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Nintendo blitzes GitHub with over 8k emulator-related DMCA takedowns

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Re: Nintendo blitzes GitHub with over 8k emulator-related DMCA takedowns

#131

Post by 3836293648 »

DoctorMckay101 wrote: post #129

Emulator developer here (not for videogame consoles but IoT and Honeypots). The DRM circumvention that Yuzu implements can be attacked legally twofold. The decryption process to run a game in the Nintendo Switch uses some alphanumerical keys stored in 2 files if I remember correctly, called "prod.keys" and "title.keys". Yuzu did not distribute those. However it did implement the code to use those keys and decrypt a g…

Nintendo in arguing that the people behind Yuzu actually did distribute them, just not very openly

Re: Nintendo blitzes GitHub with over 8k emulator-related DMCA takedowns

#132

Post by pquki4 »

forty wrote: post #55
dannyw wrote: post #8

I wonder if there’s a “git over BitTorrent”. Having a cryptographically signed (by authors, not by GitHub) and fully open source git hosting network would be a boom for FOSS security in general.

Or we can simply have a git hoster which is not in the US and as such is not impacted by DCMA

We need rutracker of github

Re: Nintendo blitzes GitHub with over 8k emulator-related DMCA takedowns

#133

Post by kemotep »

realusername wrote: post #12
basil-rash wrote: post #6

Nintendo is in an interesting position whereby they are actually selling emulators as a product to this day. Which gives them more of a leg to stand on in these sorts of efforts, regardless of whether or not I personally agree.

I would say the opposite, it gives them less of a leg to stand since they cannot say that there's never any justification for emulation anymore like they said in the past.

Why would the owners of the copyright be restricted from selling their copyrighted works in whatever way they want?

Re: Nintendo blitzes GitHub with over 8k emulator-related DMCA takedowns

#134

Post by Shish2k »

gnopgnip wrote: post #101
basil-rash wrote: post #6

Nintendo is in an interesting position whereby they are actually selling emulators as a product to this day. Which gives them more of a leg to stand on in these sorts of efforts, regardless of whether or not I personally agree.

Emulators are legal in the US because of Sony v Connectix

some aspects (not all aspects) of creating (not using) emulators are not illegal by way of copyright laws (but may be illegal by way of other laws such as trademarks, patents, DRM) in the US because of Sony vs Connectix.

Re: Nintendo blitzes GitHub with over 8k emulator-related DMCA takedowns

#136

Post by GardenLetter27 »

mqus wrote: post #121
miohtama wrote: post #111

The solution is decentralised Github: https://radicle.xyz Radicle gives a decentralised Git network that is much more immune to any legal action. This makes it much more difficult for Nintendo to take such action. Because it is a civil dispute, not a criminal one, the trick is to make it more costly for Nintendo to abuse the legal system (it is unlikely the legal system abuse will be fixed in long term, or ever). Whe…

Isn't radicle then the easy way to argue that participants actually distribute the program themselves, including an easily trackable IP, so lawyers can just add a client themselves and then sue all IPs that transfer a byte of the (illegal) program? The same happens to media sharing via bittorrent in germany right now. Having some site which gets closed instead seems to be preferable to me. Of course copyright infring…

Good luck getting that through the court.

I guess they could just send people threatening letters - but even getting the ISPs to play along would be an uphill battle.

Germany is a special case as it's particularly bureaucratic and dominated by establishment interests. And even then it's only commonplace for Bittorrent because GEMA, etc. pushed to make that possible.

Re: Nintendo blitzes GitHub with over 8k emulator-related DMCA takedowns

#137

Post by AnonymousPlanet »

None4U wrote: post #33
pprotas wrote: post #30

Why are emulators illegal? I understand that they are associated with piracy because people play pirates games on them. But it’s like banning BitTorrent because it allows you to pirate, or Windows because you can play pirates games on it as well. The article mentions that emulators “illegally circumvent Nintendo’s technological protection measures and run illegal copies of Switch games.”. But which law makes it illeg…

> But which law makes it illegal to circumvent such systems? DMCA section 1201

In the US. The DMCA is only relevant because GitHub is operated by a US company. Nintendo would have to try to make the same arguments for EU law, e.g., if the software in question would be hosted in the EU. That might be more complicated.

Re: Nintendo blitzes GitHub with over 8k emulator-related DMCA takedowns

#138

Post by GardenLetter27 »

arp242 wrote: post #60
forty wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or we can simply have a git hoster which is not in the US and as such is not impacted by DCMA

US copyright tends to be less restrictive and more relaxed than many other countries.

The DMCA is crazy though, you can just request a takedown and the onus is on the host. And then if it turns out you didn't actually have the right to do that... well that has to be sorted out later.

Re: Nintendo blitzes GitHub with over 8k emulator-related DMCA takedowns

#139

Post by consp »

anilakar wrote: post #115
iforgotpassword wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IANAL; Afaik only in the EU, it even allows non-cleanroom reverse engineering.

EU resident here. Reverse engineering in general is allowed, but decompiling software adds a good number of restrictions[1]. Disclaimer: I have talked to lawyers. Our company makes industrial IoT loggers and during my career I have only been given appropriate documentation twice by manufacturers. Most of the systems have been reverse engineered through packet capture. [1] https://vidstromlabs.com/blog/the-legal-bound…

> given appropriate documentation

Even with documentation you still get garbadge. I've had to decompile a HSM firmware to figure out what the actual input of functions was since the manufacturer kept claiming the documentation was correct. It wasn't even close. Only after I provided the solution to my own support ticket they changed the documentation (why bother paying for full support...).

I've gotten a bit of empathy for the poor front support guy since he'd have to keep complaining to the developers which kept saying "no it's fine as documented".

Re: Nintendo blitzes GitHub with over 8k emulator-related DMCA takedowns

#140

Post by realusername »

kemotep wrote: post #133
realusername wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would say the opposite, it gives them less of a leg to stand since they cannot say that there's never any justification for emulation anymore like they said in the past.

Why would the owners of the copyright be restricted from selling their copyrighted works in whatever way they want?

In the past they said that there's never any justification for emulation and that it ruins the player experience, seems like it depends on how much money they make out of it.
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