notamy
9 hours 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.
boltzmann-brain
8 hours 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
8 hours 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
8 hours 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.
EMIRELADERO
8 hours 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
8 hours ago
Thanks to the DMCA's anti circumvention provisions, it is sort of about copyright
ls612
5 hours 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
8 hours ago
Okay, so how do you plug a proprietary Switch cart into a PC to play your “already-existing copy” on an emulator?
chewmieser
8 hours ago
MIG Flash Dumper
naikrovek
6 hours 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
4 hours 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
3 hours 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
7 hours 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
7 hours ago
You can play your backup on the emulator, and you can even make these backup through a modded Switch.
jachee
4 hours 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.
boltzmann-brain
an hour ago
Not in light of IP law which is what you're arguing about unknowledgably.
devmor
8 hours ago
There have been tools built to do this, which Nintendo abused IP law to shut down.
sim7c00
8 hours 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
7 hours 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
7 hours ago
It's how the DMCA works though, if the media has any DRM on it.
DrillShopper
7 hours 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
7 hours 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
3 hours 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
7 hours 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
7 hours 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.
boltzmann-brain
an hour 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.
roywiggins
7 hours 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...
roywiggins
7 hours ago
Well maybe, if you have the time and the money to make a fair use defense in court...
johnnyanmac
6 hours 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
an hour 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.
roywiggins
5 hours ago
The LoC can issue exemptions, sort of, but it has to be renewed every three years, and they don't actually apply to circumvention devices themselves, only to users.
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/10/victory-users-libraria...
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/11/new-dmca-ss1201-exempt...
pjmlp
7 hours ago
That is exactly why on some countries there is an additional copy tax on that stuff.
anthk
7 hours 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
6 hours 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
6 hours ago
And France, Germany, and a couple of others.
johnnyanmac
6 hours 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.
wilsonnb3
7 hours 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
7 hours 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
6 hours 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
6 hours 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
5 hours 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.
boltzmann-brain
an hour ago
You better not have a tool in your pocket that lets you make unregulated digital copies of any copyrighted document, movie, or song
naikrovek
6 hours 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
5 hours ago
> and game dumping.
Your argument is that legally purchasing a game and playing that in an emulator is piracy?
naikrovek
5 hours 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
2 hours 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.
amlib
3 hours 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
3 hours 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
2 hours 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.
roywiggins
7 hours 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.
ysofunny
7 hours 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
7 hours 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
6 hours 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
5 hours ago
Convenient streaming services do not pay musicians a living wage for their work. It's basically still ripping them off.
johnnyanmac
3 hours 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.
ysofunny
2 hours 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
7 hours 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
3 hours 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
6 hours 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
5 hours 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.
johnnyanmac
3 hours 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.
choo-t
7 hours 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
3 hours 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
6 hours 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
5 hours 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.
MaxBarraclough
7 hours 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.
snapcaster
7 hours 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
ls612
4 minutes 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.
ApolloFortyNine
7 hours 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
6 hours 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
6 hours 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.
craftkiller
5 hours 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
3 hours 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.
johnnyanmac
3 hours 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
2 hours 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.
wilsonnb3
5 hours 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
5 hours 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
4 hours 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.
DCH3416
6 hours 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
3 hours 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
NotPractical
6 hours 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
3 hours ago
>Emulating a console that already exists just feels wrong.
feelings aren't real, you can do whatever you want in this life! :)
altruios
8 hours 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
8 hours ago
If your mp3 is copy protected and your calculator bypasses that copy protection, it is in fact illegal (in the US)
altruios
7 hours ago
Such a translation would be "format shifting" which is protected under US/UK law (IANAL).
kevin_thibedeau
7 hours 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
7 hours ago
I think you are correct in the case of an actual MP3 file and calculator.
I was thinking they were metaphorical.
altruios
7 hours 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
7 hours 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
7 hours ago
There is no such thing as an mp3 being copy protected. A game on a cartridge is not "copy protected" either.
johnnyanmac
3 hours 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
8 hours 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
7 hours ago
How is an emulator infringing on the copyrights of Nintendo?
wilsonnb3
7 hours 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
6 hours 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
5 hours 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.
FMecha
7 hours 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.
johnnyanmac
6 hours 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
7 hours 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
6 hours 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.
johnnyanmac
3 hours 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
2 hours 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.
cubefox
8 hours 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?
doctorpangloss
7 hours ago
I don’t know why you are being downvoted. Of course emulators are being used to play pirated games.
cheeze
7 hours 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
6 hours 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
6 hours 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
5 hours ago
But what if it is mainly used to commit a crime?
FactKnower69
3 hours ago
playing video games is a CRIME against hard working RIGHTS HOLDERS
doctorpangloss
2 hours 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?
wilsonnb3
5 hours 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.
ksec
an hour 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.
Narhem
7 hours 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.
Liquix
8 hours 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"...
duxup
9 hours 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
8 hours ago
It's hard to blame a hobby group for not having a perfect comms strategy.
the_gorilla
8 hours 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
8 hours 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
8 hours 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.
klyrs
8 hours 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
7 hours 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
4 hours 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
8 hours ago
If and only if this was their intent and timeline. May be external.
klyrs
8 hours 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.
jsheard
7 hours 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
7 hours 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.
textadventure
7 hours 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".
sundarurfriend
4 hours 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
4 hours ago
Sadly, sometimes there's a perverse incentive for lawyers to intentionally delay lawsuits so that they can reap increased damages/penalties.
ndiddy
6 hours 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
6 hours 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
5 hours 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
7 hours ago
Interesting, I wonder if this means that they got paid.
koolala
5 hours ago
A threat is not a natural 'agreement'.
ls612
8 hours ago
I mean it's hard to imagine this being anything other than the worst.