Ryujinx (Nintendo Switch emulator) has been removed from GitHub

473 pointsposted a year ago
by jsheard
(github.com)

445 Comments

notamy

a year ago

https://gbatemp.net/threads/ryujinx-emulator-github-reposito...

> UPDATE #3: According to an official statement on Ryujinx's Discord server, developer gdkchan was contacted by Nintendo and they were offered an agreement to stop working on the emulator project, and while the agreement wasn't confirmed yet, the organization has been entirely removed.

Liquix

a year ago

> it's not a DMCA, it's not an issue with GitHub.

glaring omission of the statement "it's not an issue with Nintendo". they have a reputation for relentlessly pursuing the creators of homebrew/emu projects like this. sometimes even going as far as contracting operatives to stalk hobby devs living outside of Japan. look up "nintendo ninjas"...

devmor

a year ago

It was indeed Nintendo. They released a statement about 50 minutes ago that the lead developer "agreed to stop working on the project" after speaking with Nintendo.

tomcam

a year ago

Nice career you have there. Be a shame if something happened to it.

jsheard

a year ago

RE: Update 3 (gdkchan being "encouraged" to step down)

I'm mostly just surprised it took Nintendo this long to make a move - the Switch is on its last legs, its successor is less than a year away and almost certainly won't be hacked for a good while. Acting in a way that's bound to piss everyone off but doing it so late that the upside to them is minimal (there won't be that many more new Switch games to pirate at this point) is a weird unforced error. Lawyers move in mysterious ways I guess.

Lan

a year ago

I would assume the launch of the Switch successor is why they are clamping down. It's likely very similar architecturally to the Switch. Nobody knows how long it would take to hack it, someone could be silently sitting on an exploit that they've been saving to see if it'll work on the successor. In the event it's hacked quickly and there are still actively developed Switch emulators, it wouldn't be a stretch to believe support would quickly be added to those emulators for the successor.

user

a year ago

[deleted]

textadventure

a year ago

Do you think the average joe who owns a Switch or is a potential client for their next console, is even aware of any of this happening? This is the tiniest of stories. The only way the public at large can become aware of emulators is if they hit a big app store.

So as far as timing of this move goes, it's as good a time as any to "protect what's theirs".

user

a year ago

[deleted]

JansjoFromIkea

a year ago

Doubt they were that focused on it until the Steam Deck came out; would've been too busy dealing with how successful the console was to worry about this kind of thing. Probably more focused on killing access to older games so their NSO service seems more appealing.

I suspect the sheer number of tiktoks and whatnot about how to emulate old nintendo games on iOS earlier in the year massively increased their legal team's focus on this stuff.

sundarurfriend

a year ago

> Acting in a way that's bound to piss everyone off but doing it so late that the upside to them is minimal ... is a weird unforced error.

This describes their response to Palworld (the Pokemon-"inspired" game that they're suing now) too. When Palworld came out, everyone was talking about how it blatantly copied things and how surprised they are that Nintendo is doing nothing. Now, after several months of people playing Palworld and many of them enjoying it, Nintendo is suddenly choosing to sue them. And predictably, the general response is a lot more negative now, with people having a lot more positive associations with Palworld and having gotten used to assuming that it's here-to-stay.

> Lawyers move in mysterious ways I guess.

Indeed. The timeline to build a case doesn't necessarily align with the business profit goals (like in the Switch case) nor with the public relations goals (like in the Palworld case).

foobazgt

a year ago

Sadly, sometimes there's a perverse incentive for lawyers to intentionally delay lawsuits so that they can reap increased damages/penalties.

duxup

a year ago

I get the message but this is one of those things where you should have YOUR explanation ready before you pause everything...

Granted that's understandable if they didn't choose the timeline.

SpicyLemonZest

a year ago

It's hard to blame a hobby group for not having a perfect comms strategy.

the_gorilla

a year ago

It's still true, though. If they really don't want people to speculate on why they did something, they can provide a reason. It doesn't require an entire PR team to figure that out.

Xylakant

a year ago

They may have been hit by something entirely unexpected and may still need to get their bearings. "It's not github, it's not a DCMA takedown." may very well be the only thing they can communicate with a modicum of certainty at this moment.

nine_k

a year ago

If what you say may have legal implications, it might be wiser to just say "no comments" for some time, while seeking proper counseling.

"Not DMCA" and "not GitHub" is plenty already. But maybe it's a possible malware infiltration, or having something unbecoming committed to the repo by mistake, or anything else that might warrant denying public access for some time to prevent damage.

user

a year ago

[deleted]

klyrs

a year ago

There are a million reasons not to say something, and a blush of legal anything should deter you from opening your mouth in public before you're straight with a lawyer.

squeaky-clean

a year ago

I think protecting themselves from being sued into oblivion is more important than getting a message out to users an hour earlier. We don't have any form of SLA agreement with Ryujinx

Also the project is being shut down. Why should they care about community reaction?

the_gorilla

a year ago

Why do I get so many inane responses every time I post here? Does it really take 5 people? It's impossible to respond even if I wanted to.

borski

a year ago

If and only if this was their intent and timeline. May be external.

klyrs

a year ago

This, a hundred times over. It turns out that communication isn't entirely a bullshit field of study* and it requires significant planning and effort to keep people happy.

* note: all fields have bullshit; this is a recent learning of mine -- unlearning, rather, of a single day of a communications class which left me with the impression that many of us here seem to have of soft sciences: all bullshit by default.

ndiddy

a year ago

In case anyone's curious about Nintendo's general MO (not sure how similar this case is) around 10 years ago they successfully prevented someone from publishing a method to run arbitrary code on the 3DS using an NDA and the threat of legal action. Here's some documents detailing their approach: https://archive.org/details/Knock_And_Talk_directcontact/Kno...

alfalfasprout

a year ago

Given that Ryujinx is open source, I wonder what rights other OSS contributors have? Surely there's nothing stopping another fork from continued development provided nothing illegal is happening.

zamadatix

a year ago

Even if you think/"know" the project to be 100% legit do you want to be the OSS contributor that spends the next year or two in court fighting Nintendo about it or did you just like writing some emulator code once in a while in your spare time?

nurettin

a year ago

Interesting, I wonder if this means that they got paid.

koolala

a year ago

A threat is not a natural 'agreement'.

ls612

a year ago

I mean it's hard to imagine this being anything other than the worst.

rcarmo

a year ago

Wow. When yuzu was taken down I wrote a script to automatically download the 5 latest releases of a few other emulators I use, and that included Ryujinx (so I do have the binaries for those, which will go into safekeeping).

Now I wish I had set up a Gitea mirror as well, even though I would likely never build it myself.

Edit: here's the script - https://gist.github.com/rcarmo/89afd64747fc909e80b29abc902c8...

It is designed to be very low impact (I had it on a daily cron).

Feel free to use it to ensure you can preserve the software you rely on. As far as I'm concerned, I'm _very_ sad that Nintendo has now made it impossible to enjoy my games on better hardware, and will probably focus on PC gaming henceforth (there are lots of nice indie games on Steam, like Dredge, which is my current favorite).

rererereferred

a year ago

Do forks go away together with the original repository when it's removed from Github?

bityard

a year ago

Edit: I guess I'm wrong, see reply

If a repository is removed by Github in response to a DMCA request, yes.

(But it's not clear that that's what happened here.)

tjhorner

a year ago

The forks aren't actually automatically taken down in most cases. The claimant must list every individual fork in the claim. Which I love, because it's kind of petty but still following the DMCA to the letter.

Here is an example[1] of the form claimants must fill out.

> Each fork is a distinct repository and must be identified separately if you believe it is infringing and wish to have it taken down

[1]: https://github.com/github/dmca/blob/master/2024/05/2024-05-3...

0xcde4c3db

a year ago

IIRC it took them a couple months to get through all of the Yuzu forks after the initial DMCA and lawsuit. I doubt there were nearly as many forks of Ryujinx, though.

ZeWaka

a year ago

Depends on which type of removal they do, but they can be yes.

Macha

a year ago

I actually do have a private gitea mirror setup after the yuzu takedown.

user

a year ago

[deleted]

mikae1

a year ago

Doesn't matter what the reason is this time.

Next time it will undoubtedly be DMCA considering what happened to Yuzu. This is the perfect case for some sort of decentralized Git[1] or a Git repo via Tor.

[1] https://radicle.xyz

mtndew4brkfst

a year ago

Probably worth reminding that this is the project where the backing company is centered around crypto/blockchain, but they pinkie promise it will never affect this work!

https://radicle.xyz/faq

Radworks, the organization that has been financing Radicle is organized around the RAD token which is a governance token on Ethereum.

It gives off the same odor as Tea did, for me personally.

Vegemeister

a year ago

If you meme yourself into getting the ick around libertarians, you cripple your ability to defend liberty. Imagine that.

kmeisthax

a year ago

Money is an artifice used to track the payment of taxes. It happens to be useful for tracking other kinds of scarcity, especially with people you do not know, so societies in which the use of money is imposed tend to move the rest of their economic relationships over to it. In other words, Bitcoin is not valuable because it is scarce, it is valuable because you can pay data ransoms to cybercriminals with it. If, tomorrow, every ransomware vendor demanded payment in POGS or Beanie Babies, you'd see the value of those skyrocket as every IT professional went and hoarded them.

Satoshi Nakamoto saw the state, with it's coercive taxation and central banking, and thought the answer was to make decentralized money you couldn't shut down. Hence, Bitcoin and it's millions of forks. The problem is that Bitcoin's valuations are based on the same coercive taxation, just carried out by the illegitimate criminal underworld rather than the legitimate state. That's not liberty, that's just changing who wears the jackboots.

Vegemeister

a year ago

That is an interesting perspective, but it doesn't actually change my point, which is that if you want to build a distributed system that cannot be shut down, you have to be willing to collaborate with distributed system that cannot be shut down enjoyers.

BobaFloutist

a year ago

Libertarians call themselves that, that doesn't mean that they're inherently the primary defenders of liberty.

Much like how the difference between Republicans and Democrats aren't an argument over whether the United States is better run as a Republic or a Democracy.

phatskat

a year ago

No memeing necessary - most vocal and visible (eg mainstream or platformed) libertarians are…a lot, and not in a good way. I’m sure it’s very similar in nuance to democrat and republican - the faces and voices in the media aren’t necessarily representative of the average people who use the same labels.

asveikau

a year ago

> is the perfect case for some sort of decentralized Git

This is exactly what git is made to be without any extra tooling on top.

tshaddox

a year ago

AFAIK git doesn’t concern itself with discoverability, which is presumably what OP means. Sure, if you already know the IP address of someone hosting a git repo you can pull it. But that’s not really a decentralized service (or not any more decentralized than downloading stuff from a known host via HTTPS).

square_usual

a year ago

What happened to Yuzu was that they took money to help people pirate a brand new game. I don't think that's a reasonable take.

lcouturi

a year ago

The popular narrative seems to be that Yuzu had something to do and/or profited in some way from the Zelda Tears of the Kingdom leak, which isn't true. The Patreon-only Early Access builds could not play the game any more than the public Nightly builds could. Both versions needed an unofficial game patch for the game to launch, a patch which the Yuzu developers had nothing to do with. Yuzu developers also did not implement or work on any bug fixes involving the game before its official release. Perhaps you were alluding to something else, though.

theturtletalks

a year ago

I thought they were sharing Nintendo encryption keys that are "technically" supposed to be from the Switch you're emulating. People were using Yuzu to turn their Steamdeck into a Switch and using Yuzu's private discord to get the keys needed to do that.

It's the same reason other emulators ask you to bring your own BIOS file because that is proprietary.

thomastjeffery

a year ago

AFAIK, they were explicitly not sharing those keys. You had to get your own. They provided instructions on how to copy them from your own hardware.

tombert

a year ago

I thought that there was also speculation of people sharing ROMs directly on Discord, with the Yuzu admins being pretty ambivalent about the whole thing?

I only followed the story peripherally, so it's possible I'm wrong.

CryZe

a year ago

The Yuzu devs banned anyone even mentioning TotK in the Discord. However, they apparently had some private Discord or something where the Yuzu devs shared ROMs between themselves.

squigz

a year ago

I'm a big advocate of emulation (and piracy, frankly) but yeah, honestly, painting the Yuzu developers as the victims is insane. How much were they pulling in via Patreon? $30,000 a month?

EMIRELADERO

a year ago

What's wrong with getting money out of a product? The fact that it was an emulator changes nothing. They would have been sued, Patreon or no Patreon. Making an emulator is not illegal. And I don't mean gray-area not illegal, I mean court-precedent not illegal.

ferbivore

a year ago

Does the Nintendo-Tropic Haze settlement not count as court precedent? It was signed off by a judge after all.

NotPractical

a year ago

A settlement does not imply guilt or create legal precedent (AFAIK IAMNAL LOL).

gjsman-1000

a year ago

> court-precedent not illegal

Under precedents established before the DMCA was law, and under lawsuits filed before the DMCA was applicable, on consoles which did not have encryption on which the DMCA would have applied.

EMIRELADERO

a year ago

Correct, but the DMCA has an explicit exception for this kind of thing.

gjsman-1000

a year ago

> Correct, but the DMCA has an explicit exception for this kind of thing.

That has never been examined or declared, as the DMCA exemptions are much narrower than they appear. The reverse engineering exemption, for example, does not cover the right to make a product that interfaces with the original - only to examine the technology to build your own product.

An obvious example of this is DVDs, which have the same exemptions. The US PTO, and the US Librarian of Congress (who has the power to make DMCA exemptions) are unequivocally clear that a private copying exemption does not exist in their view. This is also why the EFF has been begging every 3 years for the last... two decades... to make such an exemption, and has failed.

EMIRELADERO

a year ago

The reversing clause doesn't, but the law does.

It's "declared" specifically in the Act, here:

(1)Notwithstanding the provisions of subsection (a)(1)(A), a person who has lawfully obtained the right to use a copy of a computer program may circumvent a technological measure that effectively controls access to a particular portion of that program for the sole purpose of identifying and analyzing those elements of the program that are necessary to achieve interoperability of an independently created computer program with other programs, and that have not previously been readily available to the person engaging in the circumvention, to the extent any such acts of identification and analysis do not constitute infringement under this title.

(2)Notwithstanding the provisions of subsections (a)(2) and (b), a person may develop and employ technological means to circumvent a technological measure, or to circumvent protection afforded by a technological measure, in order to enable the identification and analysis under paragraph (1), or for the purpose of enabling interoperability of an independently created computer program with other programs, if such means are necessary to achieve such interoperability, to the extent that doing so does not constitute infringement under this title.

(3)The information acquired through the acts permitted under paragraph (1), and the means permitted under paragraph (2), may be made available to others if the person referred to in paragraph (1) or (2), as the case may be, provides such information or means solely for the purpose of enabling interoperability of an independently created computer program with other programs, and to the extent that doing so does not constitute infringement under this title or violate applicable law other than this section.

gjsman-1000

a year ago

Let's say your interpretation holds water even though I, and the EFF in their handbook [https://www.eff.org/pages/unintended-consequences-fifteen-ye...], and the US legal system just a few months ago [https://www.pearlcohen.com/court-upholds-dmcas-anti-circumve...], do not believe is correct. (It's easy to be an armchair lawyer - if you read the first amendment out of context, threatening to kill someone seems protected.)

Nintendo may potentially argue that yes, you are completely right. You have the right to interoperability, in the sense that you are allowed to make a device which physically takes Switch cards, decrypts them, plays them, from the original card, does not copy it to storage media of any kind, and does not allow the user any semblance of a DRM bypass, or any way to resell the original card while maintaining a copy. Interoperability is for building CD players, not CD rippers.

EDIT TO REPLY FOR "POSTING TOO FAST": Section 117 is very clever, except there's one problem: It was created in 1980, before the DMCA. Thus, if there is a conflict between the DMCA and Section 117, the DMCA is likely to receive the benefit of the doubt. As such, Section 117 is only effective for demonstrating the legality of copying non encrypted programs, or (as an actual lawyer put it), copying a program with the DRM remaining intact, as useless as that is.

Combine my point about interoperability in the courtroom + Section 117 likely being overruled by Section 1201 of the later DMCA which is extremely restrictive on bypassing "technological protection measures" copied or not, and it's not a clear win.

EMIRELADERO

a year ago

> Let's say your interpretation holds water even though I, and the EFF in their handbook [https://www.eff.org/pages/unintended-consequences-fifteen-ye...], and the US legal system just a few months ago [https://www.pearlcohen.com/court-upholds-dmcas-anti-circumve...], do not believe is correct.

The case you linked to has nothing to do with the interoperability exception. I don't know how they could reject my view if they never touched it.

Also

> Nintendo may potentially argue that yes, you are completely right. You have the right to interoperability, in the sense that you are allowed to make a device which physically takes Switch cards, decrypts them, plays them, from the original card, does not copy it to storage media of any kind, and does not allow the user any semblance of a DRM bypass, or any way to resell the original card while maintaining a copy.

And they would be right, if copyright law didn't have an additional exception...

17 U.S.C § 117 - Limitations on exclusive rights: Computer programs (a)Making of Additional Copy or Adaptation by Owner of Copy.—

Notwithstanding the provisions of section 106, it is not an infringement for the owner of a copy of a computer program to make or authorize the making of another copy or adaptation of that computer program provided:

(1)that such a new copy or adaptation is created as an essential step in the utilization of the computer program in conjunction with a machine and that it is used in no other manner, or

(2)that such new copy or adaptation is for archival purposes only and that all archival copies are destroyed in the event that continued possession of the computer program should cease to be rightful.

EMIRELADERO

a year ago

Reply to your edit:

That's what the first exception in the DMCA itself is for. It provides that:

1. You can manually decrypt DRM'd content if it's software you own a legal copy of and you need to run it.

2. You can make an automated tool that does step 1.

3. You can share that tool with anyone as long as they respect 1.

The DMCA DRM clauses only care about that, the DRM itself. Not whether you make a new copy of the content.

squigz

a year ago

Just curious, why does Nintendo seem to think they have a legal standing? Why did the Ryujinx devs give up instead of continuing their extremely-legal work?

nextaccountic

a year ago

Nintendo obviously doesn't think they have standing against emulators [0]. However they they can make the lives of defendants hell until the emulator devs settle.

Now, I think there are laws to curb this kind of judicial abuse, called anti-SLAPP laws. But reading about it, it seems to apply to defamation lawsuits. Apparently it's okay to threaten legal action in bad faith when it's, say, regarding non-existent copyright infringement.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategic_lawsuit_against_publ...

[0] to be fair, they might get something out of the anti-circumvention clause of DMCA. But this only applies if devs aren't careful enough (or don't know about this technicality). Developing an emulator to run legally acquired games doesn't break any laws.

kmeisthax

a year ago

>to be fair, they might get something out of the anti-circumvention clause of DMCA

Nintendo's entire case rests on DMCA 1201. It entirely circumvents (pun intended) the reverse-engineering case law[0] most emulation developers point to. In other words, they aren't saying "you can't write a Switch emulator", they're saying "you can't tell people how to rip Switch games".

The problem is that a DMCA 1201 compliant Switch emulator would be nearly useless. To be clear, the legal way to use the emulator on your own purchased games would be entirely undocumented. You probably couldn't even say "figure out how to rip the games yourself". The illegal way to use the emulator - i.e. with pre-decrypted, pirated game files that don't rely on any Nintendo keys - would be very easy. But they can't tell you to do that, that would be inducement.

Homebrew developers could still legally release their own games for use in a Switch emulator. And emulator developers could advertise the use of the emulator with those games. But that's really limited and I could see Nintendo convincing a court to just ignore it.

[0] e.g. Sony v. Connectix

croes

a year ago

>they took money to help people pirate a brand new game

That is where they went wrong

Dylan16807

a year ago

There's nothing wrong with a team of people getting that much money to code an emulator.

croes

a year ago

>they took money to help people pirate a brand new game

That was the wrong part

Dylan16807

a year ago

Yeah, but that's not the comment I was responding to.

I understand the issue of making money drawing attention to the piracy they (supposedly?) participated in. But there is nothing wrong with the money they got for their development efforts. That money is not a counterpoint to them being victims, regardless of whether they actually are victims or not.

I doubt any meaningful amount of it went to piracy, if any. If that's wrong, then okay I'll change my mind.

And big citation needed that they had a money collection specifically for some instance of piracy.

croes

a year ago

But the comments you were replying too agreed with the point I quoted.

There is most likely a correlation between their Patreon donations and their helpfulness regarding games

Dylan16807

a year ago

> But the comments you were replying too agreed with the point I quoted.

Yes, I dispute the connection they were drawing.

> There is most likely a correlation between their Patreon donations and their helpfulness regarding games

Helpfulness implying some kind of piracy? Maybe but I will doubt it without seeing evidence.

mikae1

a year ago

> painting the Yuzu developers as the victims is insane.

Hope you're not thinking I'm the painter here... I know they turned the thing into big business and I don't have a lot of understanding for that.

Realistically though, I expect Nintendo to find ways to wipe Ryujinx from Github and sue these developers too, considering people have turned to it now that Yuzu is gone.

The only way to escape that fate would be to maintain proper opsec, stay in the right jurisdiction and not rely on (DMCA sensitive) big tech platforms for the development.

EDIT: guess I was kind of right... Seems Nintendo succeeded with their goal: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41712399

gjsman-1000

a year ago

Mandatory reminder as well, to the emulation community, that $30K a month is probably enough to fund a legal defense...

squigz

a year ago

Perhaps not against Nintendo, but yes.

woodrowbarlow

a year ago

git is decentralized and can be served across anything, including tor.

grzracz

a year ago

i think you don't know what decentralized means

trufas

a year ago

You're conflating git with git forges. Most popular forges use a centralized model. Git was built as distributed from the start and it's original mode of collaboration was through a federated protocol.

1propionyl

a year ago

Some sort of decentralized Git.

You mean Git?

tombert

a year ago

I mean, nominally, but honestly how many of us actually use Git in a distributed fashion? I think most of us treat Git more or less like Subversion with local committing and much better merging.

I think what the person was referring to was something more along the lines of a DHT (e.g. Pastry or Kademlia), IPFS, or (as they mentioned) Tor, where it can be truly leaderless and owned by everyone and no one at the same time.

1propionyl

a year ago

I think what they meant was GitHub, not Git.

A common conflation these days, and one GitHub works hard to reinforce.

tombert

a year ago

Sure, but a vast majority of people who use Git will centralize it, with Gitlab, or Bitbucket, or SourceForge, even barring Github.

While the git program is allowed to be decentralized, pretty much everyone's workflow is decidedly not.

hnlmorg

a year ago

git already is decentralised. GitHub isn’t. But you can clone the git repository and mirror that as many places as you want.

user

a year ago

[deleted]

j_maffe

a year ago

git doesn't have discoverability or any kind of decentralized CDN service AFAIK.

hnlmorg

a year ago

None of that are requirements for a version control system, let alone a distributed one.

What people are after is a decentralised GitHub. Which I think is a good idea. But git itself is already built from the ground up to work decentralised.

So if someone were to build a decentralised discovery service for git, then you could take any existing git repository, whether it’s local copies on your laptop or “centralised” versions in GitHub, and use them equally as a seed.

saurik

a year ago

Without the decentralized discovery service; though, you have nothing; one might as well say that hard disk drives are a decentralized storage solution, as everyone who has a copy of a file by definition has a copy of the file... but, obviously, this is meaningless if there is no way for me to find who has a copy of the file to request the download.

RiverCrochet

a year ago

My niece tells me that decentralized Git is, well Git.

As far as a web interface to Git, she was saying the basic pieces are kinda already there with Gitea, and provided the following points:

- Gitea is a single executable, fairly easy to install at least on Linux (it does need a database), and while the configuration requires some time it's worth it for all that Gitea does - which is basically be a copy of Github.

- Gitea has a migration option which will literally pull in an entire Git repo with one click.

So my niece was telling me zany things like "why doesn't everyone run their own Gitea and simply cross migrate everything?" I don't know, I feel like it's dangerous and essentially providing easy tools and paraphernalia to potential evil doers, such as those who may want to infringe copyright, so this is an application I'll never host or run in my life.

adzm

a year ago

YouTube accounts showing devices that emulate Nintendo games have been targeted recently as well

https://www.timeextension.com/news/2024/10/nintendo-is-now-g...

onlyrealcuzzo

a year ago

Ironically, this is the type of behavior that will make me STOP buying a company's products.

They're obviously doing this because they think their losing sales - which they probably are on net. But I wish more people would stop buying products from companies that try to ruins people's literal lives over - essentially - a rounding error to the company's bottom line.

hbn

a year ago

I'm not so sure Switch emulation makes up for a "rounding error"

The truth of the matter is powerful computers are getting cheap and accessible. Emulators can run Switch games better than the Switch itself - I've seen plenty of people who are playing the new Zelda at 60fps while the Switch can barely maintain 30. How many of those people paid for the game? I'd guess very few.

Not to mention Nintendo has had a few cases where their new, major release leaked online a week or 2 before the street release date. So players are now in a situation where you can very easily play games earlier and with better performance thanks to emulators.

There aren't real alternatives to Nintendo games, if you want to play the new Mario or Zelda game, Nintendo is the only one who is offering it. That is to say, these are people who would otherwise be paying customers that aren't giving them any money. I'm sure emulators cost them millions of dollars.

onlyrealcuzzo

a year ago

> How many of those people paid for the game? I'd guess very few.

In many countries that doesn't matter.

consteval

a year ago

To the company and to you, the consumer, it does matter. If they stop making the games you would care, and everyone pirating the games would also care, because clearly they like the games.

Extrapolate this and then there's no good games anywhere, ever again. That's the only logical conclusion of this line of action.

tourmalinetaco

a year ago

I haven’t bought a Nintendo product in almost a decade. My life is better for it. Previously I avidly bought every MH, every Pokémon, would have bought the Digimon releases on Switch too. A fair portion of the recent Zeldas too. Nowadays I play pirated games on my 3DS and am quite happy, far happier than I had been paying Nintendo only to fuck over the things I enjoy. My impact may be small, but that hardly matters because at least I‘m putting my (lack of) money where my mouth is.

gjsman-1000

a year ago

[flagged]

onlyrealcuzzo

a year ago

Nintendo's success during the Switch era is completely orthogonal to their recent overly zealous litigation.

pezezin

a year ago

It is not recent, they have been like this for decades.

m3kw9

a year ago

I think this move hurts yourself more than the company. There are more level headed ways to go about it but this one ain’t it

alext54321

a year ago

If nintendo could come into your hoise and smash all your old games consoles so you buy thr rerelease, they would do it.

MarioMan

a year ago

I was shocked to learn there was a short period in the '90s when even reselling your physical games was outlawed in Japan. At the time, Nintendo put "no resale" icons on the back of all their games.

favorited

a year ago

We'll be back to that same state of affairs, once physical game media is phased out. The PlayStation platform has gone from the PS4 (universal optical media) to the PS5 (cheaper model without optical media) to the PS5 Pro (no optical media without a separate accessory). Hell, it's already happened for PC games.

jwrallie

a year ago

I understand protecting new console sales and current IPs, after all many people are currently employed and working on it, and in Japanese law this is protected under unfair competition.

But when Nintendo just recycles old games, many times with inferior quality compared to the originals, they are not advancing the industry at all. And I’m sure they would totally be into bricking your old consoles and stop all the used game market if they could.

nephy

a year ago

These projects really need to start standing up their own Gitea or Gitlab instances and mirroring to GitHub.

It also cracks me up every time I see legalistic apologists on this website backing up giant corporations.

A) Who cares about the law? It’s rarely moral. B) Which laws should we follow? The internet exists in every country.

hypeatei

a year ago

HN has a lot of people suggesting regulations and laws as a solution to almost everything in existence. It doesn't surprise me that same thought pattern also shows itself in emulator takedown discussions like this one.

kaishin

a year ago

I doubt hosting on Gitea or Gitlab would have helped in this case since Nintendo reached an agreement with the lead developer.

squeaky-clean

a year ago

I would bet serious money that this is because of the upcoming Switch 2. If the rumors are true, it could very much be like how the Dolphin emulator is able to run both Gamecube and Wii games because the system architectures are so similar. Nintendo wants to avoid a day-zero emulator for Switch 2.

zamadatix

a year ago

And even if it wasn't a day-zero (or even several month in) Switch 2 emulator it's seeming like one of the big selling points of the new system is going to be "play your old Switch games on the new system, now in higher resolution" but it's a lot of bad press if that's still "play them in worse quality than emulators were 3 years before this hardware came out".

Dban1

a year ago

that's good and bad news for Switch 2 emulation..

jsheard

a year ago

For clarity, Ryujinx has no connection to the Yuzu Switch emulator which Nintendo unleashed their wrath on earlier this year. They were developed independently of each other, by different people, in parallel until Yuzus demise.

guax

a year ago

I always though switch emulation got too good too fast. Switch being such weak hardware you can emulate it on a potato. Nintendo must've been eyeing an angle to close Ryujinx for a while now.

It would be very interesting if the main dev actually got paid to delete everything. Although it looks like a "dick move" at first, if you know the source will live on and you get retirement money. I would be very pressed to accept if in that situation. Much more likely they just offered to not sue him to oblivion.

I honestly don't blame Nintendo for angling emulators with everything they have while the hardware is current. They have much shittier behaviour when interacting with the community, like suing tournaments that used mods and threatening others.

bluescrn

a year ago

I'm wondering if the anticipated Switch 2 is going to be very similar to the current device in terms of architecture and OS, and the real concern of Nintendo isn't Switch 1 piracy right now, it's that the current Switch emulators could evolve into Switch 2 emulators in the early months/years of the new hardware lifecycle, emulators able to play ripped Switch 2 games well before anyone figures out how to mod the new hardware to enable piracy.

But they probably also want to re-sell us previous games, too, particularly if they can run 'remastered' versions of the Switch Zelda games at a better resolution/framerate on the new hardware - which you can already to via emulation...

guax

a year ago

I am sure the Switch 2 is just a more powerful switch. Still massively underpowered compared to a PC so updating the emulators to run switch 2 would be a fast affair considering how easy people were able to dump the first one. Its likely just a "switch pro" iteration that the OLED never was.

Its likely inevitable considering the hunger for pirated nintendo games on markets like Brazil with a large supply of competent hackers and not much chance of people being able to afford legit games.

1propionyl

a year ago

> Yesterday, gdkchan was contacted by Nintendo and offered an agreement to stop working on the project, remove the organization and all related assets he's in control of. While awaiting confirmation on whether he would take this agreement, the organization has been removed, so I think it's safe to say what the outcome is. Rather than leave you with only panic and speculation, I decided to write this short message to give some closure.

Taken from Discord announcement.

dmonitor

a year ago

So they bribed him into taking down the project? That's certainly one way to go about it.

moritzruth

a year ago

I also thought that at first, but they could have just threatened him with a lawsuit if he does not "agree".

wilsonnb3

a year ago

Indeed, i would be very surprised if Nintendos offer was all carrot and no stick.

1propionyl

a year ago

It's probably a C&D.

EasyMark

a year ago

More likely a verbal threat, take the $20k carrot or we’ll see you in court over the next few years.

user

a year ago

[deleted]

ChrisArchitect

a year ago

Related:

Nintendo Is Now Going After YouTube Accounts Which Show Its Games Being Emulated https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41708771

EasyMark

a year ago

Well that seals the deal, never buying a Nintendo product again. I’m sure I don’t matter to them but I’ll help friends and family get more into PC and retro gaming if they want to pick my brain.

raxxorraxor

a year ago

Their profits plunged significantly and this seems like a futile attempt to compensate. They are still far better off than Sony is currently.

Also it turned out PC gaming wasn't dead after all. Even with many major publishers failing pretty hard, the market still grew.

I have a bit of hope that there is a renaissance of open systems because they simply are superior in every conceivable way and that people are fed up with shitty compromises.

user

a year ago

[deleted]

giancarlostoro

a year ago

Doesn't look to be DMCA'd see here for GitHub DMCA takedowns:

https://github.com/github/dmca

I wonder if they went after the maintainer directly.

CryZe

a year ago

I wouldn't be surprised if they showed up at the maintainer's house even.

ntqvm

a year ago

According to the Discord, that’s exactly what they did.

hu3

a year ago

I can picture expensive looking lawyers arriving at their door, carrying leather briefcases and delivering an ultimatum:

"Listen carefully, my friend, let me help you out. Here are your options:

1) Delete the code, stop working on it, take this $1 million, and enjoy some peace. Think about your family, you deserve a stress-free life. If you choose this, you'll never hear from us again.

2) Keep resisting, and I'll personally see to it that not a day passes where we don’t make your life difficult. You'll end up spending most of your time, energy, money, and sanity fighting a battle that, for me, is just another Tuesday.

Not a tough decision, is it?"

neonsunset

a year ago

This is absolutely terrible. It may be in the business interest of Nintendo but the absolute anti-consumer way this is carried out destroys all the good will that the customers still had towards them.

It seems someone hosts a mirror: https://git.naxdy.org/Mirror/Ryujinx/

I was able to build the project with a single command, so there's hope that easy barrier for entry and a language more developers are familiar with will ensure the survival.

sweeter

a year ago

This just affirms the idea that Nintendo doesn't care about legality, they are extremely litigious and will attack anything and everything they perceive to be as harmful to them whether it is actually harmful or not.

bittwiddle

a year ago

So I understand wanting to build emulators so that people can continue to play their old games after the hardware fails. But in building an emulator for a current generation console, it seems likely that much of the audience is just interested in pirating the games.

cloogshicer

a year ago

The Switch hardware is so underpowered that most games run a lot better (no framedrops, higher resolution) on PC.

ThrowawayTestr

a year ago

It doesn't matter what most people are doing, emulators are legal.

m-p-3

a year ago

Legal or not, Nintendo will release its hounds and drown you in court fees. Personally, I'd rather not have to deal with this legal bullshit and stress in my life.

supernikio2

a year ago

The problem then it's anti-SLAPP not doing what it's supposed to.

Janicc

a year ago

Good. If there's one company that deserves to have their stuff pirated, it's Nintendo.

tester756

a year ago

One of the most impressive C# code bases :(

jsheard

a year ago

The name Ryujinx is even a C# in-joke of sorts, early iterations of the emulator translated the Switches ARM code into .NET CIL bytecode and then used the standard .NET JIT, which is called RyuJIT, to translate that to native code. NX was the Switches codename, so RyuJIT + NX, minus the T, makes Ryujinx.

They eventually outgrew that approach and rolled their own JIT, but the name had stuck at that point.

theragra

a year ago

Thanks a lot, you clarified my confusion about these two things

JamesSwift

a year ago

I submitted a PR a couple months ago and was really pleasantly surprised at how accessible it was to contribute. No funny business, just `git clone` and open up Rider.

I was only touching the frontend client (i.e. game library screen etc, not the actual emulation), but it took less than two weeks to go from zero-to-PR-submitted on a fairly complex refactor.

kcb

a year ago

Microsoft themselves have highlighted Ryujinx as an example of high performance modern .NET.

ranger_danger

a year ago

https://git.naxdy.org/Mirror/Ryujinx/ (5 minutes ago)

https://github.com/ryujinx-mirror/ryujinx (36 minutes ago)

https://github.com/Synthlight/Ryujinx (13 hours ago)

https://git.tardis.systems/mirrors/Ryujinx (last week)

https://codeberg.org/alexdh/Ryujinx (8 months ago)

haunter

a year ago

Probably because of the backwards compability of Switch 2. Just imagine emulators outperforming bc games, which of course will happen lol

textadventure

a year ago

Someone else re-uploaded the repo (archived): https://github.com/emmauss/Ryujinx

hypeatei

a year ago

That doesn't look to be an up-to-date fork at all. Latest commit is from 5 years ago.

mikae1

a year ago

Here's a recent (unofficial) AppImage for future use...

https://web.archive.org/save/https://github.com/Samueru-sama...

EDIT: it's not the latest. 1.1.1403 is the latest.

rcarmo

a year ago

Someone should mirror the flatpaks

mikae1

a year ago

Just upgraded the Flathub flatpak to the latest version on my machine. Not sure what's the recommended way to keep two stray Flatpak apps alive.

I have the latest Yuzu flatpak installed on one machine and the latest Ryujinx flatpak on another. How do I save them for the future and migrate them to a new machine?

https://docs.flatpak.org/en/latest/flatpak-command-reference... ?

silverliver

a year ago

If you're on a system where flatpak is installed, you can easily and quickly create installable flatpaks yourself (complete with their dependencies) in case Nintendo decides to abuse law to intimidate and extort flatpak itself.

1. Add a collection Id for the remote you will be using to get the app if you haven't already. To check, run `flatpak remotes -d`. To add, run `flatpak remote-modify --collection-id=org.flathub.Stable flathub`.

2. Download the app and dependencies and collect them into a single copyable directory:

    flatpak create-usb PATH_TO_USB_OR_DIR org.ryujinx.Ryujinx
And presto! you have a 570MB offline installable flatpak that you can distribute among your family and friends. They can enjoy Ryujinx by running:

    flatpak install --sideload-repo=PATH_TO_USB_OR_DIR/.ostree/repo flathub org.ryujinx.Ryujinx
Nintendo, may you become irrelevant as quickly as the 3 e-waste switches we have laying around collecting dust in our house. Fuck you and the slimy minions that abuse the law and infringe on the rights of millions to carry out your delusional take on reality. May the courts fine you dearly and give you the thorough beating you deserve.

Edit: Documentation for ryujinx seems to have also been harmed by Nintendo's reckless actions. Luckily, archive.org seems to have a recent cached copy of the most important pages: e.g. https://web.archive.org/web/20240924023518/https://github.co...

mikae1

a year ago

Thanks!

But, I already have the last Yuzu Flathub flatpak installed on one computer and the last Ryujinx Flathub flatpak installed on another. "flatpak upgrade" does not remove them even if they were removed from Flathub. I just get:

  Info: app org.yuzu_emu.yuzu branch stable is end-of-life, with reason:
  This application is no longer maintained. See https://yuzu-emu.org/ for details.
But, I want to archive these two apps to make sure I can migrate them around computers for all eternity. :D

What does the steps look like then?

mikae1

a year ago

Sorry, followed the steps and it seems to work. I just need to try the install part.

rcarmo

a year ago

flatpak build-bundle /var/lib/flatpak/repo org.ryujinx.Ryujinx.VERSION.flatpak org.ryujinx.Ryujinx stable is what you need.

k__

a year ago

If you want to avoid such a takedown, check out:

https://protocol.land/

https://radicle.xyz/

ezfe

a year ago

It wasn't taken down by Github, it was seemingly taken down by the maintainers. Git already provides protection against this via local copies, so there's no benefit.

k__

a year ago

Data on protocol.land is permanent and can't be deleted.

squeaky-clean

a year ago

That sounds much worse for projects like this unless the authors go fully anonymous and always practice clean opsec.

Nintendo probably sent them a deal along the lines of "Agree to take down the project or else we will sue you for millions of dollars". Could you imagine if you were served that and had to respond "it is impossible for me to take down the project because of the hosting I used."

Even if it's a trial Ryujinx could win... Winning and trial isn't free, and you can often can't recoup attorney fees.

_flux

a year ago

How does it deal with material that lands people in the jail?

ezfe

a year ago

Okay and I'm not sure maintainers want that

mtndew4brkfst

a year ago

Not familiar with the first but the second is funded by a commercial company whose core focus is Ethereum-based, and they're making another cryptocurrency and caused a bunch of PR spammers the same way Tea did.

https://radicle.xyz/faq https://docs.radworks.org/#projects https://www.drips.network/

aiw1nt3rs

a year ago

It seems that Drips has been funding FOSS builders with real money for a while, so I'm not sure what issue you have with that.

Drips has nothing in common with tea.xyz, and I have never come across any PR spamming issue related to it, as it operates in a very different way. Can you provide any evidence?

mtndew4brkfst

a year ago

Considering your post history, notably including a "Show HN: Radicle", it's hard to imagine you are neutral third party here, rather than a contributor or someone with other skin in the game. I'll assume you're insincere, and you're free to assume my refusal to engage was a victory - so we can both go about our days.

k__

a year ago

Drips sounded like a reasonable idea to get builders funded.

tombert

a year ago

I wonder how far this will go. Is Nintendo going to send a cease and desist for the MiSTer project?

Probably not, pretty much all those cores would be for machines where patents have fully expired, but who the hell knows?

espinielli

a year ago

The forks from the listed co-developers are still available...and some of them pretty recent

whaleofatw2022

a year ago

Links? Would not mind forking or getting a copy

lauraorchid

a year ago

Obviously nintendo will do this because the switch is still an active product while emulator for older consoles like dolphin is still around because GameCube/Wii is discontinued.

exitb

a year ago

When they came for Yuzu it was because „the devs clearly had bootleg prerelease games” IIRC. Now it’s because „Switch is still an active product”. I wonder what it will be when they finally come for Dolphin.

user

a year ago

[deleted]

jdright

a year ago

Nintendo must be getting ready to launch the next generation, which by targeting Switch emulators may signal that Switch 2 is not that far from it.

boltzmann-brain

a year ago

What ever exactly happened, ultimately this is just another corporation trying to disturb people in their ownership of their purchased property, in specific video games. Anyone who really thinks about this topic will start questioning why some company located on an island on the other side of the world should be dictating what I do or don't do with a cartridge or disc I paid for with my own money and which is in my possession. It's just ludicrous behavior from a group of power-hungry megalomaniacs. This is why it's important to claw back as much ownership in that space as possible. If you want things to move in the right direction, you should sign https://www.stopkillinggames.com/eci if you're an EU citizen, or support them in any other way if you're not. This stuff is important and will ultimately decide whether we own things in our life or not, as increasingly more items have critical features that are anchored in the digital world. Without stuff like that we will become digital paupers.

wilsonnb3

a year ago

> Anyone who really thinks about this topic will start questioning why some company located on an island on the other side of the world

Why does the location of the company matter? They have branches in america and Europe even if it does somehow matter.

> should be dictating what I do or don't do with a cartridge or disc I paid for with my own money and which is in my possession

You can't ignore the entire idea of intellectual property just because you have a physical disc or cartridge in your possession. There are arguments to be made against IP but this is just lazy.

necovek

a year ago

"Intellectual property" is a meaningless term: GP is specifically referring to rules dictated by copyright laws, which generally allow one to do whatever they please with their "copy" for the most part (as long as they don't hurt the copyright holder's business through a couple of well defined "protections").

Copyright laws were established when it became cheap to "copy" creative works, so creativity would continue to be stimulated by guaranteeing rewards for a set time (idea was not to guarantee getting filthy rich, just to make sure creation happens by keeping the authors fairly compensated).

Digital "sales" are attempts to trick customers into thinking they are buying a copy when they are only getting a license, but this is unrelated to Nintendo killing emulators with an army of lawyers.

johnnyanmac

a year ago

[flagged]

kibwen

a year ago

> Only if you try to package it and sell it en masse.

Ryujinx wasn't being sold, it was being given away for free.

> Someone else distributed a tool that can be argued as used to bypass copyright

By this logic your entire computer is a tool to bypass copyright. An emulator is just a virtual machine, it doesn't contain any games or other copyrighted material. They are legal, despite Nintendo's mafioso scare tactics.

matheusmoreira

a year ago

> By this logic your entire computer is a tool to bypass copyright.

That is the logic of copyright monopolists.

Free computing is subversive. It has the power to wipe out their entire business model like it was nothing. They don't want that. That's why they sign deals with the likes of Intel and AMD so that our processors come pwned straight off the factory.

"Our" computers haven't been ours for a long time now. They hide secrets from us. They have "protected video paths", "remote attestation", "platform keys", etc. These are all tools the monopolists use to make "our" computers do their bidding. Run all programs, except the ones that affect our bottom line. We want to copy but monopolists say no, and our computers obey.

boltzmann-brain

a year ago

Exactly. People have been unsuccessfully ringing the bell on this ever since DeCSS. It's 25 years this month. The general population isn't informed about this, they don't care and they don't have the capacity to know and even if they did, they wouldn't want to know. Thankfully, people are slowly waking up to this. With an ECI like Stop Killing Games, you don't need the genpop to decide that this is bad. You just need a million good men and women. It's much easier to find a million people who understand something is a problem and sign an EU initiative than to find 6 billion people who will understand something is a problem AND vote with their wallet.

johnnyanmac

a year ago

"packaged and distributed en masses" is you want to be nitpicky. I don't get to get away with dealing illegal substances just because I give it away for free. Money simply puts a target on my back.

>your entire computer is a tool to bypass copyright

Reducto ad absurdum doesn't really work here. There are specific scopes and use cases taken into consideration when considering what tools or works are bypassing copyright. I cant claim Yuzu is the same as VMware in their use cases (especially when VMware had to work with Microsoft to have that be allowed. And why it can't legally distribute Mac OS Tom's freely).

kibwen

a year ago

I must ask you to please stop commenting all over this thread if you have such demonstrably little idea what you're talking about.

boltzmann-brain

a year ago

Probably the best comment I've seen in this subthread so far.

ehaliewicz2

a year ago

"I don't get to get away with dealing illegal substances just because I give it away for free."

Good to see you want virtual machines to be illegal.

EMIRELADERO

a year ago

> You can't ignore the entire idea of intellectual property just because you have a physical disc or cartridge in your possession. There are arguments to be made against IP but this is just lazy.

But IP law says nothing about interaction with already-existing copies. This just isn't about copyright at all.

wilsonnb3

a year ago

Thanks to the DMCA's anti circumvention provisions, it is sort of about copyright

ls612

a year ago

IP law more or less "worked" in the 20th century because of the first sale doctrine. Removing that is what led to the dystopian situation today.

jachee

a year ago

Okay, so how do you plug a proprietary Switch cart into a PC to play your “already-existing copy” on an emulator?

devmor

a year ago

There have been tools built to do this, which Nintendo abused IP law to shut down.

sim7c00

a year ago

isnt this basically piracy enabling technology? its good n all that people take the stance they will only use it for their legitimately owned copies but thats not the reality. people dump stuff and spread it around, and others play illegal copies. its much more rare for people to use such tech legitimately than the other clearly illegal case...

DrillShopper

a year ago

Ope, we'd better ban CD burners, Xerox machines, 3D printers, EPROM burners, VCRs, and DAT tape decks because they're pIrAcY eNaBlInG tEcHnOlOgY!!!!!!

That's not how any of this works.

roywiggins

a year ago

It's how the DMCA works though, if the media has any DRM on it.

DrillShopper

a year ago

No it's not. You can't just say "SOME PEOPLE ARE USING THIS FOR PIRACY SO NOBODY SHOULD BE ALLOWED TO USE THIS LEGALLY". That's _not_ how it works and there are many court cases on point here.

The legal uses as well as the plausible fair uses need to be evaluated before you can say "nope, this has gotta go".

stzsch

a year ago

Nintendo's latest legal argument against emulators does rest on the DMCA's anti-circumvention provision. The letter from Nintendo to Valve in the Dolphin case makes it pretty clear.

matheusmoreira

a year ago

That's just Nintendo's opinion on the matter. This letter is just them asking Valve politely to please take down the emulator.

Until this stuff actually goes to court and an actual judge decides on it, nobody knows what the truth is.

Who am I kidding? Even when the truth is known, they'll still abuse the expense associated with the legal system to bully people into submission. Sony sued a commercial emulator developer decades ago. They made the asinine argument that the screenshots they used was copyright infringement. The judge said it was just comparative advertising instead, and that it was actually good for consumers. Nevertheless you still see these monopolists take down emulator screenshots of their games as if they had the right to do it. They know they won't fight back.

bitwize

a year ago

> That's _not_ how it works and there are many court cases on point here.

Those court cases were overridden by Congress... when they passed the DMCA.

Under the DMCA, IT IS A CRIME to:

1) circumvent an "effective" copyright measure for any purpose, except specific, delineated purposes and cases which must be approved and reapproved by the Librarian of Congress every 3 years;

2) traffic in the means or technology to so circumvent a copy protection measure, with no exceptions.

The definition of "effective" is so weak that it applies to anything, even a bit of JavaScript that intercepts right click so you can't "Save Image As". It basically means, would the copy protection measure prevent copying "during the normal course of its operation". I.e., if it's buggy, employs weak crypto, or is otherwise trivially defeated, too bad. You can still catch federal time for breaking it.

In order for a Switch emulator to work properly, the copy protection on the game must be defeated. So even if you dump it yourself and a court somehow rules that copy to be fair use, YOU ARE STILL COMMITTING A CRIME by the very act of dumping it. Therefore, it is illegal to run a Switch emulator to play legitimate Switch games, irrespective of whether those games are "legal" copies or not. And a court may rule that Switch emulators are illegal to distribute as well, since they only have illegal uses.

I am not a lawyer, so I recommend you find yourself a good one if you want to mess around with Switch emulation. Best bet is to not get involved with it at all. Forget about preservation. The Switch and its games are not yours to preserve.

Space5000

a year ago

How does an after fact of someone's supposed illegal activity become itself illegal in a case like this? Especially in Brazil if I'm assuming correctly.

I never heard of a case declaring a non-circumvent tool to be illegal just because it may indirectly rely on people dumping it first. If so, then even project64 would be illegal too as bypassing a physical cartridge was ruled to also bypass copy protection.

Also the tool was in another specific country, which I heard doesn't have copy protection laws so the idea that it itself becomes illegal because of the actions in another country sounds even more silly.

I am not a lawyer by the way.

roywiggins

a year ago

If an emulator isn't actually enabling the circumvention (the DRM has already been circumvented) it does seem a serious stretch to apply it to them.

I wouldn't want to have to pay lawyers to litigate that, mind you...

kmeisthax

a year ago

> except specific, delineated purposes and cases which must be approved and reapproved by the Librarian of Congress every 3 years;

1201(c)(1) says:

> Nothing in this section shall affect rights, remedies, limitations, or defenses to copyright infringement, including fair use, under this title.

Wouldn't that apply to DMCA 1201(a)(1) - the part that bans circumvention of copy protection? i.e. since there's US[0] caselaw in favor of format-shifting[1], it's probably still legal to format shift DRM-encumbered material, even if it's illegal to tell people how to do that.

Regardless, you probably don't need to tell people - or at least, private citizens not fearing prosecution from Nintendo for unrelated matters - not to dump their own games, because it's extremely unlikely for anyone to ever get caught doing so. Dumping your own games and running them in an emulator leaves little evidence. In fact, that's why DMCA 1201(a)(2) has no exceptions. DMCA exists to take copying tools away from people who are not legible to copyright holders.

[0] The biggest split between US and UK copyright law is actually just format-shifting. In the UK it's not only illegal to format-shift, but a law to legalize it was struck down on the basis that copyright holders need to be paid for lost sales of the same work in a different format.

[1] RIAA v. Diamond, which notably overcame the Audio Home Recording Act, an even more draconian law on digital music recording technology that mandated specific DRM systems on all digital recordings.

boltzmann-brain

a year ago

What you need to understand is that Stop Killing Games and future initiatives to come are about changing the law. You arguing about current law means nothing when the whole point is to change it.

bitwize

a year ago

Anticircumvention laws were passed in many countries to conform to international treaties. They cannot be changed without violating international law.

If you have difficulty understanding why these treaties were signed and laws passed, perhaps ask someone who makes their living in a creative field (programming doesn't count). Ask them what computers and the internet would have done to their livelihood without DRM and the strong legal protections surrounding it.

komali2

a year ago

> Forget about preservation. The Switch and its games are not yours to preserve.

That's false. I own this Switch and I own the games I purchased on it. I ripped the games and I'm playing the new Zelda on my steam deck right now.

Bureaucrats and capitalists can write silly things on paper all they want, the truth of my ownership is self evident and obvious. I haven't done anything wrong and it's incredibly cynical to argue I have.

If I get fined or go to jail for it, it's just another absurdity. I'm not going to lobotomize myself so I can live in lala land with the bureaucrats and understand their clown world ethics, let them punish me if they catch me I guess.

roywiggins

a year ago

Well maybe, if you have the time and the money to make a fair use defense in court...

johnnyanmac

a year ago

> You can't just say "SOME PEOPLE ARE USING THIS FOR PIRACY SO NOBODY SHOULD BE ALLOWED TO USE THIS LEGALLY"

That is in fact how many court cases are resolved.

>The legal uses as well as the plausible fair uses need to be evaluated before you can say "nope, this has gotta go".

what "fair uses" do we really have to stand on? "I can play Nintendo games better on my PC"? Are you a university or organization trying to preserve software?

At the end of the day, video games as a whole are not a societal need. So it becomes hard to make some argument against having IP owners not clamp down on entertainment intended to make money.

BobaFloutist

a year ago

>what "fair uses" do we really have to stand on? "I can play Nintendo games better on my PC"? Are you a university or organization trying to preserve software?

"I own it and I want to" is more than enough.

pjmlp

a year ago

That is exactly why on some countries there is an additional copy tax on that stuff.

anthk

a year ago

Spain and Portugal. We hate the Spanish RIAA a lot (SGAE, sociedad general de autores y editores, I think it doesn't need a translation).

calgoo

a year ago

In a way, to me, this makes it “more legal” to rip copyright material as I’m forced to pay for it on every HD, usb, etc. i understand it’s not, but if you are going to force me to pay a tax on any storage device, then I might as well get my value out of it.

pjmlp

a year ago

And France, Germany, and a couple of others.

sim7c00

a year ago

don't forget debuggers, disassemblers and hexdump tools ;) ...

I don't disagree with you, but if you look at how the law is interpreted, and used 'succesfully' by lawyers. I do think I am right. I think further it's mainly a case of, like other people suggested, circumventing active protections, and also how its 'most commonly used'.

For emulators, the most common use is not the creators and hobbyist trying to keep stuff alive. The most common use is people downloading the stuff who never owned a console or said games, and them playing stuff.

For CD burners you might claim the same, but there's no protections circumvented by the majority users. CD's can just be copied, there's no protection mechanisms. There's warning labels not to distribute copies though, which is against the law. The act of making a copy isn't included in such notices.

It's usually something around distributing illegal copies as far as i've seen them. Not "making copies".

wilsonnb3

a year ago

It is not the entirety of how it works but determining the primary intended use case of a technology is part of how it works.

repelsteeltje

a year ago

Sure, but primary intent is open to interpretation too.

Dig down deep enough and you'll find the very core of computers is about making copies. Colloquially we speak about moving data across memory or transferring it over a network swap a buffer to disk, but that's not what happens. We make copies and often, but not always, abandon the original.

So it's always been kind of hair splitting to discern between different kinds of copying. Piracy and fair use, owning a software vs having a license to use it - it's a gray area.

johnnyanmac

a year ago

>primary intent is open to interpretation too.

and I wager about a million kids, people who can't afford games, or just self-righteous pirates are the ones who engage in copying data. Primary intent can be warped by consumer usage, even if the original ideals were noble (see: Bitcoin).

That's probably why some philantropist doesn't want to try and challenge matters like DMCA. It may only make things worse.

deknos

a year ago

with scanner and printer i printed material for my school colleagues in the german version of highschool, because they could not afford some of the specialized books.

i do not say, piracy is always okay, but the intended use is VERY MUCH open to debate, depending on the view point and the money.

and even more volatile, if much money can influence the societal debate and the law system.

many people are very much we-trust-authority-and-companies-to-do-nothing-wrong.

johnnyanmac

a year ago

>i do not say, piracy is always okay, but the intended use is VERY MUCH open to debate, depending on the view point and the money.

I completely agree with this POV. But it also seems like we always get an influx of users who want to unironically destroy (not simply readjust) the idea of IP and copyright everytime topics like this occur. So it can be hard to navigate a discussion like this where some people have such radical mindsests to begin with (and usually not anything resembling a model for their plan)

>many people are very much we-trust-authority-and-companies-to-do-nothing-wrong.

yes, I get that a lot just because I want to simply limit copyright terms down to its original 14/14 terms instead of the absurd 95 years or soemthing, or remove it entirely. 28 years happens to be most of a traditional career, so it seems fair for creators to benefit from their creation for assumedly the rest of their career and a bit into retirement before throwing it out for the public for others to iterate on.

The general idea of "well companies can pay to license it out" hasn't worked out to well in hindsight. Lots of companies will happily sit on projects for years, decades, because sometimes denying others of a project is better than giving it out. I'd also be interested in some sort of "use it or lose it" clause of maybe 10 years or so to prove you have an actual proudct in production before an IP goes into the public domain. It'd also solve those weird licensing hells we run into as companies shut down, but I also see a few obvious loopholes to close.

johnnyanmac

a year ago

Is it a coincidence every one of those pieces of tech have been under controversy? Yes, companies have been against easily copying their works for decades, and the laws are wishy washy until someone angry enough to challenge it rises up.

But odds are, if you have that kind of money you benefit from keeping it vauge.

naikrovek

a year ago

If people used emulators for homebrew there wouldn’t be much of a fuss about it. But they don’t, they use emulators for piracy.

It doesn’t matter if it has legitimate uses if 50%+ of the information online is about piracy and game dumping.

Nintendo is gonna care and they’re gonna try to stop these things, so long as their primary use is piracy. It doesn’t matter that there are legitimate and legal use cases. There are zero people writing homebrew of any real value for any console platform newer than the SNES as far as I’m aware. There are lots and lots of toy applications in homebrew stores but nothing serious. LOTS of detailed and useful info about how to pirate games, though.

boolemancer

a year ago

> and game dumping.

Your argument is that legally purchasing a game and playing that in an emulator is piracy?

consteval

a year ago

No, the piracy part come in when that dumped game is distributed, and guides are made so even the most computer illiterate people are able to play Nintendo games free of charge.

Personally, I don't think an emulator or ROM dump should be banned. However, I cannot deny that these exist primarily to pirate games. In the long run, I think paying customers will feel stupid for spending money when other people aren't so they'll stop too. Eventually, it will get to a point where Nintendo can't make a profit.

I think if you love the games, which I personally do, the moral thing to do is pay so that those games can continue to be made. But that's my moral, not legal, assessment.

naikrovek

a year ago

No, my argument is that the information on the web is about how to pirate games, no matter how it is couched in the tool documentation.

The case for homebrew is in the homebrew software that is available, and all of the homebrew software that I have ever seen is absolute shite. Toy programs and simple SDK test tools, nothing of value other than the 3rd party SDKs themselves.

It does not matter if you make a legitimate backup copy of a cart you own for safekeeping, emulation of legitimately owned copies of retail games is not an exemption of the DMCA.

It doesn’t matter if you own a copy of the game, making a copy for any reason is not in accordance with the DMCA, as far as I’m aware. Exemptions to the DMCA are granted every few years, and some exemptions are rescinded at the same time. Copying game cartridges has never been an exemption.

And even if it was, you can’t put your copy back onto a legitimate blank cartridge to regain playability if the original is destroyed.

It’s a shitty situation to be sure, and it is wholly unfair. Blame gamers who are “morally opposed” to paying for games that they play. There are a lot of them, and they play a lot of games, and are often popular streamers on YouTube and Twitch.

If people stopped pirating games so much, the homebrew and legitimate use people would have a solid defense and maybe even support in government, but the amount of piracy that goes on absolutely dwarfs legitimate uses of unlocked hardware.

I personally am fascinated with Nintendo hardware and the choices made when they design their systems, and despite repeated efforts to get a Switch dev kit, I have been denied approval time and time again. I have no interest in piracy, I have interest in hardware platforms. But I am in the extremely small minority with that focus.

If piracy slows somewhat dramatically, Nintendo won’t be able to do this with impunity like they do today. They will simply not have a leg to stand on when they say emulators are purely piracy mechanisms. But today, they really are.

How many new games come out for the SNES every year? How many SNES emulators are there under active development? Are you going to say that all of those emulators and all of that time spent making them and perfecting them, making them cycle-perfect is done so that 1-2 games can come out every 1-2 years? EMULATORS ARE PRIMARILY USED FOR PIRACY.

Until that changes, Nintendo will keep doing this.

WgaqPdNr7PGLGVW

a year ago

> EMULATORS ARE PRIMARILY USED FOR PIRACY.

This is not a piracy issue. Please stop framing it as such.

The primary use case is to run all your games on a single device.

Nintendo want to lock customers into their ecosystem rather than competing on game quality alone.

They know if you have a switch then you will likely buy other switch games etc. If you buy and play Mario Kart on your PC then you are much less likely to invest in the rest of the ecosystem.

We should carve out legal provisions for emulators and circumventing DRM.

Nintendo can then still go against individual people pirating software.

consteval

a year ago

> This is not a piracy issue

I don't think emulators or ROM dumps should be banned. However, it is a piracy issue because in the real world these are used almost exclusively for piracy.

I think a "know nothing" type argument is very weak.

naikrovek

a year ago

It is absolutely a piracy issue. Nintendo are using the DMCA to fight piracy.

It is extremely cut and dried in their eyes: emulation = piracy.

Mario Kart exists on many non-Nintendo platforms legitimately already. The existence of Mario Kart in the arcade or on mobile devices brings people into the Nintendo ecosystem, not draw them out of it.

It is a waste of time to fight individuals downloading games when the tools of emulation exist out in the open. that is why Nintendo are going after emulators themselves, at the current time, emulators are the big, easy wins.

chithanh

a year ago

> EMULATORS ARE PRIMARILY USED FOR PIRACY.

Even if that is true (and I guess for that you'd have to classify downloading abandonware as piracy): Valve founder Gabe Newell famously said that piracy is a "service issue".

So if you give emulator users the option of playing or buying legitimate copies without jumping through hoops, then piracy rates will drop.

naikrovek

a year ago

I don't understand how you consider the Nintendo Switch to be abandonware.

Nintendo aren't taking down SNES emulators. They're not taking down GameCube emulators, they're taking down Switch emulators.

The emulation community, -- again, mostly pirates -- have zero chill. The lesson that they desperately need to learn here is this: Do not bite the hand that feeds you.

Emulating latest generation systems and games that are currently for sale for that system is biting the hand that feeds you.

chithanh

a year ago

> I don't understand how you consider the Nintendo Switch to be abandonware.

I don't? My comment was on the primary use of emulation.

And Nintendo Switch is not the predominant console that is emulated. In fact Switch emulation runs only on relatively modern systems, not on Android and not on the myriad of cheap emulation hardware that is sold on AliExpress.

prmoustache

a year ago

uh no.

I am emulating Zelda Breath of the Wild to play it at higher resolution. I already own the cart and the console.

naikrovek

a year ago

Hey, guess what? That’s piracy!

You aren’t licensed to play that game on a PC or in an emulator. It doesn’t matter if you paid for the game and paid for the Nintendo Switch to play it on. If you used a hacked Switch to dump the console or you downloaded the rom, that’s piracy. It is not legal to circumvent the DMCA for fair use reasons.[1]

It is very cut and dried in the legal world, and it would take a very significant case and a few appeals which uphold a decision that changes how the DMCA is interpreted in the courts.

If you’re not in the US and not a US citizen, then I have no idea what laws apply to you or how they are interpreted.

1: https://copyrightresource.uw.edu/copyright-law/dmca/#excepti...

chithanh

a year ago

> If you’re not in the US and not a US citizen, then I have no idea what laws apply to you or how they are interpreted.

I live in the EU, where consumers are authorized by Directive 2009/24/EC to reproduce and translate computer programs on other systems in order to achieve interoperability.

But even in the US there is the Sony v. Connectix precedent that creation of interoperable products is compliant with the DMCA and the anti-circumvention provisions do not apply to them.

naikrovek

a year ago

You don’t have to tell me that.

Everyone who is not an IP owner knows that.

Also it doesn’t matter if something is “abandoned.” It’s still got an owner, and pirating that thing is still against the law.

The law is what matters when discussing legal matters. Nothing else has any meaning at all. Law and precedent are the only things lawyers care about.

If Nintendo wanted to go from a company that is tolerated to a company that is beloved, they would stop this, but they don’t. They are happy to be hated if it stops piracy of their games, clearly.

amlib

a year ago

Computers are primarily used for copying data, and thus by extension are perfect piracy machines. Should Nintendo go on an epic crusade to ban computers because many people use computers for piracy?

It doesn't help that the copyright system is heavily unfavorable for the common folk and society as whole. Some pirate as a workaround or in protest of the current draconian copyright rules.

Morally there is an argument to be made for recent works against piracy, but why should we care about old stuff that arguably should have already entered public domain like SNES games from the early 90s?

devmor

a year ago

> EMULATORS ARE PRIMARILY USED FOR PIRACY

Emulators are primarily used to play games that are no longer available on hardware that no longer exists.

That is preservation, not piracy.

WgaqPdNr7PGLGVW

a year ago

Yes, and in the case of older games it is incredibly difficult for a company to prove any kind of damages against an individual since they no longer make the games available for sale.

consteval

a year ago

That doesn't apply for current generation consoles and games.

devmor

a year ago

How exactly do you expect to preserve games if you only start after they are no longer available?

consteval

a year ago

I would imagine the games don't disappear from existence the very moment a new console is released.

The reality is that emulating and dumping current games is almost exclusively used for piracy purposes. Naturally, this isn't true for something like the N64.

devmor

a year ago

That is not the reality, that is your personal opinion.

consteval

a year ago

It also happens to be the reality. I won't entertain delusions that switch emulation is not primarily used for piracy.

I mean really, archival? The games are in every Walmart, Target, and GameStop in the country. Within a 5-mile radius of you at any given time there's dozens of games. Get real.

naikrovek

a year ago

Agree.

Pirates never openly admit they are pirating. What, everyone with an emulator is an archivist? Give me a break.

What does an emulator have to do with preservation, anyway? Nothing. You don’t need an emulator to preserve a game. You need an emulator to play a game that you can’t get the hardware for anymore, and the Switch is very much still on store shelves, so the “archiving” excuse evaporates as soon as it is uttered.

Pirates will however say they are doing all kinds of legitimate things in order to keep pirating. I include all those fools who pirate everything they play as a matter of principle, as if that is a legitimately defensible position in reality.

prmoustache

a year ago

> EMULATORS ARE PRIMARILY USED FOR PIRACY.

It is funny that when you replace EMULATORS with GUNS and PIRACY with INJURING AND KIllING, the very same people advocacing for the bans of emulators are the ones arguing that guns are for protection and not to harm others.

But all emulators user combined don't harm nearly as much humanity as a single gun owner does.

tpmoney

a year ago

How did you reach the conclusion that there's a strong correlation between being a Corporate IP Rights Diehard and a Gun Rights Diehard? Was there some study that showed a link between supporting the individual right to own a firearm and support for banning individuals from owning software emulators? Perhaps the NRA or the 2AF file an amicus brief in support of Nintendo's fights against emulators recently? Or the other way around maybe? Did Nintendo of America file a motion in favor of striking down some firearms laws?

boltzmann-brain

a year ago

You better not have a tool in your pocket that lets you make unregulated digital copies of any copyrighted document, movie, or song

roywiggins

a year ago

Selling a tool designed to circumvent DRM, even to make backups, seems straightforwardly illegal under the DMCA? I'm not sure that counts as an abuse of the law...

Using it to shut down emulators that don't help you circumvent DRM does seem like an abuse, though.

chewmieser

a year ago

MIG Flash Dumper

naikrovek

a year ago

You mean the one that Nintendo crushed and now has details on everyone who bought (or at least ordered) one?

Sure those are just flying around where anyone can grab one.

If you have a 1st hardware generation Switch you have all the dumping hardware you require anyway.

76SlashDolphin

a year ago

Huh? Last I checked you can still order them off AliExpress without an issue. And I highly doubt that Nintendo would go after the thousands of people who bought one after the big MIG Switch announcements.

naikrovek

a year ago

they're not "going after" MIG Dumper customers, I didn't say that. Remember what people actually say vs. what you imagine them saying when you want to argue with them.

Nintendo seek customer information in order to inform those customers that they are in possession of illegally obtained copyrighted material.

> Last I checked you can still order them off AliExpress without an issue.

Copyright is barely a thing in China, and is almost never enforced. And certainly the tech culture there is very much pro-copying.

jachee

a year ago

That doesn’t fit the bill, as it seems to only be for “making backup copies”, not interfacing directly with an emulator.

choo-t

a year ago

You can play your backup on the emulator, and you can even make these backup through a modded Switch.

jachee

a year ago

But that doesn’t allow for this, the original assertion:

> But IP law says nothing about interaction with already-existing copies.

…because it requires a separate copy.

choo-t

a year ago

> …because it requires a separate copy.

That's an absurd statement, it's the same with most program, you make a copy of the data from a CD/Flash to the host machine storage, then make another copy to the RAM for execution.

Are you arguing that installing a software is akin to making an illegal copy ?

jachee

a year ago

A proprietary cart has a license that doesn’t include any provisions for installation. Thus, it is only authorized to be executed directly from the cart. So in the specific case I’m talking about, as opposed to your premature extrapolation, yes. Copying the data from a cart to another system that isn’t directly executing the data from that cart is an illegal act.

choo-t

a year ago

> A proprietary cart has a license that doesn’t include any provisions for installation. Thus, it is only authorized to be executed directly from the cart. So in the specific case I’m talking about, as opposed to your premature extrapolation, yes.

No, the wishes of Nintendo are not law.

> Copying the data from a cart to another system that isn’t directly executing the data from that cart is an illegal act.

Not it isn't, it's explicitly stated that making a copy to run the program is not a infringement[1]

117. Limitations on exclusive rights: Computer programs (a) Making of Additional Copy or Adaptation by Owner of Copy.— Notwithstanding the provisions of section 106, it is not an infringement for the owner of a copy of a computer program to make or authorize the making of another copy or adaptation of that computer program provided:

(1) that such a new copy or adaptation is created as an essential step in the utilization of the computer program in conjunction with a machine and that it is used in no other manner, or

(2) that such new copy or adaptation is for archival purposes only and that all archival copies are destroyed in the event that continued possession of the computer program should cease to be rightful.

[1]: https://www.copyright.gov/title17/92chap1.html#117

jachee

a year ago

That’s all well and good if you’re the owner. But you’re not the owner of a computer program that is merely licensed to you for your use. Every game comes with an End User License Agreement that explicitly unambiguously says you don’t own it. [1][2]

Also, executing a copy of a program is violating the “for archival purposes only” provision. Once it’s being executed it’s no longer archival, it’s executive.

1. https://www.nintendo.com/sg/support/switch/eula/usage_policy... 2. https://en-americas-support.nintendo.com/app/answers/detail/...

choo-t

a year ago

> But you’re not the owner of a computer program that is merely licensed to you for your use.

For copyright purpose, you're still the owner of the _copy_, independently of what Nintendo say, you bought the cartridge, you're the owner of it (but not the licence right on the distribution of the game).

> Also, executing a copy of a program is violating the “for archival purposes only” provision. Once it’s being executed it’s no longer archival, it’s executive.

It is not, it's covered by the section I'm quoting.

> 1. https://www.nintendo.com/sg/support/switch/eula/usage_policy... 2. https://en-americas-support.nintendo.com/app/answers/detail/...

Nintendo wishes and words are not law.

komali2

a year ago

If that's the law then the law is stupid and should be changed.

dns_snek

a year ago

Where did purchasers of physical copies have a chance to read that license and did the store clerk require their signature to prove that they agreed to such an EULA?

boltzmann-brain

a year ago

Not in light of IP law which is what you're arguing about unknowledgably.

ysofunny

a year ago

IP is an obsolete idea of a bygone century

it arose from a legitimate answer to material scarcity, but it's nonesense in the digital space

people who advocate for IP and DRM and all such thing are in the end advocating for scarcity.

Wytwwww

a year ago

So your position is that almost nobody who sells their content should be able to make a living doing that?

You either must be able to fund it through ads, host it on platform which make piracy effectively impossible and/or impractical like Apple's App Store, YouTube etc. or be independently wealthy and just do it as a hobby?

e.g. screw all the authors who are writing books, Amazon should just be able to distribute (or sell for some "convenience" fee) books to everyone who has a Kindle without paying anything to them? That (which would be the logical outcome of nothing having no IP protection) certainly sounds like a reasonable opinion..

neuralRiot

a year ago

Piracy is product of artificial scarcity, people pirate mostly because it is easier and more convenient than the legitimate counterpart, music piracy almost disappeared when convenient streaming services appeared, same for movies until studios decided that they wanted “cable tv 2.0” Make something as easy as pirating and people will pay for it.

adamc

a year ago

Convenient streaming services do not pay musicians a living wage for their work. It's basically still ripping them off.

consteval

a year ago

The reality is high-qualit games like Mario Odyssey are very expensive to make.

If in some hypothetical future you can't turn a profit because everyone is pirating it, these games will either:

1. stop existing

2. be lower quality

3. follow the steps of free mobile games - full of ads, microtransactions, etc.

Wytwwww

a year ago

> Make something as easy as pirating and people will pay for it.

Would they still pay for it if all the content could be posted ( by 3rd parties ) on platforms like YouTube and viewed for free (besides the ad revenue which would be going to Google rather than to the author and/or companies that produced the content in the first place)? Of course that question doesn't make a lot of sense since most of that content wouldn't exist in the first place...

(I wasn't talk about piracy but rather responding to a comment advocating the total abolition of IP laws)

johnnyanmac

a year ago

>people pirate mostly because it is easier and more convenient than the legitimate counterpart

Sure, same logic as "people steal when it's easy to do so"

>music piracy almost disappeared when convenient streaming services appeared

Too much to go into now, but Spotify is definately next on the list of enshittification. It's very easy to "end piracy" when your plan is to capture the market with unsustainable business models and clamp down later when money is tight.

>Make something as easy as pirating and people will pay for it.

We're kind of seeing that right now with Gamepass. And all that does is make me fear for the end of games preservation as we speak. But I suppose that's the market demand, so it is what it is.

We already saw what happened with the mobile scene with this. apps are essentially "free" so it's easier than piracy to jump in. I'm not sure if that's an ideal model either.

komali2

a year ago

There's still really phenomenal games on phones, there's just also a ton of "free" (ad and micro transaction driven) crap.

Also phones can emulate and there's some interesting homebrew they can thus run like micromages.

ysofunny

a year ago

i just want megaupload for all mankind because we can. it's a dumbass problem that we cannot afford it (but somehow a crook from down and under could? hmmm)

toolz

a year ago

In practice I agree with your points, but it's also important to consider that the open source model is alive, well and is directly and indirectly at the heart of employing many people. I won't make the argument that society is willing or could switch to that model successfully, but I also wouldn't be willing to say it couldn't work, either.

johnnyanmac

a year ago

>t's also important to consider that the open source model is alive, well and is directly and indirectly at the heart of employing many people... I also wouldn't be willing to say it couldn't work, either.

I would. Many people who contribute to FOSS either already or proceeded to work on proprietary technology which makes money. Like Nintendo. The FOSS work in good times is a passion hobby, not a means to live.

It'd be nice, but charity for most ventures has never ventured to be a way for the charity giver to sustain a liveable wage. If it could do that then I'd be more on board for FOSS being a model to follow. Instead, just like when you list a couch on Craigslist, you want to charge even a small price (and maybe not even collect the money) just to filter out the most unhinged customers who somehow become even more unhinged over literal free stuff.

Wytwwww

a year ago

> consider that the open source model is alive

Not everything revolves around software.

Also even then OSS generally seems to only be universally successful in areas where software is a "cost centre" i.e. companies are willing to invest into it when it makes it cheaper for them run their business than building/buying proprietary stuff or they build their products on top of it (A but almost never when it's the actual end product targeted at consumers.

And if we extend the definition of software to video games, OS is not even a thing there (besides middleware of course which falls into the previous category).

hirako2000

a year ago

Throwing away these abused IP laws wouldn't prevent creators from making a living off their art.

Plenty of ways for artist to monetize. Selling a copy of the art is one way, very cherished by publishers. Creators for the most part don't make money off copy distribution of their art. That was the case with physical copies, still the case with online distribution.

The good old "let's protect the artists" is a fallacy. It's only to protect publishers and distributors. These IP laws, at least their interpretation acts against the public interest, creators included.

Other forms of monetisation of art? Performance, training and teaching, patronage, custom requests, etc.

Ask Taylor Swift where most of her money is coming from, that's not from Spotify.

Wytwwww

a year ago

> Creators for the most part don't make money off copy distribution of their art Can you back this up with any sources? Besides listing individual artists or only talking about specific industries?

e.g. how many successful fiction authors don't make money off copy distribution of their "art"?

Regardless I don't see how is this a legitimate argument (even if it were accurate), authors/creators should be free to chose their monetization model themselves.

> These IP laws, at least their interpretation acts against the public interest, creators included.

On the whole I certainly don't agree at all (obviously the current system is not perfect and need to be improved. Also could you explain how exactly they act against creators interests?

> Performance, training and teaching, patronage, custom requests, etc.

Yes, let's go back to the middle ages when when you could only be an artist/writer/etc. if you found a rich patron willing to support you

boltzmann-brain

a year ago

who do you think owns record labels? poor people?

Wytwwww

a year ago

I'm not sure what are you arguing against? Sure, record labels might be exploitative and the share going to the original creators might be too low (no argument there), but how exactly would abolishing IP protections fix that?

If musicians can create and distribute their content on their own (for free) and sustain themselves entirely from donations and/or performances they are completely free to do that. What does that have to do with IP law?

boltzmann-brain

a year ago

You say "Yes, let's go back to the middle ages when when you could only be an artist/writer/etc. if you found a rich patron willing to support you" like that's not the case today, which is either duplicitous or just naiive.

Donations are exactly that, a rich patron willing to support you.

So you're basically getting upset over some made up reality where currently musicians don't need support from rich people, but that reality only exists in your head.

Wytwwww

a year ago

I'm not particularly upset, just somewhat baffled...

First I was never talking about musicians specifically, secondly modern (Patreon/etc.) style donation model is in my opinion overall much better that being dependent on a small number of rich donors. However that seems besides the point, authors/creators are free to chose how they distribute their content and what business model they want to adopt (obviously different models work better in different industries).

You are somehow implying that denying them that choice would improve something? Can you explain?

> like that's not the case today, which is either duplicitous or just naiive.

Really? Most successful authors are musicians are dependent on 1 or 2 individual patron? Not thousands or even millions of people willing to pay for their content (in some form)?

user

a year ago

[deleted]

johnnyanmac

a year ago

so you're basically saying you're fine with a creator needing to get a business major in order to sell merch... just so they can give away the thing they real care for? I'd hope premium games would show there's a market where you don't need to become a coporate model just to make ends meet, but I guess when even games are dismissing that it was only a dream.

>The good old "let's protect the artists" is a fallacy. It's only to protect publishers and distributors.

Who do you think is the first to be cut when publishers/distributors are low on money? It's not like they need that money to live. They can shut down the business and still retire comfortably.

>Ask Taylor Swift where most of her money is coming from

okay.

>Swift's income streams include revenue from her concert tour ticket sales, music catalog, streaming deals and record sales. She also owns numerous pricey properties across the U.S. Both Bloomberg and Forbes pin her net worth at an estimated $1.1 billion on the low end, based on analyses of her fortune.

so... either she's really good in real estate or she command enough power to get a fair cut from stuff 99.9% of artists barely get anything out of.

Never thought about comparing Swift to the typical music market but I was expecting something a little bit more surprising.

boltzmann-brain

a year ago

> so you're basically saying you're fine with a creator needing to get a business major in order to sell merch... just so they can give away the thing they real care for?

What a nonsensical, bad-faith, mis-representation of GP. At this point you might as well start talking about hot air balloons, another thing that wasn't mentioned in GP. If this is what you're going to be doing, you shouldn't be on this website at all. Your comments particularly stand out as always being on the wrong side of the conversation, no matter what point is brought up. It's obvious you just want to be a contrarian for no sake at all.

Wytwwww

a year ago

> What a nonsensical, bad-faith, mis-representation > At this point you might as well start talking about hot air balloons,

To be fair the same could be said about any comment in this thread advocating the complete abolition (as opposed to reform) of IP laws. Ofcourse, Maybe they are not directly "bad-faith", just not thought through at all and/or extremely ideological.

boltzmann-brain

a year ago

No, that would not be fair, that would be self-serving and unfair, and again a mis-representation of what you're being challenged with.

Wytwwww

a year ago

> mis-representation of what you're being challenged with.

Can you elaborate? I haven't seen a single coherent logical argument explaining why why IP laws should be abolished (instead of reformed) in this entire thread and/or why and how would that benefit creators?

user

a year ago

[deleted]

choo-t

a year ago

other sources of revenue exist, lot of creators get their revenue through donation, either one time or recurring (monthly, yearly, by release).

On another level, we could pivot to UBI instead of dedicating ressource to enforce fake scarcity.

johnnyanmac

a year ago

> lot of creators get their revenue through donation, either one time or recurring

I keep hearing this, but I have yet to see one person truly live off of donations. Patreon is backed by expecting services in return, so most Patreons are definitely not donations.

It is probably possible, but only for people making funds that are already at points many would call "wealthy".

>we could pivot to UBI instead of dedicating ressource to enforce fake scarcity.

I'm all for UBI. But I don't even see that in much talks in the US, just a few tests by private companies (how very American). Might as well have short term ways to survive while just blueskying entire economic models.

Wytwwww

a year ago

> other sources of revenue exist > revenue through donation

So what? Not everyone wants to engage in all of the PR/marketing stuff that's necessary to make any money from that and it would still generally result in significantly lower revenue.

> On another level, we could pivot to UBI instead of dedicating

And fund it how exactly? Even if that were sustainable why do you think that content creators should be fully content living of UBI + a few pennies in donations while people working in most other industries should be able to money the same way they previously did?

IP protection (even if often implemented in a suboptimal way which of course should be improved) have been one of the primaries force behind human progress over that last 300+ years.

choo-t

a year ago

> Not everyone wants to engage in all of the PR/marketing stuff that's necessary to make any money from that

That's not a difference, PR/Marketing is already used to profit over IP work.

> Even if that were sustainable why do you think that content creators should be fully content living of UBI + a few pennies in donations while people working in most other industries should be able to money the same way they previously did?

This is assuming creators are fully content on how stuff work now, and I'm betting that's not the case for the vast majority, most of them cannot make end meets with the current system, regardless of how hard they work on their book/song/game/etc, and they have to have a side job just to put food on the table.

> IP protection (even if often implemented in a suboptimal way which of course should be improved) have been one of the primaries force behind human progress over that last 300+ years.

That's a bold claim. Most of, if not all, human progress on this period is directly attributable to the use of fossil fuel, from the steam engine to the modern use of it, and how it empowered us to do so much more with less human-hour.

boltzmann-brain

a year ago

Indeed, people didn't invent the telephone, television, or typewriter because they thought "wow this would be a great payout for the next 20-80 years for me and my subsequent heirs, let me invent something useful", they did it because they needed a telephone, television, or typewriter, and one didn't exist yet.

Wytwwww

a year ago

Unless this is sarcasm, you base these claim on what exactly? Inventors in the late 1800s were often notoriously litigious and highly motivated by the fact that they could profit from their inventions through patents.

The alternative option would have meant that individuals would have had to spend significant amounts of time and resources to "invent" new products, and the only ones to profit would be the companies that had the capacity to manufacture them (while keeping all of the profits for themselves). Does that seem like an environment that's highly conducive to innovation?

> they did it because they needed a telephone,

There is a pretty extensive section named "The race to the patent office" on Graham Bell's Wikipedia page.

Do you think Watt would have successful at building his steam engine had there been no patents that allowed him to attract investors? Or he would have just spent all of his live working as an engineer or a surveyor because he couldn't have afford the significant capital required to develop the engine?

boltzmann-brain

a year ago

> Does that seem like an environment that's highly conducive to innovation?

people invent stuff and put it out in the public domain every day, not everyone is a robber baron. look at youtube or hackaday one day, maybe you'll learn something.

Wytwwww

a year ago

That's certainly a rational, well thought out and deep argument. Never thought it about it this way...

boltzmann-brain

a year ago

> And fund it how exactly?

The work necessary to properly answer this question is a team of 100+ domain experts working for at least 5 years. There's no way you're getting a good answer to this question in a comment thread on a website for programmers. Why even ask that question - what value do you expect out of the responses?

Wytwwww

a year ago

> what value do you expect out of the responses

Why even make that argument in the first place then? It's the equivalent (following your logic) of saying that "it would be nice if we were living in an utopian society with no material scarcity" which doesn't mean much unless you can at least provide some explanation of how we should get there.

> The work necessary to properly answer this question is a team of 100+ domain experts working for at least 5 years.

I don't think we live in a video game where you can just spend "research points" to develop new economic systems that somehow magically improve economic productivity and solve complex socio-economical problems?

choo-t

a year ago

> Why even make that argument in the first place then?

Making an argument doesn't require to describe every step to it, if I told you could use your GPS to navigate to work, you're not gonna ask me how to launch a satellite in space.

> It's the equivalent (following your logic) of saying that "it would be nice if we were living in an utopian society with no material scarcity"

Copyright have nothing to do with material scarcity, neither does UBI, that is about money, a man made social construct, not a material thing.

boltzmann-brain

a year ago

exactly as you say, an argument for UBI doesn't necessarily need to mean retreading the whole history of UBI designs and legislatures, it just means someone would like to UBI exist without necessarily having to be an expert on how to implement it. I wanted to eat some sushi today and I didn't start questioning myself "well how would you evolve sushi rice starting with a wild rice cultivar", i just went to the store and bought it and now i'm fine. there are experts for that sort of thing and I leave it up to them. I guess if someone doesn't realize there are experts for topics then that betrays they think they are an expert with everything.

Wytwwww

a year ago

> just means someone would like to UBI exist without necessarily having to be an expert on how to implement

I would like eco-friendly flying cars to exist so that I could avoid traffic in the morning, I think that would solve all the mass transit and infrastructure problems in major cities.

No clue how to build one but I'm sure that 500 experts should be able to accomplish it if they really tried it. Until they do that nobody is allowed to question the validity of this universal solution to all transportation related problems that humanity is facing.

wilsonnb3

a year ago

It's reasonable to expect people who advocate for policy to have some idea of how they want it to be implemented.

boltzmann-brain

a year ago

no, i can advocate for having public rail without knowing how to lay track, how to fund it, or how to run the schedules. i can also advocate for photovoltaics and heat pumps getting funded, and i can advocate for health care reform without even knowing where that reform would go, just by knowing that the current state of the health care system is bad. there's no burden of proof when stating a preference.

themaninthedark

a year ago

If you are advocating for a position, with no idea of how to implement that position is implemented then you are just increasing the noise.

It is all fine and well to say "We should have public rail" but with out any idea of how it should be implemented and what it will take to get there, the idea falls flat on it's face. You have to be able to support it with funding increases and possibly eminent domain.

If you advocate for healthcare reform, great! So do I! And since you have no preference about how and what shape the reforms should take, you agree with me that we should abolish all health insurance companies! That would definitely reform the system but you might not like the outcome.

A large number of our current issues come from law and policy that was passed to address issues of the day with no understanding of how or why things were happening. Let's not continue that trend.

MaxBarraclough

a year ago

What do you say to people who want to stop using Open Source software licences and instead use 'Fair Source' licences intended to prevent cloud companies monetising the works of others?

For instance, here's discussion about a blog post titled So you want to compete with or replace open source https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40993787

With no copyright, it would be akin to using permissive BSD-style licensing, which is by no means everyone's preference.

boltzmann-brain

a year ago

Good for them. Free Software is much too easy to abuse, and we need something that provides additional protections.

MaxBarraclough

a year ago

Sounds like you believe copyright can serve a legitimate purpose then.

I presume you don't hold that IP is an obsolete idea of a bygone century, as ysofunny put it.

user

a year ago

[deleted]

snapcaster

a year ago

I don't agree with them, but i haven't seen the argument being pro scarcity. To steelman it, the argument is that without these protections the incentive to create is lower so we actually will have more scarcity

boltzmann-brain

a year ago

Without the ability to use asbestos, the incentive to build houses is lower, so we actually will have less houses.

snapcaster

a year ago

That analogy doesn't map because asbestos wasn't part of the incentive structure just one of many materials

dclowd9901

a year ago

If it was really about IP, they wouldn’t be going after emulators, they’d be going after rom distributors. It’s not like there’s some secret special industry secret aspect to their 8 year old hardware.

There’s IP protections and then there’s whatever this is.

chefandy

a year ago

It's just a matter of strategy— their goal is to get people to buy the game who might otherwise use an emulated copy. They aren't doing it for the principle— It's a sale in their pocket and avoids downward pressure on their price from cheaper (free) sources. Agree with their actions or not, attacking the tiny mechanism that makes all roms useful is far more efficient than trying to whack-a-mole with a bazillion ROM sources forever.

Even intimidating ROM sites out of existence only means they'll get distributed elsewhere. It's much harder to run an open source dev project in secret than it is to seed a huge library of ROMS over BT.

ls612

a year ago

Back before the computer era it was the case that once you bought a product the IP rights to it were extinguished and you could do whatever you wanted with it except distribute copies. The end of that combined with ubiquitous internet and decent TPMs that aren’t riddled with vulnerabilities effectively heralds the end of private property, or at least private property that involves electricity in its function.

pdntspa

a year ago

> You can't ignore the entire idea of intellectual property

Yes you can, if you are someplace out of reach of the law.

joquarky

a year ago

IP is unnatural. No other arguments needed

altruios

a year ago

I can run legally an mp3 through a calculator. No one can dictate otherwise - it's my machine, and purchased media to do with as I (privately) please. This does not interfere with copyright. To legislate otherwise would be insane - as that would effectively legislate your ability to calculate.

This argument extends to any purchased media, to any program.

wilsonnb3

a year ago

If your mp3 is copy protected and your calculator bypasses that copy protection, it is in fact illegal (in the US)

altruios

a year ago

Such a translation would be "format shifting" which is protected under US/UK law (IANAL).

kevin_thibedeau

a year ago

The US AHRA requires serial copy management (SCMS or an equivalent) when using format shifting to digital media. Nobody bothers to follow that part of the law and it seems to have never been enforced.

wilsonnb3

a year ago

I think you are correct in the case of an actual MP3 file and calculator.

I was thinking they were metaphorical.

altruios

a year ago

Not just a mp3 file. any media you have purchased can be format shifted by you for archive/personal purposes. regardless of DRM/copy protections. What is illegal is redistribution (thus the copyright).

Again: ianal. But this is kind of a fundamental right. If you own something, it's yours to do with privately as you wish. If you don't own the copyright, then you can't redistribute.

zerocrates

a year ago

The DMCA makes breaking DRM illegal, even when done for fair use purposes, if it doesn't fall into a small number of tightly-defined exceptions. And they can go after tools that enable people to do this, as well (think of DeCSS for example).

textadventure

a year ago

There is no such thing as an mp3 being copy protected. A game on a cartridge is not "copy protected" either.

johnnyanmac

a year ago

>Copy protection, also known as content protection, copy prevention and copy restriction, is any measure to enforce copyright by preventing the reproduction of software, films, music, and other media.

I don't see much point in making the theoretical argument of "nothing is unhackable". The point of protection isn't to make some absolute defense, it's to mitigate low effort thieves. Any house can bypass a lock by using a cheap hammer on a window, but I'd still call a house lock a "lock".

karmajunkie

a year ago

unless i’m mistaken, nobody is telling you what to do with your media.

the issue at play here would be whether the emulator publishers/developers have the right to publish what is almost certainly an infringing piece of software, which courts have repeatedly determined they do not.

eptcyka

a year ago

How is an emulator infringing on the copyrights of Nintendo?

wilsonnb3

a year ago

While an emulator does not infringe on copyright and is illegal per US court precedence, an emulator being available is a large part of what makes copyright infringement popular and as such it is related.

Adding in the DMCAs anti-circumvention provisions and the fact that you have to violate them to emulate a modern console, the whole thing becomes very nuanced and tightly linked to copyright infringement despite not directly infringing.

Brian_K_White

a year ago

Explaining that emulators can be used in concert with copyright infringement does not explain what right a copyright holder has over emulators.

That merely explains why Nintendo doesn't like them, not why anyone should care that they don't like them.

Cars may be used to commit bank robberies, yet banks have no rights over cars.

wilsonnb3

a year ago

> That merely explains why Nintendo doesn't like them, not why anyone should care that they don't like them

I don't think it has been tested in courts yet but the general idea is that you have to violate the DMCA to use a switch emulator, so people making switch emulators are making tools to help people circumvent the switch's copy protection.

Which is also a violation of the DMCA.

Like I said, it is nuanced.

consteval

a year ago

It's more nuanced than this, because we need to acknowledge the real world and how those products are actually used.

> Cars may be used to commit bank robberies, yet banks have no rights over cars

Sure, but if said car had specific bank-robbing help built in, like say some magic device that immediately opens a bank safe, then the bank probably could sue.

FMecha

a year ago

>While an emulator does not infringe on copyright and is illegal per US court precedence

At least until Nintendo manages to overturn Sony v. Connectix, given recent SCOTUS trends.

ApolloFortyNine

a year ago

Emulating consoles that are no longer sold makes some sense.

Emulating a console that already exists just feels wrong. Even if technically in the right.

And it's hard to ignore, even when the emulator is in the right, 100% legal, 99.99% of people will simply be pirating their roms.

craftkiller

a year ago

Well if we're going to dive into morality, requiring me to produce additional pollution and e-waste to run your program when I have a perfectly capable turing machine already is unconscionable.

Nintendo: Put your games on steam. Let me buy them without killing the planet.

Apple: License your damn operating system for running on non-apple hardware. Hell, just let me legally run it in an virtual machine so I can test my scripts on your OS without killing the planet.

mightyham

a year ago

Nintendo's primary competitive advantage in the gaming space is it's expertise in hardware and tight integration of self-published games. Nintendo would have to fundamentally change it's business model and alter the design of their games (and consequently the unique appeal of them) in order to fit your demand.

You are right about Apple though, simply allowing people to install their OS on other hardware for personal use would not impact their market strategy in any significant way.

boltzmann-brain

a year ago

> Nintendo would have to fundamentally change it's business model and alter the design of their games

it's all C++, dude. Most of the time it's all based on engines that already run on Windows. So what are you telling me, programmers are unable to port minor amounts code over to a different, vastly more powerful architecture? This sounds like some sort of incompetence olympics.

consteval

a year ago

It's not that, it's that the experience wouldn't be the same or of the same quality so it would hurt Nintendo's image.

You can run a Wii game on not a Wii. But if you're not standing in your living room with a Wii remote, then you're not playing the game as it was intended. You might have a shitty experience and that reflects badly on Nintendo.

Same for something like a DS. Yes, you can emulate a DS on something that is not "dual screen". But the form factor, dual screen, and stylus is integral to the game's experience.

Nintendo isn't like Microsoft or Sony. Thier games really lean into the hardware and rely on it, and it does genuinely allow for a unique experience.

mightyham

a year ago

You don't seem to understand what I'm saying because obviously it's technically feasible for Nintendo to port their games. The fact that they own the hardware platform their games are run on though, fundamentally changes Nintendo's approach to designing games. And considering how successful the buissness is, clearly people like what Nintendo is making. It has nothing to do with incompetence and everything to do with the fact that they have found a niche in the gaming market, which means they can't and shouldn't try using the same business strategies as a normal game studio.

boltzmann-brain

a year ago

yes, i'm sure you're privy to the internal business dealings and strategy at nintendo and can speak authoratitavely as to how and why they make certain internal choices.

craftkiller

a year ago

I'd argue the success of the switch emulators proves their games can be successful without changes in the PC space. I'd certainly agree with you when it came to Wii-era games since that had the unusual controller[0] but the switch is a pretty standard controller.

[0] Which they could have sold as first-party PC accessories, further capitalizing on the PC market

johnnyanmac

a year ago

> the success of the switch emulators

you mean the success of a decade of unpaid labor which has the free time to reverse engineer and iterate on the tech with no regards for regulation, business demands, and a higher quality bar compared to some FOSS-ish tech?

I'd hope a forum like this would understand that the things and time you get for hobby projects is far different from working for a business. It couldn't work because Nintendo has a much larger target on its head for the tech being used compared to a small group of hackers with little to no money to sue for.

themaninthedark

a year ago

I am not an Apple fan at all but I would say that Apple tries to run their business similar to Nintendo, a tightly polished OS tied to hardware. I say tries as it appears to me that their quality has dropped since the death of Steve.

To your parent; >Well if we're going to dive into morality, requiring me to produce additional pollution and e-waste to run your program when I have a perfectly capable turing machine already is unconscionable.

No one is requiring you to buy Apple OS or Nintendo games.

wilsonnb3

a year ago

> Well if we're going to dive into morality, requiring me to produce additional pollution and e-waste to run your program when I have a perfectly capable turing machine already is unconscionable.

This is not obvious to me - I would be interested in reading more about the ethical considerations here, if you or anyone else has any good links.

craftkiller

a year ago

Links for what? The environmental damage of producing electronics?

- Apple has a report for the environmental impact of an iphone, 81% of the carbon emissions is from the production of the device [0]

- In addition to the whole global warming thing, there's the health impact [1].

So here I am, typing this message out on a perfectly capable universal turing machine. But in order to run <nintendo game> I have to incur that 81% carbon emissions again to buy a different universal turing machine from Nintendo. One that will, after a few years, get thrown into the back of a closet where it will accumulate dust until one day I haul it down to electronics recycling where it can continue its journey poisoning the children.

Its a simple matter of 1 device is less bad than 2.

    [0] https://www.apple.com/environment/pdf/products/iphone/iPhone_13_PER_Sept2021.pdf
    [1] https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/electronic-waste-(e-waste)

wilsonnb3

a year ago

I was hoping for a more holistic analysis about nintendos business model, the environmental impact, and how the purchasers choice to not buy Nintendos hardware and software fits in. But it is interesting food for thought nonetheless.

johnnyanmac

a year ago

> requiring me to produce additional pollution and e-waste to run your program when I have a perfectly capable turing machine already is unconscionable

The waste of all 150m Nintendo Switches in production isn't eve a fraction of the actual worst environmental impacts of current society.

>Nintendo: Put your games on steam.

Why is it only now that it's "consiousable" to tell a business how to operate? Especially in conjunction to yet another, private, business?

If I don't like a business or their model, I simply don't deal with them. As I have with Apple for all my life. Neither Nintendo nor Apple are monopolies in their respective markets.

ndriscoll

a year ago

It's not only now. Product tying has been considered a bad thing for a long time. Console "exclusives" are pretty much the definition of tying. Why are businesses suddenly given unlimited leeway with anticompetitive practices (e.g. preventing anyone from offering a switch-compatible device with better frame rates/resolution) once copyright is involved? Emulators demonstrate that it's not a technology constraint causing market failures.

You should be able to buy a switch compatible device from e.g. Asus if you're not satisfied with Nintendo's hardware. Tying media to the device is just as absurd as requiring Sony speakers to listen to music from artists that signed with them or requiring a Disney television to watch sports.

DCH3416

a year ago

I disagree. In my case I want to play some of my legally acquired games in ways that were not possible on the original hardware. High FPS, widescreen support, VR, mods. I also want to play my games in a way that's convenient for me, like not having to hook up my console over its own dedicated HDMI. There's more to emulation than just piracy, it opens up a whole field of possibilities for the software.

johnnyanmac

a year ago

> In my case I want to play some of my legally acquired games in ways that were not possible on the original hardware.

And I want Sony to not ignore its entire back catalog that made them successful in the first place instead of seeing one IP bomb and saying "well we have no IPs". But I don't have anymore control over that than you do.

Life is all about compromises. That's why multiple teams of ex-Sony devs chose to make their own IP instead of playing hardball with Sony

boltzmann-brain

a year ago

I'd say it's morally more important for me to be able to run my games at framerates that don't make me nauseous and/or give me epilepsy as opposed to some overbearing company taking away my basic ownership rights in order to squeeze another nickel out of me.

NotPractical

a year ago

Even so, there is no difference between games from the 80s and games released last week from the perspective of copyright law, which usually works in Nintendo's favor.

FactKnower69

a year ago

>Emulating a console that already exists just feels wrong.

feelings aren't real, you can do whatever you want in this life! :)

cubefox

a year ago

> ultimately this is just another corporation trying to disturb people in their ownership of their purchased property, in specific video games.

Is it reasonable to assume the majority of Ryujinx users merely emulate Switch games they legally own? That only a minority uses the emulator to play pirated Switch games?

boltzmann-brain

a year ago

Yes, because the counter point to that reduces to "criminals do crime" and that is never a good argument against the personal rights of the smallest, lest powerful, most vulnerable, and most disenfranchised unit in the legal system, the private person.

cubefox

a year ago

The private person is vulnerable because he maybe can't use an emulator and need to buy a Switch instead?

boltzmann-brain

a year ago

no one ever said that, stop derailing arguments. this is bs.

cubefox

a year ago

So why specifically is the private person vulnerable in this case?

doctorpangloss

a year ago

I don’t know why you are being downvoted. Of course emulators are being used to play pirated games.

cheeze

a year ago

Yeah. It's a bummer because I actually own the games and just want to play them at 4k60 rather than on the weak HW of the Switch. But I understand why Nintendo would target emulators of a _current gen console_.

To say that this is solely an attack on law abiding folks who own the game is... being willfully ignorant because you don't want to accept that a large percentage of installs are doing so for piracy.

Ajedi32

a year ago

Of course it's not solely an attack on law abiding folks who own the game. But is is an attack on them nonetheless. Its also an attack on open source, software freedom, and digital preservation. Further, assuming there were legal threats involved, its an abuse of the legal system to harass open source developers working on perfectly legal software. Emulators are also direct competition to Nintendo's hardware, so you could see this as an anti-competitive move as well. There are lots of problems with this, and they're only mostly Nintendo's fault.

ethbr1

a year ago

It's also important to remember that emulators exist without ROMs.

All the code that's in an emulator isn't infringing on any Nintendo's IP -- it's re-implementing Nintendo's hardware interface.

That it can be used to make piracy easier is unfortunately, but isn't really the emulator developers' concern, given...

There are substantial, legal, non-infringing uses.

In most legal jurisdictions, thankfully you can't ban something useful just because it might be used to commit a crime.

cubefox

a year ago

But what if it is mainly used to commit a crime?

FactKnower69

a year ago

playing video games is a CRIME against hard working RIGHTS HOLDERS

cubefox

a year ago

You mean pirating video games is a crime against hard working video game developers.

doctorpangloss

a year ago

This is the same as saying that most of the money can only be earned by Fortnite. Surely you see that the status quo has given you much worse, not better, games?

consteval

a year ago

It's not unusual for law-abiding folks to be collateral damage for criminal activity.

One example I saw recently on here: locking up stuff in supermarkets. It sucks for real consumers because now they have to go out of their way to buy a razor. But it's intended to discourage theft.

The difference is that that is even worse, IMO, since the vast majority of people affected are real customers. For this switch emulator I'm not sure this is the case - I'd say the vast majority are people pirating.

Ajedi32

a year ago

This isn't collateral damage though; Ryujinx's developers (read: "law-abiding folks") were the target of this attack by Nintendo. That piracy may be impacted as a result is incidental.

consteval

a year ago

I would argue that while the developers where the de-facto targets, the true targets are individuals who pirate. However, they're too plentiful and too anonymous to pursue. So, instead, innocent people were targeted.

This, to me, aligns with what we see with many measures, like locking up razor blades. The thiefs are the true target, but they're hard to sift out. So we target the average consumer in practice, who is innocent. They become collateral.

It's a difficult problem because there are both innocent people and actual economic harm being done, and we really need to resolve both of those. Technology helps a lot with this, I mean this is essentially why DRM exists. Yes DRM is sucky, but DRM also allows you to have media on your devices at all. Otherwise, it wouldn't be economically viable, and it would be pulled across the board.

wilsonnb3

a year ago

I feel like the blame mostly lies on people who pirate games. It's a sort of tragedy of the commons. We could have a better world (Nintendo not caring if we play switch games we bought at 4k60 on a PC) but people who pirate games mucked it up.

boltzmann-brain

a year ago

Downloading files is mostly used for piracy. At some point, 70% of all internet was used for torrents and nothing else. Are you trying to tell me the internet should have been shut down?

cubefox

a year ago

Analogous question: At what percentage of uses for crime should guns be banned?

pokerface_86

a year ago

false equivalence, guns kill people, piracy doesn’t

cubefox

a year ago

Analogous question: At what percentage of uses for crime should train ticket copy machines be banned?

pokerface_86

a year ago

i’m okay with them not being banned? i don’t really give a shit if municipalities and train companies lose money

consteval

a year ago

The problem is that this breaks down very fast. You would eventually care, when those people can no longer operate and then you're affected, i.e. this is a problem of selfishness.

People pirating Nintendo games AND people playing Nintendo games DO care - when Nintendo no longer makes money and there's no more games to play. And I know they care, because they're playing and love the games right now. So it is their problem, regardless of what they say. Their very actions prove it's their problem.

cubefox

a year ago

You would give "a shit" if you relied on the train and the company closed down. Certainly the people that do, do.

pokerface_86

a year ago

i don’t, i use my car. no need for a train. until we have high speed rail on the level of japan across the continental US, i have no interest in seeing trains succeed

cubefox

a year ago

There is this thing called "ethics"...

boltzmann-brain

a year ago

"criminals will do crime" is a crappy argument for making the lives of law abiding citizens considerably worse.

cubefox

a year ago

Not sure if not being able to play Zelda at 4k60 is making life considerably worse.

ksec

a year ago

>Yeah. It's a bummer because I actually own the games and just want to play them at 4k60 rather than on the weak HW of the Switch. But I understand why Nintendo would target emulators of a _current gen console_.

People here are either pro open source and nothing should be copyrighted or patented, on the other end where company has the right to do what ever it want.

This comment finally has someone hitting the middle ground somewhere.

johnnyanmac

a year ago

>disturb people in their ownership of their purchased property

It's a nice utopic view, but I'd be surprised if more than 10% of the games emulated are also owned by the user. I'd be surprised if more than half the people using emulators ever owned a Switch to begin with.

>Anyone who really thinks about this topic will start questioning why some company located on an island on the other side of the world should be dictating what I do or don't do with a cartridge or disc I paid for with my own money and which is in my possession.

They don't really. If you made Ryujinx or Yuzu and kept it to yourself and maybe a few close friends, they'd never know nor care. But things get complicated when you post it on the public internet.

>This is why it's important to claw back as much ownership in that space as possible. If you want things to move in the right direction, you should sign https://www.stopkillinggames.com/eci if you're an EU citizen, or support them in any other way if you're not.

I dont think even the EU wants to touch the matter of emulation. Precisely because they may discover many emulator users are pirates.

doctorpangloss

a year ago

Apple doesn’t need any laws to enforce the following:

- you can’t pirate App Store IAP

- you can’t pirate Apple News

- you can’t pirate Apple Arcade

- you can’t pirate iCloud storage and you can’t upgrade phone storage space from anyone but Apple, and therefore the amount of data you can practicably store in the iOS ecosystem

- it’s impracticable to pirate App Store apps

Okay, that’s like 90% of Apple services revenue.

Is Apple the only company allowed to make money? That’s kind of what your position is: “the only permissible limitations are the ones that cannot be surmounted technologically.” Why should the law be toothless in copyright protections, but not in other things? Because that is a Pro Apple position in disguise.

Brian_K_White

a year ago

The law should have teeth and should say that DRM is actually illegal, or at the very least that circumventing it is legal.

No matter how ludicrously long Disney manages to get copyright terms extended to, copyright does still expire, and there are even other exceptions such accessibility and military and emergency usage that trump copyright.

But encryption never expires and does not care if it would save someones life to use some product in some unusual situation, so, it should either be illegal to sell an encrypted audiobook that can never be decrypted even 100 years later when it is public domain, or at the very least, if it is to be legal to produce such a thing, then the trade-off is it is at least legal for anyone else to try to overcome it.

How could drm risk anyone's life? I don't know but it isn't just protecting a movie from playing, it's baked into the hardware of devices and makes the entire device non-functional, like HDCP making a display not-display.

Maybe a pdf has critical emergency information like how to sanitize water during an natural disater or war, or identify if a berry is safe or poisonous, but the only pdf you have happened to come from an expensive college course so you can't read it. Contrived examples will always sound contrived and dismissable but no particular example matters. The principle holds even without any examples. If a tv can fail to tv, then forget about if tvs are important, what matters is a tool can be arbitrarily and artificially rendered non-functional.

The law should absolutely have teeth, but it should say something other than what it currently does, and have the teeth to enforce that.

boltzmann-brain

a year ago

> encryption never expires and does not care

wow, I never thought about it this way. Amazing point. Thanks.

> How could drm risk anyone's life?

- medical software - firmware on medical devices, eg people's vision implants are being turned off remotely, as well as anti-epilepsy implants, iirc - train you're taking to hospital has been turned off (trains being remotely disabled via DRM happened in Poland recently) - heated seats unable to provide warmth because you don't own DRM for a car long after the DRM servers have been shut down and copyright has lapsed. Or just because the DRM server is down right now - you get in your car to go to hospital and can't, because e.g. you bought a Fisker car which now doesn't start due to a DRM server that doesn't exist anymore after the company went bankrupt - pretty much the same thing with other EVs when they're outside of mobile network range. You have a car that works and could get you to safety, but instead you expire in the desert, and the thing doesn't even have a tank full of water you could drink - inability to repair medical devices makes them non-functional because any code fixes you could do via a disassembler are fully rpevented with DRM and TPMs - your juice press won't take your fruit pack because it's not DRM'd by them and so you die of thirst - your water fountain won't produce water because the water (!!) wasn't DRM'd, or because the server is just gone - you want to call someone for help via wifi but you're unable to because the app won't work on a jailbroken device due to DRM - you are strongly autistic and you are anchored to a specific piece of media to calm you down, and the DRM somehow becomes broken and now you can't watch that anymore and suddenly your quality of life deteriorates. you refuse to ingest foods and wither away in a hospital due to DRM

I could go on, but you get the gist. NONE of those trajectories will apply to EVERYONE, but once everything that uses electricity has DRM in it, the impact on the general population will be significant.

johnnyanmac

a year ago

>he law should have teeth and should say that DRM is actually illegal, or at the very least that circumventing it is legal.

They law literally emboldened DRM. We'll see if the politics of the next generation changes that, but I don't see it happening in my lifetime that the US will just allow the consumer to legally copy software that does not want to be copied by the individual.

>encryption never expires and does not care if it would save someones life to use some product in some unusual situation, so, it should either be illegal to sell an encrypted audiobook that can never be decrypted even 100 years later when it is public domain, or at the very least, if it is to be legal to produce such a thing, then the trade-off is it is at least legal for anyone else to try to overcome it.

If encryption was that vacuum tight, we wouldn't see constant progress in cryptography. It's the generation ship paradox: what may take us 100 years to break with currently known knowledge may take someone next decade a month.

doctorpangloss

a year ago

DRM isn’t the reason it is impracticable to pirate their IP. If you pirate Apple News, your iCloud account gets banned and your photos go poof. They could decide that your iPhone should stop working. It’s a networked device. Your position strengthens the power of network owners and weakens yours, ironically, in all the ways that matter.

user

a year ago

[deleted]

ChrisRR

a year ago

> purchased property

Remember the distinction here is that the property is the licence to use the software, not a physical item. It confuses the discussion of what can and can't be done

Narhem

a year ago

Could be an organization issue, when I think of a Nintendo Switch it should be organized under Bh not Gh. Especially with an emulator which doesn’t get updates from Nintendo.

m3kw9

a year ago

The emulator can play 99% of the games, talk about closing the barn doors after..

hypeatei

a year ago

New update (from discord):

> Yesterday, gdkchan was contacted by Nintendo and offered an agreement to stop working on the project, remove the organization and all related assets he's in control of. While awaiting confirmation on whether he would take this agreement, the organization has been removed, so I think it's safe to say what the outcome is. Rather than leave you with only panic and speculation, I decided to write this short message to give some closure.

...

gnarbarian

a year ago

this is why centralized "free" services like discord and github are a big risk to projects that exist in a legal gray area.

hard to beat a physical server you own in a data center you have a contract with.

ambyra

a year ago

Does anybody know where they are mirrors for the source and builds?

user

a year ago

[deleted]

mrfinn

a year ago

Yet another chapter of Nintendo's wrath against the people? How long the world is going to be dominated by absurd copy(made up)right laws?

PS. Even if that wouldn't be the case here, my POV stands. Current copy(made up)right laws don't even make tiny-little sense nowadays. FREEDOM NOW FOR HUMAN KNOWLEDGE once for all FGS.

numpad0

a year ago

I think:

- Nintendo was probably _always_ like that, since 80s or 40s or however long ago: they were merely dormant outside the home country due to the famously enormous language barrier.

- Hypothetical defanged Nintendo that isn't like that probably holds little value: even Microsoft with -1 hardcoded as budget ceiling had been successful at forcing Nintendo into obsolescence. This suggests that Nintendo "being like that" is an advantage in itself.

dfxm12

a year ago

Not sure about the 80s, but off the top of my head, there is clear evidence in the early 90s with lawsuits against both Galoob (game genie) and Atari (Tengen games without the 10NES chip).

Sakos

a year ago

This is absolutely the case considering their insane lawsuit on Palworld, which is a patent dispute. Nintendo has clearly turned evil and this is only going to cause great harm and strife in the gaming industry long-term if they win. We've been largely free of patent trolling in gaming aside from the lawsuits against hardware technologies like vibration (which is itself insanity and harmful), but this would open the flood gates.

bitwize

a year ago

> Nintendo has clearly turned evil

Astronaut 2: Always has been.

See: Nintendo v. Galoob, Atari and Tengen v. Nintendo, their predatory in general business practices throughout the NES era.

Just because Shigeru Miyamoto flashes his friendly Austin Powers grin and opens up another world of wonder playable on your Switch doesn't mean that the company doesn't or never had a dark side. Hell, the man himself cancelled StarFox 2 to pillage its 3D transform code for use in Super Mario 64.

gs17

a year ago

> Nintendo has clearly turned evil

They've been roughly like this for a long time. They're very protective of their IP.

7734128

a year ago

Nintendo have been absolute monsters for a long time. The only thing preventing people from realizing this is the cognitive dissonance between their cute games and their evil behavior.

radicalbyte

a year ago

I am strongly reconsidering buying a Switch 2 now. This is absolutely disgusting from Nintendo.

cooper_ganglia

a year ago

Nintendo's behavior recently has guaranteed that I will never purchase another Nintendo product ever again. I'm exclusively pirating their games from now on, lol

zzo38computer

a year ago

I don't purchase Nintendo products either (except for the flower cards which I have purchased once, and they are of good quality), but I think that modifications of some games for Nintendo systems are of better quality than the original official games anyways, so it is generally the modified versions of the games that I will pirate instead.

Janicc

a year ago

It's always morally correct to pirate Nintendo Games.

EasyMark

a year ago

Don’t buy it, put money towards a PC system or card. I’m done with Nintendo after this. It takes a lot to make me skip out on Mario, but in the end Nintendo burned through all of my nostalgia for them from my childhood

pezezin

a year ago

Have you been living under a rock? Nintendo has been like this since the NES days.

komali2

a year ago

Me as well though I may try to get a day 1 switch 2 to never update to keep around for trying to hack. Might be able to contribute to getting an emulator out ASAP for it :)

givinguflac

a year ago

Darn. I finally got pop os working the way I like and was about to set up my emulation stuff this weekend. Now Nintendo has successfully stopped me forever! /s

giancarlostoro

a year ago

The only thing they've guaranteed is that I'll never buy another one of their consoles or games again. For context I only buy PC and Nintendo.

richard___

a year ago

[flagged]

textadventure

a year ago

That probably applies to like 90% of posts here.

EasyMark

a year ago

Why not scroll on past then? Most posts here are technical or fairly specific, do you come to all the article comments and say they are irrelevant?

tightbookkeeper

a year ago

Hope nothing happens to anything you have an interest in.