) that material or activity was removed or disabled by mistake or misidentification,
shall be liable for any damages, including costs and attorneys’ fees, incurred by the alleged infringer, by any copyright owner or copyright owner’s authorized licensee, or by a service provider, who is injured by such misrepresentation, as the result of the service provider relying upon such misrepresentation in removing or disabling access to the material or activity claimed to be infringing, or in replacing the removed material or ceasing to disable access to it.
Of course its on the proverbial me to prove that they're at fault and I dont have the money or time ...
I imagine one day they will kick the wrong horse though and someone will sue the company for it & GH/GL/whoever for not giving fair recourse or something.
Sure, and one day the aliens will stop treating us like zoo animals. This is like EULAs. Only corporations have the time and money to utilize them in their favor. In other words, we are not equal in the eyes of the law.
When Apple (computer company) was legally threatened by Apple Corps (Beatles record company) about the inclusion of audio technology in their computers in ostensible violation of a trademark agreement between the two companies, the sound designer for the former Apple defiantly added an alert sound to the Macintosh called "Sosumi".
There seems to be some confusion here. Let me step in as someone who has gone through this.
My repo https://github.com/shawwn/llama-dl was taken down last March by Facebook. They asserted copyright over LLaMA, which is obviously bogus since it was trained on data they do not own the copyright to. I was bummed about this, but after I mentioned on HN that I was willing to fight Meta, an anonymous person named L contacted me and sent $20k of Monero to cover legal fees. I was also contacted by an amazing lawyer who wanted to represent me in this. I was absurdly fortunate on both counts.
He drafted a counternotice, we sent it, and then my repo was restored within a week or so.
GitHub had no choice in the matter. Legally this is a required process. Ditto for GitLab. Both are US companies.
When YouTube-dl was taken down some time ago by a DMCA, Nat went to bat and got it restored, and GitHub made some sort of pledge to cover legal fees associated with bogus takedown requests.
Here’s the shitty part for this particular situation. A case can be made that the emulator is for the purpose of circumventing copyright protection mechanisms. This, sadly, is a solid legal basis for issuing a lawful takedown, as much as we all absolutely despise that idea. It’s pretty clear cut; Nintendo doesn’t want Switch games to be run on non-Nintendo platforms, and the emulator seeks to enable Switch games to be run on any platform. Therefore, the intent of the emulator is to circumvent Nintendo’s protection mechanisms.
So where does this leave us? Well, the team can file a counternotice. GitLab will restore the repo. But that opens up the team to a lawsuit by Nintendo. And as much as I want to stand up to bullies, there’s a difference between standing up to a guy shoving a kid in a locker vs standing up to a Silverback gorilla charging at you. Nintendo’s legal history implies the latter.
Welcome to Nintendo pain. The Smash community has been dealing with Nintendo’s BS for decades now. They shut down tournaments that use emulators for Smash Melee. And no one can do anything, because it’s their legal right to do so.
EDIT: It’s horrible that GitLab disabled the accounts of the developers, though. My GitHub account was fine. This should be the focus of the outrage here.
> They asserted copyright over LLaMA, which is obviously bogus since it was trained on data they do not own the copyright to.
Not saying I agree with FB here, but infringing on someone else's copyright doesn't suddenly void their own copyright to their contributions. A more sensible defense for you here is that copyright law likely doesn't give them any rights to any weights at all.
Man, way to make your customers never want to buy your products. I don't know that I'll ever give another cent to Nintendo at this rate, they just seem completely Anti-User.
Nintendo has always been sue-happy. What's notable here is they haven't been able to find a way towards injunctions against hosting the source. It's not going to be difficult to find non-hostile hosting.
I don't believe the DMCA can be used to do anything but harass the team anyway.
Developers could take advantage of the current political climate and mirror potentially endangered projects in a jurisdiction where companies like Nintendo have a limited legal reach. E.g. on a Russian GitVerse, good luck getting your DMCA processed over there.
I've personally used these hosts to provide data to the public that was subject to constant takedowns
- UDN (Used before the invasion) which is based in Ukraine. Good way to support them I suppose.
- BuyVM in Luxembourg
- Incognet in NL (Probably reach out to them first to see if it's OK)
- PQ.hosting in Russia
I've been using emulators for decades. Yuzu were making money on current gen Nintendo content, no one would pay for them patreon money if Nintendo did make the content for it. I'm fine with them being shutdown. What I'm hoping is that the yuzu team haven't ignited a wider crack down on emulator Devs who provided their work for free.
Not so much moral, but I don't think piracy is good for the game industry. And the primary use case for yuzu is playing pirated Nintendo games. I doubt a significant percentage of users are playing games they bought legitimately.
In short they are making money from enabling piracy of Nintendo games.
Arguably if everyone pirated everything it wouldn't be good for the games industry, but objectively piracy is good for the industry. It acts as competition to encourage companies to improve their service (see: gabe newel, "Piracy is a service problem"), it preserves historical games that companies otherwise would just delete, leaving nobody ever able to play them. It's good.
I want to boycott Nintendo for this. They have a lot of old games that can only be emulated if the old hardware is too expensive to buy. Nintendo is bullying the open source developers with DMCA takedown notices for an emulator that doesn't use any of Nintendo's code.
This is not an issue about "old hardware" or "old games", it's about an emulator for a currently selling system. I don't agree with what Nintendo is doing, but I understand why they're so angry.
Interestingly, while it was down last night (GMT) and all the release download links on their website were broken, those links and the associated GitLab repos appear to be back up now (09:47 GMT).
It’s only a matter of time before a freedom focussed source control provider similar in nature to Pirate Bay, or some distributed model over BitTorrent or Tor comes into existence.
I think the runaway success of p2p file sharing platforms (from Gnutella to Bittorrent and everything in between), Bitcoin and others prove that plenty of users do want decentralized systems.
It's interesting that you named a bunch of very large corporations who have a vested interest in users not having the choice of decentralized systems (which they cannot control or profit from) as "proof" that decentralized systems are not desirable.
People used them because they worked better than alternatives, not because they were p2p. Indeed, most people used them like centralized services by going to The Big Site We All Know and downloading things from there. That they weren't actually downloading the movie/game/etc from there was an ignorable implementation detail.
Young people today use centralized streaming sites more, because they're easier to use. That they're not p2p isn't something any of them know or care about.
I use those on purpose, because they were there before Internet became a thing, using their proprietary systems, and after the Internet boom, the abstract set of "users" basically gathered around centralized systems that provide them the comfort to know where to go to, what to talk about with their friends and family.
Where are Gnutella and Bittorrent now?
Gone, in what non geeky users are concerned they never happened.
I can't speak for Gnutella, but BitTorrent remains as popular as ever. Every non-technical acquaintance of mine is at least familiar with it, except for those over 70 years old. Most keep on using it. Flash-in-the-pan streaming platforms of the day come and go, this thing has endured and will outlive anything centralized.
You must be in some kind of bubble, even half the technical people I know are not regular BitTorrent users.
Take pirated switch games for example, the root cause of this whole discussion. For a given game, you'll find 10 sketchy but fully functional direct-download sites before you find a magnet link. (Yes I'm sure your favorite private tracker has a great selection, but private tracker users are an even smaller niche within a niche)
They were made gone by fiat, despite the demand and popularity they enjoyed. That does not support the conclusion that people don't want them. Indeed, torrenting never died, a testament to the demand.
>I think the runaway success of p2p file sharing platforms (from Gnutella to BitTorrent and everything in between), Bitcoin and others
The success of p2p file sharing platforms rested on the fact that people like piracy and free stuff, it didn't compete on service quality. Which became evident when most content became cheap and people switched.
Same with Bitcoin, people buy into it because they want to speculate and buy a Lamborghini, I still can't go to any supermarket and pay in crypto because nobody really cares about making it a means of transaction for normal people.
> The success of p2p file sharing platforms rested on the fact that people like piracy and free stuff, it didn't compete on service quality. Which became evident when most content became cheap and people switched.
Nah, it was absolutely about service quality. Absodefinitelutely.
Back in the day it was either buying things on physical media and adjusting your living situation accordingly (having meters of shelves just to store it and media player(s) set up to play the media), OR sail the seas and have "your" entire media library stored away on a media server in the closet, easily accessible from the media center PC connected to your TV. Netflix before Netflix was a thing, essentially.
Now, finally, they caught on and do provide a similar (in some ways higher) level of service as the "homebrew Netflix" solution from "þe aulde" days, and people are prepared to pay for it. I gladly pay the price for the different streaming services because of the convenience of having everything easily accessible in a format that doesn't take up all the space at my home. If that disappears though, I'll grumpily re-build the server in the closet and expand the sails again.
There's still plenty of people who don't want or can't pay for the official service... but these days, >90% use illegal streaming portals instead of p2p services, because the service quality is so much higher. No need for a server closet, when these sites are basically "netflix but you don't need to log in and they actually have what you want".
That makes me happy even though I'll still choose to pay, since I guess it will make it harder for the legal streaming providers to suddenly downgrade the experience.
It's sad that we need piracy to drive innovation and keep quality expectations up.
You're using yourself as the yardstick for "normal people", but there are other "normal people" elsewhere (e.g. unstable economies) who rely on cryptocurrencies for use cases you don't have to worry about.
Cryptocurrency is a platform for trade. Not a miracle investment.
Media piracy is alive because many simply don't have access to it, otherwise.
When Netflix came to my area. Yesthankyouplease signed up for the ultra whatever 4k package within days. When they started removing content, pumping woke shit and increased the price, ye nah cya wouldn't wanna be ya. And back to piracy.
Who is the idiot who pays for a garbage streaming service that has no content? Let alone multiple streaming services? Just read a book, instead.
No. Piracy and crypto aren't alive because of your delusions.
The last feature piracy has is enabling game demos (Thank fuck more companies are releasing demos again). How many times do companies expect to fool people into shilling out hard cash for what, effectively, is just an unrelated CGI video reel nicked named "trailer"? Many times these trailers don't even include gameplay. Other times they straight up lie about the content of the game and release it with dumbed down graphics. Or a much more barren world.
The entire internet is a decentralized system. So is email. Almost everything built before monetization was decentralized. It's only been proven than corporations that trying to monetize don't want decentralized systems.
With legalized gov corruption (lobbying) and media campaigns to brainwash us into thinking how amazing all these megacorps are, of course most people think a centralized internet is the bee's knees. These people don't have time to crawl through these niche information channels and find out how these user-hostile corporations operate. The people see pretty colors and drool in response. We're given enough time to work, make some babies and die.
Yup, and we just put a provision prohibiting anything from remaining resident on gitlab to our company's security policy, and several larger firms just did the same. LMAO.
And if, for example, my Switch breaks, or Nintendo shuts down whatever online stuff they got, and I still want to play the games I own? Sometimes an emulator ends up being the only answer.
You're not wrong, but to be fair, Switch offers a decent offline only experience. So in that scenario Nintendo would like you to get a new Switch or to buy a game cartridge. For many cases, especially Nintendo exclusives, this would work.
