OK!
SAY IT WITH ME NOW!
WHEN I SAY "BARBARA" YOU SAY "STREISAND"!
READY?!
" BARBARA "
this post was submitted on 02 Oct 2024
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Never give Nintendo money.
I'm going to pirate a switch game and load it onto my steam deck in honour of Yuzu and Ryujinx.
Let's create millions of copies of BOTW and delete them so Nintendo loses a few billion.
Here is HurricanePootis pinned comment in the AUR.
So, I am going to pin this post.
For now, I am pointing this package to https://git.naxdy.org/Mirror/Ryujinx as it has tags, which is useful for this package.
I am against deleting this package, as with yuzu and citra, forks will arise and then these packages will be resurrected (sometimes by less skilled maintainers cough cough citra). Therefore, I am going to keep an eye out to see where Ryujinx development goes, and go on from there.
Nintendo youll never get my money cuz you wont me play yer great games on my own hardware. Ill never spend another dime on your designed to fail overpriced crappy controllers. Never! Boooooo!
This kind of thing often has the opposite of the intended effect. People then host mirrors of the original repo, and the press brings more developers to the project.
This sort of action by Nintendo and other companies is so short sighted. Bad press, a legal battle they couldn't actually win if it went to court, increased attention on the thing they're trying to hinder, etc. Its a stupid decision made by business people who don't know anything about tech, and who are disincentivized to care about the long term health of their brand.
I litterally had not heard of the emulator until now. Maybe I'll have to compile it and give it a spin now.
Bad press, a legal battle they couldn't actually win if it went to court
Those two seem like a stretch.
Emulation and emulators aren't illegal. Yuzu for example got in trouble mostly for distributing tools for circumventing copy protection and dumping roms and not for the emulator itself.
But it doesn't really matter as nobody has money to defend themselves against something like Nintendo. Here just even the threat of it was enough to get the Ryujinx devs to fold just in case.
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Yeeeah, Nintendo sucks.
And it sucks that, despite this not killing the distribution of Yuzu or Ryujinx forks it does make them less safe and reliable for users, as well as hindering ongoing development.
Ultimately, though, Nintendo is acting within their rights. Which is not an endorsement, it's proof that modern copyright frameworks are broken and unfit for purpose in an online world. We need a refoundation of IP. Not to make everything freely accessible, necessarily, but to make it make sense online instead of having to rely on voluntary non-enforcement. I don't care if it's Youtube or emulation development, you should know if your project is legal and safe before you have lawyers showing up at your door with offers you can't refuse.
They aren't working within any rights. Emulator production is a legal right that Nintendo has neither the ability to bestow nor deny. It's the founding legal rationale behind virtualization as a technology. This is the equivalent of someone holding a gun to your head and telling you to shut up - the forced relinquishing of your rights through threat of force, and it's a little frightening to watch people suggest otherwise. This has played out in court and is settled law. Bleem! went BANKRUPT to secure a legal victory against SONY and establish that emulators are completely legal and there is no "gray area" about them, and you should be in less of a hurry to throw legal rights away because "Well, Nintendo said so..."
They are absolutely within their rights to approach the developers of Ryujinx and threaten to sue them. Based on how things have worked so far they'd lose, and I agreee with you that the inequality in that interaction is terrible and should be addressed.
On the Yuzu scenario it's more relevant, because of the specific proprietary elements found in the emulator.
And then there's Nintendo targeting emulation-based handhelds and streamers for featuring emulated footage of their first party games on Youtube videos, which falls directly under the mess that is copyright enforcement under Youtube and other social platforms.
In all of those cases, a clearer, more rules-based organization of IP that explicitly covers these scenarios would have helped people defend against Nintendo's overreach, or at least have a clearer picture of what they can do about it. We can't go on forever relying on custom, subjective judicial interpretation and non-enforcement. We're way overdue on a rules-based agreement of what can and can't be done with media online.
The worst part is... we kinda know. There is a custom-based baseline for it we've slowly acquired over time. It's just not properly codified, it exists in EULAs and unspoken, unenforceable practices. It's an amazing gap in what is a ridiculously massive cultural and economic segment. It's crazy that we're running on "do you feel lucky?" when it comes to deciding if a corporation claiming you can't do a thing on the Internet that involves media. We need to know what we're allowed to do so we can say "no" when predatory corporations like Nintendo show up to enforce rights they don't have or shouldn't have.
You're incorrect. Creating an emulator is not illegal. Nintendo has the legal right to threaten to sue someone, but if you are threatening to sue for something that is not a crime, and you know that, and you do it anyway in the hopes of bankrupting them before the case settles, that's not a legal proceeding, it's extortion. I can threaten to sue you for cooking pancakes in your house, and while it's technically ALLOWED for me to do that, it's clearly and obviously not a case I would win, but if the threat of making your life hell is prominent enough, you might get forced into backing down, which is exactly what's happening here.
They would absolutely NOT lose in court for creating an emulator. I cannot stress enough exactly how legal emulation is. It's as legal as making your pancakes. The only way they would lose in court is if there is some EXTRA thing they've done that we don't know about. If all they've done is create and distribute Ryujinx, there is absolutely NO way Nintendo would win a case in the US. This is settled law, and saying it isn't doesn't make it so, although it DOES embolden companies to bullshit developers with more bogus threats in the future.
I did not claim that creating an emulator is illegal. You don't sue people for a crime, either. "Illegal" and "criminal" are different concepts, and making an emulator without tapping into proprietary assets is neither.
We don't know what Nintendo used to threaten Ryujinx, so we don't know how likely it is that they would have won. We do know the Yuzu guys messed up and gave them a better shot than in the other times they have failed at this exact play.
You are very mad at an argument nobody is making.
Perhaps. But I see a lot of hand rubbing and "oh welling" from people when this is a legitimate moment for anger at the precedence this sets. I understand the urge to make it make sense, but the fact is people either tacitly accepting this activity as reasonable or arguing about the red herring of whether the source code is still available to sit and rot with nobody touching it but shady scam artists, not only moves the bar on what what Nintendo and other companies see they can get away with, it has a chilling effect on future preservation efforts among the constantly shrinking pool of people skilled enough in low level development to do this kind of work.
I guess my point is, I'm seeing very few voices that are sufficiently concerned or angry enough about this event considering the far reaching consequences it's going to have.
We shouldn't in ANY way be normalizing this activity, and our reaction shouldn't be "Of COURSE they did this." Although I guess I shouldn't be surprised after we just watched Boeing murder a half dozen of its whistleblowers and the most people did was make a few memes. We're living in a literal dystopia, apparently.
Well, there are a couple of caveats to that. One is that it's far from the first time an emulator has been taken down for similar reasons and it's historically been pretty ineffective in the grand scheme, especially when alternative forks are available. "Far reaching consequences" is a bit of an overstatement, at least for those of us that went down into the Bleem! mines back in the day. There is a chance that you may be connecting things that aren't that directly connected here.
The second is that you're still misrepresenting people not acting out their annoyance the way you'd like with people not being annoyed. I'm not here defending Nintendo, this sucks. I'm here saying that I don't want to shame Nintendo into the same awkward gray area Google as an intermediary and every other IP holder currently inhabits, I want actually effective regulation that protects legitimate content creators from IP abuse, including from predatory corporations. You are looking to perform outrage in a room of like-minded people, and I get that you want to vent, but it's not particularly useful to get mad at people that agree with you for not being in your same emotional level while they do.
This is a fair point. I just get so sick of seeing the constant erosion of individual rights in the technology space due to apathy and under reactions, and it's a more or less constant, ongoing slide to the point where moments like this become absolutely infuriating.
The maintainer of the Apple M1 branch said that they literally showed up to the lead dev's home in Brazil in a comment on Reddit.
That's a good cue to mention that I don't know the specifics of how this would work in Brazil and how they impact the situation one way or the other. That said, my objections to the current arrangement of IP and copyright are fairly international.
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Oh snap, we have to decentralize the hub
I mean, that's been obvious since Microsoft bought it.
But this is really more about how emulator devs ought to accept that Nintendo is going to try to persecute them and start keeping themselves anonymous to avoid being ruined by lawsuits, even though what they're doing is neither illegal nor unethical.
A “hub” implies centralization, no?
Not necessarily. Look at Lemmy instances for example. You could call each instance a hub, but the content is pretty much distributed.
The author was bullied by Nintendo into voluntarily removing the repos, it wasn't DMCA'd.
GitHub had nothing to do with this one. And just like with Yuzu, plenty of people have uploaded copies of the repo already, thanks to git's decentralized nature where everyone have a full copy of the entire history.
Git is decentralized, but the collaborative aspect is fully centralized.
I see. But still, GitHub isn't the right place for precious code like this. The best would be to have a federated git forge, something like what the forgejo devs are working on.
Git itself isn't decentralized is about people copying it and sometimes mirroring it.
Anyway it is a good habit to avoid github entirely (when hosting a repo).
You can easily mirror GitHub to some other repo
Yup. I've done it myself when I switched to Gitlab. It's really straightforward.
Git is decentralised by nature. It's what allows mirroring the repo on other forges even when git repos are hosted on proprietary platforms like GitHub.
Anyway it is a good habit to avoid github entirely ~~(when hosting a repo)~~.
FIFY
Yes but no, because I don't want to not interact with a repo at all just because it's on github for whatever reason (if there's one).
But yes, I understand your feelings. Fuck M$
Git itself isn't decentralized is about people copying it and sometimes mirroring it.
Not sure what you mean. My understanding is that git itself is decentralized insofar as each clone can develop its own history without ever needing to push to the origin, but that what OP is referring to is actually the “distributed” nature of git, where i.e. it’s easy to copy the entire history of an instance.
what OP is referring to is actually the “distributed” nature of git, where i.e. it’s easy to copy the entire history of an instance.
Exactly. Isn't decentralized itself since it's not a platform but by being "indipendent" and not entangled with anything you can just copy it entirely and host it somewhere else.
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