Reminder to all that barring access to internal docs, use of internal software/firmware components and information obtained through nefarious means, emulation is 100% legal pretty much everywhere in the world.
Edit: of course there's the gray area of scrapers, game downloaders etc... but those are not emulators.
Note that there is the following exception to dmca circumvention provision:
"Computer programs and video games distributed in formats that have become obsolete and that require the original media or hardware as a condition of access, when circumvention is accomplished for the purpose of preservation or archival reproduction of published digital works by a library or archive. A format shall be considered obsolete if the machine or system necessary to render perceptible a work stored in that format is no longer manufactured or is no longer reasonably available in the commercial marketplace."
Some people find this confusing. Section 1201 of the DMCA has two parts. One part bans circumventing DRM, and the other part bans distributing devices that can circumvent DRM. The Section 1201 exemptions published by the Copyright Office only apply to the first part, not the second. I imagine it works this way because the companies lobbying for the DMCA to be passed didn't want to make it legal to sell or distribute circumvention devices as long as someone has a legal right to break the DRM, as that would defeat the purpose of the law.
I started to think about this like physical locks and that made it seem less weird. You don't need a great lock to communicate "this is a private space" and there's no "but your honor is was a crappy lock" defense to trespassing. Circumventing bad copy protection still establishes intent to circumvent so you're still in trouble.
Notably, neither lockpicks nor lockpicks are illegal.
By making circumvention itself illegal the DMCA gives the producer to essentially invent new IP law.
Want to take a DVD you bought while vacationing in China and play it back home in the US. That is perfectly legal. However, if the DVD has even the flimsiest form of region locking, you would need to circumvent them, which is a crime.
> But as soon as I pick someone else's lock without permission, it very much is a crime.
Right, but no one's installing a modchip on someone else's Switch without permission. No one's stealing Blu-rays to rip. I'd actually challenge you to find any DMCA anticircumvention claim where the people accused of violating it were doing things to hardware or media they didn't own or have permission from the owner to access.
>But as soon as I pick someone else's lock without permission, it very much is a crime.
The analogy is broken and doesn't apply.
The better analogy would be someone installing a lock on your property which you have the right to enter and use, and you going to jail for breaking the lock.
In real world, of course you can break someone's lock without permission when they put it on your property without getting your permission to do it.
And you buying property means the locks are no longer someone else's. They are yours to pick, cut off, melt, or throw into volcanoes.
In Illinois, owning lockpicking equipment without a locksmith license is prima facie evidence of intent to break into someone's home. You can be charged with attempted burglary just for having the lockpicks.
This is an intent thing. A protected auth checksum verification step could be the number of letters in the packet and still count, it is not a technical provision
Circumventing a xor by xoring it back is still attempted circumvention.
The "arguing in favor of a bad law by saying they'll just look at your intent" thing is completely invalid for the DMCA because your intent is the thing they don't care about. That's why it's such an absurd law.
Suppose you commit unambiguous copyright infringement. Then they could already sue you regardless of whether there is any circumvention and anti-circumvention is completely redundant. It has no actual purpose that exceeds what you would get from presuming willful infringement if someone had to circumvent copy protection and then having different penalties for willful and unintentional infringement.
But now suppose you don't commit copyright infringement. You make a fair use copy of the work. Completely different intent. They don't care. It's crazy.
Where this gets really wild is the prohibition on circumvention tools.
Suppose the copyright expires on a work previously under copyright. Happens all the time. You now have a bunch of works with a "technological protection measure" preventing you from copying them, even though they're not copyrighted. Your intent is now to publish a tool to help everyone remove the DRM from those public domain works. But maybe the same DRM is also used on other works that are still under copyright -- and you may not even know that. So does your intent matter or not?
To clarify by intent I mean whether the intent was to circumvent or not wrt strength of technical DRM not whether the intent was to use it fairly or not; nothing to do with morals or ethics. I make no comment on whether it is right, just, or absurd.
When people say intent matters, what they generally mean is intent to do something wrong. It implies that having no malicious intent would exculpate you. Applying it exclusively to the intent to do something innocuous is... I believe the technical term is cheating.
And does the DMCA have even that as an intent requirement? Suppose you tell your local AI to copy something without even knowing that it has any DRM, and it does. Is that still a violation? Obvious loophole if it isn't, but intent requirement 100% fully absent if it is.
Yes, I agree with all that. But we accept that reverse engineering is often a correct, honest, morally legit thing to do. But tape on a padlock made of paper onto the thing and suddenly you are criminally liable for repairing your tractor.
To onlookers it would be a baffling and cruel action. (Also some would say, it would not be morally correct, because the baby didn't do anything wrong.)
But repairing ones' tractor should hardly elicit such reactions.
Right - the trouble is now that we're seeing emulators and recompilers that are obviously derivative works of NDA-restricted SDKs.
These SDKs are lavishly documented, full of worked examples and have top-notch toolchains. More than enough for Claude and a really big stack of tokens to turn into an emulator.
So who's to tell whether a new emulator didn't come from forbidden information? If there are any honest efforts left, this will surely drown them.
I don't think it works that way. Putting information behind an NDA does not make it "forbidden information" that nobody can ever use. It means that one party (the one who signed the NDA) can't disclose it. To the extent someone either violates the NDA or the owner is sloppy and posts the information publicly, there are no restrictions on what people NOT party to the NDA can do with it.
Nintendo (and others) are free to go after those who violate NDAs, and to go after scrapers or whatnot, but they can't declare the information itself off-limits to everyone.
This myth needs to stop being spread. Emulation lies in a legal grey area and only some parts of it have been tested in court. Only those parts are defined as legal.
It may well be legal, it may not, but until it's tested in court then nobody can fully claim it's 100% legal
Googling turns up some court cases. Among them this which included copying of a copyrighted artifact:
"Sony Computer Entertainment, Inc. v. Connectix Corp. (2000): The Ninth Circuit ruled that Connectix's intermediate copying of the Sony PlayStation BIOS during reverse engineering to create the Virtual Game Station emulator was fair use."
That is how legal things usually work. Legal by default because it's not illegal.
We are about to get a flood of new nes, snes, gensis, etc games. Corporations that require moats to exist are in serious trouble, we don't need new drm'ed hardware for entertainment. It's going to be the 90s again but even crazier.
I'm willing to bet that the number of people who would genuinely boycott nintendo over that, along with the crossover with people who pirate software is an absolute drop in the bucket for nintendo to care about
Edit: Also Gary Bowser he had a criminal case brought against him by the US before he got sued by Nintendo and was sentenced to 3 years in prison
Yeah I gave up on them for the multiple DMCA and copyright bullshit they keep pulling. I'm not really a console guy, but my friend gave me a Switch 1, and that was wonderful at a time I was in the hospital. But ever since then they've just become another rentier trading in their games, but attacking users and fans over and over. Screw em. I wish more people understood and felt like that, but most people don't care about the politics. They just want another Mario game for their kids.
The sad part is I would gladly fork over money, the new Zelda looks really nice, but, I'm not that desperate. I'll pay for another yacht for Gabe over Nintendo these days.
It’s funny that in gaming circles, the sentiment is the exact opposite: in the time of live service games, microtransactions, pay-to win schemes, premium currencies, gacha games is Nintendo taken to be one of the last big gaming companies that will sell you a complete, single player, physical game made as a labor of love for the craft.
I have absolutely no sympathy for Team Xecuter. They knowingly bricked consoles, misled customers, stole GPL software and shipped buggy software leading thousands of users to getting banned. This goes way back to the Gateway 3DS days (same team) where they did the same shit.
I read all of these comments and was feeling absolutely outraged. The more I read about the actual case, the less I felt that way. He wasn't just some random guy screwed for handling a landing page and customer support, he did that and:
- Operated rom-bank.com, which provided downloadable libraries of >10k ROMs for the users
- Handled additional product marketing sites, distributor reviews, and advertising.
- Received ~$320,000 in direct payments and website ad revenue, which he fully knew came from this company selling pirating hardware/software as he operated the above to enable them to do so
- Probably more, I lost interest in trying to find actual details over repetition of minor pieces of it
This operation made 10s of millions, he made hundreds of thousands and clearly knew what was going on for many years. I'm not saying I'm happy with the punishments handed to him, but I also don't buy the claims he was just some dude that got fucked out of left field because Nintendo was pure evil (emphasis on the pure). I still feel like they could throw the dude a bone at this point though, but maybe the popular 5 minute take is already so set in people's minds that Nintendo just sees bringing the topic up in people's minds again as a massive liability for backlash. Or maybe they just don't care and wanted more. Either way, he's no martyr for those who just want fair use of what they buy and it doesn't make me hate Nintendo.
320k for the period of time he worked for the group amounts to a meager 44k a year, it's a low salary.
Also piracy doesn't work like that, it's a speculation on damage but no real damage is done. It's not like people stopped buying games and consoles because they could emulate. Quite the contrary, emulation works almost as advertising. Those that stay on emulation wouldn't purchase the console and games anyway, and those that would is always exaggerated in these kinds of plea.
In https://www.theguardian.com/games/2024/feb/01/the-man-who-ow... Bowser says that fighting the charges would cost a lot of time and money and pleading guilty is simpler to deal with, so I would take information from the plea deal with a pinch of salt.
GP may be referring to Doug Bowser [0], former president and COO of Nintendo of America, but a brief search didn't turn up any reasons why Nintendo would have ousted him.
Anyway, the team behind Yuzu is still at large and the development will continue elsewhere, from aside, like in older days of emulation. Not everything has to default to GitHub, and not everything can.
It's because slews of these emulators are vibecoded and the maintainers don't have much experience, if any. All of the serious efforts host their own code.
There's a bunch of different Eglantine forks around right now (and a few other non-Eden based), different ones can sometimes be better for specific games.
I think AI is going to make some kind of p2p github style decentralization closer to reality. The gap is the unique identifier vs the hash identifier and identity/signature management.
But the tools are all there to create some kind of dark web, especially as the real web is going to be flooded with garbage.
- Got leftover AI usage that's going to expire? Use Rainshare to find people who could use a hand with a software project/issue. Nobody pays, and anyone can ask.
- Introducing mutual aid, for AI coding plans & usage limits! Use Rainshare to find people who could use a hand with a software project/issue. Anyone with spare usage can send their agent to pitch in so it doesn’t get wasted. Nobody pays, and anyone can ask. Works with @tangled.org and @knotless.dev
Huh? Sure no one got imprisoned but virtually all Yuzu developers stopped contributing to emulation entirely after the lawsuit. New people came up but few of them are driven by the same passion as the old guard, so collective knowledge and experience fell off a cliff as a result.
Progress continues (much slower than before), but it's strange to claim things move forward like nothing happened.
Anyone can DMCA anything for anything. The relevant factor is how likely different providers in the chain are to respond drastically to bullshit requests.
For instance if I sent a DMCA to HN insisting that your comment violated my copyright, they'd probably ignore it, or ban my account.
Nintendo doesn't have a fucking clue what you have locally until you publish it for the world to see. Until you host it somewhere remote, there is nothing to DMCA.
Is there anything like bittorrent for github repos?
That was always the appeal of people exploring shared compute and storage on crypto networks, it was overhyped and burdened by the financial speculation (though I imagine it also helped fund development), because the cool thing for me was people trying to build resilient distributed systems that protect from these kinds of issues
Every single Switch 2 emulator is still available on Github and Gitlab.
And just checked most Switch 1 emulator is still available too because they are not hosted on Github but rather on self hosted repos with their own domains.
Not that it matters because they will be back next week either way.
The only surprising thing is the PicoFly firmware but that's such a niche. Most peope who have a chipmodded Switch never touch that.
At the rate we are going, we won't need emulators sooner rather than later: We will have direct "ports" of binaries for different platforms. I wonder how feasible is to use JVM (or CLR) technology to make these ports multi-platform. What's the state of GPU access in the JVM
Not even sooner or later, it's already happened. Friend of mine has already beat the new Ocarina of Time remake through a native PC recompilation as of two days ago and that game only released five days prior.
We won’t need them on Macs because of the same ARM architecture between the Switch and Apple Silicon. Funnily Macs are now the bleeding edge well at least as Switch games goes.
Emulators always, without fail assume piracy. Let's say you bought a cartridge, dumped it and grabbed an emulator. You bought the game but "stole" the console sale.
Nintendo's business is not just games, they need HW sales as well for the whole thing to make sense. Since I have both the game and the console, I can feel justified, but it's not their TOS and that's enough for me. Game/book/music preservation is another story I guess.
Tangent, but the new Zelda Ocarina of Time runs butterfly smooth in insane melees on an S2. Got it on day 1 and we are both over 40, pathetic. Sucks for me, she usurped it and I don't watch next to her so that I can go through the story on my own. Just watched a few encounters to get the tasted. Great game so far, 1-2AM isn't unusual.
> Let's say you bought a cartridge, dumped it and grabbed an emulator. You bought the game but "stole" the console sale.
Let's stop assuming stuff.
I own a switch 1, I own Zelda Breath Of The Wild, yet I have been playing it on Yuzu on my computer. First when the switch stopped working and needed a new battery, then I realized I could run it at better resolution on my computer, in any room with larger screen on my laptop thanks to moonlight and I don't have to actually look for it and find it abandonned and discharged by my daughters or that the joycons started drifting again and in need of a repair.
An emulator is a piece of software and can't make assumptions. I'm not sure who you're referring to doing the assuming in your
Ok, fellow pedant! By dumping and decrypting the ROM, one is breaking the license agreement. And these ROMs slip into the wild. You've read the EULA? It's DRM circumvention. You don't need to like it. No skin off of my nose, but this isn't a John Deer right to repair situation.
1. License Grant/Restrictions; Third-Party Content.
Subject to the terms of this Agreement, Nintendo grants you a non-exclusive, revocable license to use the Software solely on the Console for your personal, non-commercial use. For clarity, the Software is licensed, not sold, to you, and you may not make use of the Software except as expressly authorized by this Agreement. Without limitation, you agree that you may not ( a) publish, copy, modify, reverse engineer, lease, rent, decompile, disassemble, distribute, offer for sale, or create derivative works of any portion of the *Software;*
> > Nintendo has no legal entitlement for their business plan to work financially.
> Their lawyers will craft it. See ya!
The EFF actually coined a term for this in its analyses of the impact of the DMCA: "Felony Contempt of Business Model". Of course, when they wrote those words they expected the very phrase to constitute a kind of reductio ad absurdum.
Obviously privileging arbitrary business models over others isn't one of the legitimate purposes of the law. So what makes you think there's a public interest in supporting Nintendo's business model beyond what existing laws, which do not prohibit emulation or even the sale of compatible consoles, already do?
This is a utterly empty response. What is it that you're arguing exactly, that a company can use the law to be a nuisance and that the actual letter of the law doesn't matter at all?
If so, then why even quote law in your arguments? Because by your own admission, none of it matters.
They definitely do with the Japanese version which is local region locked and subsidized (this is the only one you can get off the shelves, the english global version is online store exclusive and more expensive, matching the global price)
Not sure, but the installed base grows and so does the walled garden :) Nintendo always held the line on console prices, was my impression as opposed to Sega/Sony/PS. "Outdated" components and in-house circuitry, besides the ancient Tegra on the S1. I am spitballing from memory, someone else here might provide real insight. Regardless though, they require Mario Kart running on their HW, not a PC. Their margin is their decision.
There is also a very juicy accessory ecosystem. A Pro Controller is $90 these days. I've tried clones, but Nintendo paywalls a few things, like powering up from the controller.
> You bought the game but "stole" the console sale.
No? Virtually every game I've ever played under emulation, not counting emulators ported to consoles for official re-releases/collections, is for a console I've bought. Many of them are games and consoles I still have working copies of both of right now, and I play under emulation because I want save states or FPS unlocking patches or a more convenient cheats system or whatever. At the same time it's not at all unusual to use other original hardware (e.g., a Wiimote) with your emulator. So it doesn't prevent hardware sales in that sense either.
And even if you do have the hardware, it's perfectly legitimate to buy it used, or pick it up out of a dumpster! "Piracy" is deliberately a loaded word and we should probably avoid using it altogether. But regardless of the choice of words, the world doesn't revolve around forcing people to buy new hardware from the likes of Nintendo. No angel is stripped of its wings every time someone buys an FPGA-based, cartridge-compatible emulation device instead of buying a used SNES at a garage sale.
Yes, "deliberately loaded", on purpose to protect copywriter owners. Once a ROM is out in the wild, it's free for all, doesn't matter if you yourself if have the hardware and bought the software. Not many are as pious as you.
Please stop trying to shill this. The crypto aspect always made the project look shady, and the massive security oversights really hammer home the fact that this is not a serious project.
What's the difference between this and https://tangled.org? This is the first time I've seen it mentioned, and it sounds like it's trying to a build a similar solution.
Also, why are we basically re-implementing a P2P network for VCS when we already have a really good generic P2P networking system which also has Git support?
IIRC Radicle is ActivityPub/traditional federation style (servers talk in a mesh) and Tangled is built on ATproto which means it's trying to work with a logical single firehose feed of everything everyone does.
I'm not a fan of how they handled this situation.. they failed to verify that the encryption in their software was actually working and then tried to sprinkle sugar on it by calling it a "security vulnerability in the network protocol used by..". It wasn't a vulnerability in the protocol, they just didn't use it properly. If you make a mistake like that, you need to just own it.
I do not want to hate on them but they did have a pretty massive oversight of ... not checking that any of their traffic was encrypted or authenticated.
I thought I had the right to use circumvention procedures to back up my own games. If I own game and run it on an emulator with a firmware extracted from my device, what law am I breaking?
As far as I understand it, the way it works is that section 1201 of the DMCA has two parts. One part prohibits breaking DRM, and one part prohibits trafficking in devices or software intended to circumvent DRM. The part that prohibits breaking DRM has tons of exceptions so previously legal behavior doesn't become illegal just because something has a digital lock. However, the part that prohibits trafficking in circumvention devices has none of these exceptions. That's the part that Nintendo uses to go after emulators.
Emulators have neither "breaking DRM", "circumvention devices" nor circumvention code though.
That's why Nintendo usually tries to avoid going to court for emulators unlike when they sued for the R4 cartridge for example, they are afraid of the result.
Nintendo Switch games are stored as encrypted data, and then decrypted at runtime by the console. Nintendo's legal position is that because the emulator will only run Switch games if the user provides decryption keys dumped from a Switch, it counts as a circumvention device and is therefore illegal to distribute. Nintendo sued Yuzu, one of the most popular Switch emulators, and the Yuzu authors chose to settle rather than going to trial.
That seems like a weak argument, but the courts make all sorts of surprising decisions these days.
In the past, Nintendo tried using their trademark as a watchdog -- the console would reboot if the game did not display it at startup -- then sued unlicensed games for trademark violation. The courts ruled the trademark was purely functional in that use case, and not a trademark, then ruled against Nintendo.
I imagine a similar ruling, if the defense is: The user has a valid key, and a copy of the media. Any circumvention happened before that point in time. We're simply building a compatible device.
Of course, I'm not a lawyer, and the DMCA is a terribly designed law.
That case was before DMCA made it generally illegal to break any copyright protection measure.
It also wasn't protecting the games from being copied. It was protecting Nintendo (actually Sega) from competition from other people making their own games. The Nintendo Game Boy uses the same technique.
Rather than a value judgment of whether or not Nintendo is rightly applying the law, Yuzu settling must be viewed as a fundamental inability for a small group of independent devs to defend themselves against the deep pockets of a famously litigious major global corporation in the modern court system.
Wasn't this same thing a huge deal back with the DVD DRM keys? The keys were leaked, but it's technically illegal to distribute software that uses them in unlicensed ways, even if you don't distribute the keys.
GitHub also has the right (responsibility, some say) to pre-emptively take down anything Nintendo complains about from their platform and optionally ask questions later.
It's baffling how these projects keep choosing Microsoft as their host.
The issue is that the law is meant to protect billionaire corporations from you, not the other way around.
Congress has now illegally approved copyright theft of millions of works from small authors, EVEN where everything was illegal about it, down to the torrent client used to get the works in the first place. Oh and this was illegal for Congress too, you see, just about the only thing Congress isn't allowed to do is to change the law retroactively (OpenAI, Meta, Google violated the law BEFORE congress made it legal. So that doesn't matter according to the law. A lot of states even created criminal responsibility for copyright violations. Do these companies or CEOs get convicted for that? No, of course not). But to protection billionaires congress gladly ignores the law (yes, technically congress didn't do anything, the "copyright office" did, but it's a part of congress and you can bet your firstborn if 10 congresscritters disagreed with the font the decision is published in they would have changed it immediately)
Even courts do it. They make up equally absurd justifications. I mean, in order to protect the billionaire AI labs from software engineers claiming copyright they have now declared AI models persons [1]. The reasoning is that because if they are not persons they cannot create a copyright, and so cannot give it to customers, in other words: AI labs would have nothing to sell. You wouldn't be legally allowed to use AI outputs, as they would be owned by the people the model learned from. What do you think the odds are that AI models will now be treated as persons when it doesn't benefit billionaires? I believe we have found the first example of odds bigger than 100%.
Congress does NOT apply copyright used against billionaires, but it does apply when billionaires sue 9 year olds with download software, without proof even, in most cases. 9 year olds get threatened with 2 months prison plus 300,000 PER INFRACTION, billionaires get to violate the law. Oh, and by the way, the EU commission has, separately, agreed with this way of doing things over the objection of German courts (the EU AI directive, like any other directive, comes from the commission. They had the good manners to let parliament vote on it, but is there anyone who doesn't remember what happens when parliament votes against it, say, something like "Chat Control" for example?)
And this is after copyright violation was made criminal in many places. The CEOs of these companies have admitted to hundreds of millions of copyright violations, so at 3 months per violation ... even if they were the first human ever to evolve they would still not even have 1% of their prison sentence served if the punishments applied to normal people were applied to them, as the law clearly dictates.
Fundamentally, Anthropic and OpenAI (and Google and Facebook and ...) are based on massive violations of copyright. If any of these companies were held liable to the standards courts hold 9 year olds, their billions wouldn't be enough to protect them from bankruptcy (violating millions of works at hundreds of thousands per work adds up fast).
Can someone explain to me how I get to do that? If I can violate the law millions of times making up a billion dollar company is trivial, for obvious reasons. How do I get courts and congress to find technicalities to never hold me responsible. Because under the deal Sam Altman, Larry Page, Elon Musk and Dario Amodei get from courts and congress, and even from the EU, anyone can become a billionaire ... Just make the Netflix everyone wants for starters, and I have zero problems coming up with 100 more ideas.
I reached out to both this legal team and SFC about cases where all of the LLMs will license strip open source code. In cases where BSD licensed code was copied into thousands of projects and millions of forks, it appears the training is so embedded that it will produce functions down to the formatting decisions. In the case of `strlcpy`, no human written version looks like the OpenBSD version, but most commercial LLMs will license strip the OpenBSD version when asked to implement. Depending on the context (not trying to trick them, just other programming questions), I’ve had them all produce it without license (100% score in JPlag).
I keep wondering how this can of worms is going to play out. Right now it doesn't get them into trouble because they're taking from OSS communities, but what happens once one company finds out code they released with a restrictive license got copied verbatim into a closed product? Will they retaliate? Will they decide together to not open pandora's box? I wonder really
Anthropic and OpenAI offer indemnity for this situation for their enterprise customers if such a suit were to happen. They will defend you and cover costs.
It doesn't matter. The courts are entirely unfair. Take the copyright office's arguments: it states the court should explicitly address "Market Harm". Essentially, ANY fair use, such as AI training should be illegal, if it harms the market for the original authors EVEN WHERE THE LICENSE WOULD NORMALLY ALLOW THAT USE. That was reasoning applied to protect billionaire profits from the horror of library lending. The copyright office's position documents this extensively.
In other words, no matter the license, the fact that OpenAIs fair use of the works for training MIGHT take opportunities from the plaintiffs should, BY ITSELF, be an argument to make that AI training illegal. Even if the software programmers agreed to allow AI training, then still sued OpenAI, that is a valid argument accepted from billionaire companies.
In case you're wondering how the court argued that in this decision? It didn't. Not covered at all. Obviously brought up by the plaintiffs, not adressed. The weirdest pro-billionaire arguments are just accepted by the court (the big one is accepting AI models as making new works despite the copyright act clearly stating, 50+ times, only "natural persons" can make new works), and the most reasonable, long established principles, such as market harm (if the use of a copyrighted work harms its authors in the smallest way, even lost sales, even lost job opportunities, lost licensing opportunities, ...) is enough to forbid it's use EVEN WHERE THE LICENSE STATES DIFFERENTLY.
This was required because they wanted to forbid digital lending out of Disney's movies, where the lending software would guarantee that only one copy is actually in circulation (ie. use of DRM to let a library just show a movie without the patron coming to the library to get it). In other words: when billionaires want to make money of works, and the first sale doctrine as well as long standing fair use principles for libraries were in the way, the courts declared that market harm superseded fair use. And, of course, suddenly, when it protects programmers from billionaires, it doesn't apply anymore.
The courts deciding this way has done incredible damage to the availability of older works, to the point of destroying them entirely, since libraries cannot legally keep collections of older works and make those available over the internet, and it is impossible to keep the physical media in working condition and available over a large area, like the united states, for example.
Repeating theme here: absurd arguments to protect billionaire profits, silently rejecting and ignoring reasonable arguments to protect normal people.
I looked into this a few years ago for lending older games or unique prototypes or press copies to researchers without having to send them a copy. VGHF argued for this use case with the copyright office and was denied an exemption to the DMCA, as the use case was not considered fair use (which affects DRM free media as well which is not affected by DMCA).
Given what happens if you ask Claude to reproduce some well-known game, especially FPS games ... you can be pretty damn sure it's seen the game, maybe they even trained on all the leaked source code they could find. But I find it very hard to believe that style, that code, the best game styles came from open source code.
I mean if it trained on open source, you'd expect it to always come up with Quake essentially. That's not true at all. It's always very close to Call Of Duty in how they play.
> just about the only thing Congress isn't allowed to do is to change the law retroactively
[IANAL] The Constitution prohibits ex post facto laws which retroactively criminalize (or increase criminal penalties of) past legal conduct. This does not apply to civil penalties, and does not apply to reductions in criminal penalties or decriminalization.
Your citation says no such thing. Maybe there’s more in the case itself (in which case, cite it), but I think you’re inferring that based on what I think is an incorrect understanding of what’s going on, also revealed in the rest of the paragraph.
(I’m not commenting on other parts of the comment directly, though I feel not identifying the “‘fair use’ exemption” claim or reacting to that in such a long tirade is a bit off.)
True, you have to look at copyright law as well. The only thing that can create a new work with copyright according to both US law AND the international convention is a "natural person".
It cannot even be a company according to the law (because copyright is split up in my textbook into what's called natural rights, such as authorship, and economic rights, such as the right to set a license. It must always have a natural person origin because that natural person retains the right to state they were the author forever, no matter what agreements he or she entered into. Meaning it's never the employer that gets that right)
That means what the AI created is new (not always) but also not copyrightable. What will vibe coding companies do when they realize none of their software is protected by copyright? A EULA can’t prevent the use of public domain works. (In reality everything will increasingly move server side and no one will be able to access anything resembling code anyway).
Really surprised to see you get downvoted. This has been known for years and for a long time was more or less a pillar of thought in hacker spaces, at least since Aaron Swartz was killed by it. Copyright has basically only been used to keep society down.
If someone writes a really great Harry Potter (or whatever other character) book that you wind up really liking and you give them a buck for it, but then some faceless corporation yanks it out of your hands and throws them into prison because they weren't the original Harry Potter author, what has society really gained by doing that? Seems like we just put a guy in prison and burned that book that you liked for basically no reason.
We have the sum of all human knowledge at our fingertips thanks to the digitization of academia. Great! Huge positive for society, we should be in a golden age where anyone can learn anything they want to, but we're not because some guy in a suit says you owe him a million dollars to get access to the journal some paper was published in (a paper which was made by someone unrelated to the suit on your tax payer dime). Unbelievable, debatably apocalyptic net negative for society.
Nintendo doing this is just more of the same again. It won't ever stop until the law is fixed to fight for you and me instead of being used to kill people like Aaron.
Besides the ones who cave simply from intimidation or costly (even if pointless) lawsuits, or from customers stopping the flow of cash into Nintendo in the first place, there is nothing to stop them.
In the long term, the only way for them to fight this is streaming video games. But even then AI can be used to recreate gameplay from video material..
It's getting there. Most games are sitting on top of engines that do almost all the heavy lifting, so the AI just has to reverse engineer the assets, gameplay and levels from footage. It can even run the game alongside the clone to see what sort of differences it finds.
> Most games are sitting on top of engines that do almost all the heavy lifting
What? Yes, most game use engines, but all of them customize gameplay systems, graphics/shaders, UI, etc dramatically. That's like saying that most programs are easy to reverse engineer because Windows/Linux are doing almost all of the heavy lifting.
> so the AI just has to reverse engineer the assets, gameplay and levels from footage.
The word "just" is doing an incredible amount of lifting here, you're basically appealing to "AI is magic and will eventually be able to do everything". If that's your argument I can't dispute it I guess, but the fact is that at the current time there has not been an example of AI reverse engineering a modern video game from gameplay footage alone.
I suppose this gets into world models a bit, but I honestly don't know this is a reasonable question. Do you really care to know it was already done or do you care to know if it could reasonably be done if it were the best available way? GP seems to be talking about the latter but you seem to be talking about the former.
And that's one of the problems of creeping copyright maximalism that will lead people to be fed up.
How do these licenses gatekeep streaming when the only right granted by copyright is control over who can copy?
Don't forget the justification for copyright in the US is "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts". I don't see how blocking streaming fits under that justification.
Nintendo in particular leans way too hard on old intellectual property.
The first step to their continued survival is admitting that they lost. They put up a good fight, but betting the farm on nostalgia was already pissing in the wind 20 years ago. AI is a hurricane in comparison.
Do you think Nintendo, Disney, and other IP holders, are going to roll over? Just like RIAA did when MP3s were being traded? They are bigger now than ever and the rest of us are stuck with laws that threaten fair use, eliminate first sale rights, and threaten people who just want to fix the stuff they bought.
The bear will only be poked so much before it decides to get up. If the fight seems existential, it’s not the content owners who are going to end up losing.
So what? If it wasn't those two corporations it would be other giga-cap corporations. IP has been subverted by large companies with full time staffed lawyers to make sure they always win. The only way to beat them is to be another huge company with teams of lawyers.
If you think individuals have any of these rights anymore, then your're living in some alternate reality.
GameCube/GBA era was the last time they made great games with any consistency. Every single series had a significantly worse game for Wii/DS, yet the Wii sold way better and all the IGN reviews were great. 10/10 for Skyward Sword.
That's alright. Smash Bros, Zelda, Mario Sunshine/Galaxy, Mario Kart, Mario Party, Paper Mario, those are the big ones where I was disappointed in the Wii sequels. And the motion controls were overall a downgrade, which it seems even Nintendo admitted. Do you prefer the Wii ones, or are you just saying they were still great?
There are also people who say Nintendo lost their way with the GameCube and that the N64 was the real deal. Well, I can see that with Zelda at least. I was a kid at the time and went back to play Ocarina.
I'm saying mario galaxy is generally just as well regarded as sunshine and 64, I grew up on sunshine, its obviously my favourite but galaxy takes the second place over 64 for sure. we also had metroid prime 3. MKDS was the best portable mario kart at the time, MK Wii was also a great game even if it didn't have the same kinds of advanced techs (which casual gamers don't even care or know about), paper mario is almost impossible to compare since it changed so much from ttyd but also an quality game. none of those to me signal the loss in quality like we saw with all the "new super mario/luigi" rehashing that we saw during the wii u and 3ds era.
Agree and disagree. The OoT remake that just came out is basically all-in on banking on nostalgia, and it's sold out basically everywhere, so obviously what they're doing works even today. Them taking stuff down like this though is just obviously out of line, for much the same reason. If your stuff is flying off the shelves and selling out the world over, it should not matter to you that some people are ripping stuff for free on the internet somewhere. You made your money already, what more do you want?
It might be an anecdote, but the Gary Bowser decision got me to stop buying Nintendo, even though platformers are my favorite genre. My third video game was Super Mario World and I have every home Nintendo console from the SNES to the Switch and handheld from the Game Boy Color to the 3DS. It didn't hurt that my Steam Deck is also pretty good for games. I like having an open platform and it actually delivered on what I wanted with the OpenPandora.
Oh wow. I haven't thought about my openPandora preorder in a long time.
I'll also add that the indie scene on Steam is amazing. We're consistently getting great games at prices that are a fraction of any Nintendo game. Frankly, I don't miss Nintendo.
This is the exact reason why I refuse to purchase anything from Nintendo. Support community devs, not the corps that refuse to let people have their freedom to tinker.
Never subscribe, never buy, always torrent/darknet/whatever. Don't be a paypig; keep your capital for important life sustaining goods, eliminate reliance on services as much as possible, but most importantly never pay for entertainment!
Pay for entertainment as much as reasonable within your budget. If you're poor then ok pirate stuff. If you have a 6-figure salary, pay up.
Put that money into what you want to see more of. Suggestions: indie studios, crowdfunded projects, open hardware/open source platforms, places like Good Old Games, relatively open platforms like Steam, game studios that play nice with their fan community, etc.
Nintendo is waaayy down on that list. Go ahead buy their stuff after you've given above options a spin, and still have time or money left.
This sounds like a very naive point of view, you might as well say "don't breath".
The entertainment industry EMPLOYS people in such a wide variety of direct and indirect roles. People involved in creating the entertainment, translating the entertainment, marketing the entertainment, manufacturing and distributing the entertainment. Every aspect of creating an entertainment product (music, games, movies, theatre and more) employs people directly, and all of those direct employees spend their income in indirect ways that benefit you, for example spending in local businesses, paying their mortgages (which underpin pensions and economic stability), transport services (like busses, taxis etc), their family (days out, on kids etc), in their community, investing and also... on TAXES of all shapes and sizes.
You might have the opinion of "F the world", but unless you're living under a rock you directly benefit from all of the industries that are part of a functioning (local or global) economy.
I vowed never give Nintendo a penny again when they began DMCA'ing gameplay footage for games they don't even republish. They are complete bastards who don't need anyone's sympathy. Nintendo would love it if the culture they contributed to got erased from existence so our only choice is to buy their gimmicky tech demo style games.
All empirical evidence shows that boycotts don't work unless they're extremely big. Say, if you could get two thirds of the Nintendo fanbase to not buy a Switch 2, that would probably work. If it's only you, then you're just hurting yourself. If nothing else, you're cutting yourself off from the possibility to get a Switch 2 and hack it.
I'm of the same opinion. I also have my pet boycott, which is Microsoft, but I don't delude myself into thinking that it's anything but my little expression of feeling betrayed by them. No signal is being sent here, these entities are larger than us than I am for the ants in my garden. Realistically, it's a waste of attention to care, unless someone specifically wants to do so. Instead, I found that the more varied things I partake in, the better quality of life I have.
As somebody who is involved in the rom hacking scene and cares a lot about game preservation, I think the "bleeding edge" emulators do us a lot of harm. Want to emulate the Game Cube? Awesome. Want to allow people to run the Ocarina of Time remake on PC less than a month after its release? I mean come on. I want to support these projects for purposes of preservation, but because we often do so little to distinguish between retro and current, the outright piracy makes the whole community look bad.
But the fact is Nintendo is one of the most litigious of the copyright monopolists, a class of rent seekers who have systematically robbed us of our fair use and public domain rights.
There is no reason to believe they'd leave you alone if you refrained from hacking their latest games and consoles. In fact, they have repeatedly proved that they won't do that.
They have already made their fortunes many times over. They have already been more than adequately rewarded for their works. Even the Game Cube and its games are already old enough that they should be in the public domain, but Nintendo couldn't care less, they will absolutely hoard even NES games from the 80s, and they will absolutely reserve the right to sell you that exact same Mario ROM over and over again until the end of time. You and I will be dead and buried before this stuff enters the public domain. If they ever do. Who's to say the trillion dollar industry won't buy laws, I mean lobby the government for yet another copyright extension?
I just can't deal with it anymore. I think people should radicalize, not play nice with these monopolist corporations. I seriously hope AI hammers in the final nail into the coffin of intellectual property.
I have no love for Nintendo's litigiousness, but the reason to believe they'd leave you alone if you refrained from hacking their latest games and consoles is that they've left alone developers who refrained from hacking their latest games and consoles. Emulators for everything before the Switch are still widely available and untouched by Nintendo. Even Yuzu, the Switch emulator Nintendo lawfare'd out of existence, lasted six years - almost entirely contemporary to the hardware - until they flew too close to the sun by soliciting donations to the tune of hundreds-of-thousands per year and encouraging piracy of TotK at launch.
Citra (3DS) shut down with Yuzu. So not exactly. And Ryujinx did not take donations nor encourage piracy of TotK at launch, yet met a similar fate.
Regardless, for previous generations included, work on emulators and hacking consoles happened when the console was still current, of course.
You can’t start the reverse engineering work only after the console is superseded, by then it is too late for preservation, especially with live service games.
Citra shut down with Yuzu because they were owned by the same company that
It's true that Nintendo hasn't always sicced its lawyers on emulator developers for current gen - I'm fondly remembering the GBA era, when emulators based on leak dev kits started popping up before the console was even released - although that really only hurts matheusmoreira's point all the more; they're clearly OK with giving devs a fair amount of leeway. As for why that didn't apply to Ryujinx, it's hard to say, though my best guess is Nintendo was trying to get ahead of the "Yuzu alternative tears of the kingdom" Google searches.
This is a minor point, but I'll mention there really weren't any real NES or SNES emulators during their lifetime and yet they're among the most well-preserved consoles. Although sadly this did mean we lost quite a bit of Satellaview content, speaking of live services.
Btw the Mario ROM and the NES emulator they sell you are lifted from the "filthy pirates". nintendo doesn't dump its own old NES games, it just downloads them like the rest of us do. iirc this was caught in some of their headers referencing pirate groups.
Personally cannot wait for AI emulation and recomps to kill nintendo hardware / $700 Zelda machines. 4k framegen dlss5 on essentially mobile games is a joy.
Leave community-built projects up just long enough to further foster those communities and reinforce interest in your products across long time spans....
You don't even need github source code. You could spin up a gitlab community server (or Forgejo or 50 other options) today to host these projects, but your domain/server provider will shut you down in two hours.
And if that doesn't happen, wait till you find a legal letter sent from Nintendo lawyers in your mailbox.
Unless you want to play hide and seek like z library or pirate bay which will become a full time job.
> but your domain/server provider will shut you down in two hours.
> And if that doesn't happen, wait till you find a legal letter sent from Nintendo lawyers in your mailbox.
The issue with all these projects is they host `ObliterateSwitchDRM` on GitHub under their account @FrankJohnson with the bio "The one and only Frank Johnson at 123 Mainstreet Ave. In San Francisco, CA working for Google!" and go all shockedpikachuface when Nintendo sends them a 'fuck you' letter through their gaggle of lawyers.
If you're @schizomariofan185 who hosts the project on a Gitlab/Forgejo/whathaveyou on fucknintendo.su hosted on a VPS in Bulgaria/Russia/Romania paid for with crypto, they will literally NEVER find you. Such an effort could easily be crowdfunded by the community. Bonus points if you yourself reside in one of those countries, so they can't even do anything to you, if they somehow did.
Why would one need Github source code to clone what git does, even if there were not already several dozen off-the-shelf self-host solutions (Gitlab says hi)?
I think people have learned they get x months of free hosting on a platform everyone already knows about & how to use for the low cost of $0 for each time they upload it to GitHub.
Winning isn't limited to a court judgment in your favor. If Nintendo wouldn't win at trial, but successfully suppresses the thing it wants to suppress without going to trial, they won.
Not talking about a trial. Nintendo is not going to win on any plane; forks and recomps pop up like mushrooms. It’s nice to see corpos eat their own slop for once.
On the one hand game preservation is a wonderful thing, a gift to humanity. It's the reason why I can play Eternal Sonata today on my computer in 4K instead of never again probably.
On the other hand, it's fucked up people are playing Ocarina of Time for free 2 days after launch.
> On the other hand, it's fucked up people are playing Ocarina of Time for free 2 days after launch.
Yet most of those are not lost sales. They never even want to buy the game to begin with (most of them doesn't even have a Switch 2). Also as easy emulation gets nowadays it's still a "technical hurdle" for most people.
It's all guessing. My guess is that about half of those are lost sales. The kind of person who does this is obviously interested in the game. Emulating Switch 2 isn't a hacker task but isn't easy, so they were determined to play it. I think they'd buy it if there were no other choice. This emulation also requires a powerful PC, so they have money.
An opposite example would be emulating random NES games, probably only trying them out. And those are still sold on Nintendo's virtual consoles.
There's an easy way for Nintendo to shut down most piracy from people who just don't want to buy a switch 2 and pay an arm and a leg for the super-fast cutting edge microSD only compatible (at this time at least) with the switch 2 - just make the games available digitally on every platform. I don't want a bunch of locked-down consoles with different stores when I have fully owned-by-me PCs and handheld systems capable of playing everything already.
They don't want this though, and they're the ones who make it. It'd also cut down on piracy if they made the games very cheap. Like how the music industry cut down on piracy by going from $12 albums (in 1990s money) to pennies per album, because they had no other choice.
I don't really think it's fucked up. It's not something I participate in for various reasons, but you are never going to catch me feeling bad for any business as large as nintendo. I don't hate them or anything, but they're big enough that they don't need defenders.
1) Reasonable copyright duration. Long enough to give creators a chance to recoup their investment. Short enough to not get in the way of enriching the public domain. For games, something like 5..10 years should do. Books? Maybe a bit longer.
2) For creators: offer your products at a price & in a way such that for the vast majority of (potential) customers, your product is the most attractive. Jack up prices, add draconic DRM, and customers decide that pirates offer the better product. That's on you, not those pirates fault.
Failing that, Nintendo & co loose the moral high ground, and have no right to complain when people break DRM, distribute illegal copies to run on emulators etc.
Or maybe conclude that copyright laws don't serve the public, so maybe it's better to abandon / ignore the concept entirely.
Copyright has overstepped its boundaries when we have to break it to preserve works that their own creators don't even care about until someone else starts to do their work for them.
By definition they do not. Some poor family out there NEEDS money, as in money to live, and Nintendo does not. If a kid in that family decides to play Zelda for free, Nintendo does not suddenly deserve claim over that family's money, because Nintendo doesn't need it and that family does.
Money is a tool to exchange one commodity for another and not some divine arbiter of goodness, where the more you have the more good you are. To say some corporation deserves money when they have all the money they could ever use is so ridiculous to me. "Yes, we have made hundreds of millions, but poor little old us deserved billions!"
I'm glad another person has common sense. I love retro games so use emulators a lot. Even owning and collecting old games, the hardware breaks, so like you said, game preservation is amazing.
However, pirating brand new games sucks. The game industry itself and people's jobs rely on companies making a profit from the games they create.
Yes, Nintendo has a lot of money and is a huge company, they also have shitty legal practices, but they make great games and deserve to continue to make a profit on the huge investments they make in games.
Games are cheap compared to how expensive everything else has gotten. Just buy the damn games. There are so many other shitty companies you can pirate from, but most game companies aren't it.
You should consider who it is, that is pirating these games. It's basically entirely one of 2 categories of people
1. people who don't have the money to buy the game. And consider this too: maybe they had to make the choice between this game or another game. Either way, they only buy one game, and not both. There's no sale lost.
2. people who just decided that nintendo doesn't deserve their money for some moral reason and if they didn't have an emulator, they just wouldn't by the game anyways. Again, there's no sale lost.
Can we start worrying about the money for Nintendo when it's actually a problem? They made a remake of an existing title they already got money from and already owned the story/assets and sold extra 5.2M copies in 4 days, for at least $60 each... They'll be fine and the optimal amount of fraud is non-zero.
the discourse on this stuff has really gone downhill. that said...
17 years ago, there was this guy who thought suing college students for pirating music was righteous, as it was the RIAA's only real recourse to enforce their rights. now he is president of the greatest copyright violating institution in all of history.
it is really unfair to go and point at the end user and say, "cognitive dissonance." the polite way of saying that someone is a moron. because the harvard and stanford dropouts leading these near $1T valuation companies, well, they changed their minds for money. to me, flip floppers are also morons. or perhaps, nobody's a moron. at the end of the day, piracy will lead to less Crysis titles and more Monopoly Go and Roblox brainrot, so time will tell if culturally we are better off.
It used to be worthwhile to task risks in filmmaking because if you made a smash hit movie, you could keep it in theaters for a long time before offering at-home access, and still charge a lot for that. I know people talk about how much cheaper theaters used to be, but ~$10 meant a lot more in say the early 2000s, and that was per-person, and they had more volume.
Piracy set a ceiling on the price and fuss they can ask for. A producer taking big risks will take the same losses as before but can't milk the hits. It's now better to aim for a steady supply of ok media to keep people paying subscriptions. Bonus if they can fit into some franchise so they can also milk the IP in non-piratable ways like merch and theme parks. Some point to tech alone (minus piracy) for killing theaters. Yes, but that's a different point. Without piracy, they could've charged a lot for digital streaming new releases. This did actually happen for some period of time. You only broke even vs theater tickets if like 10 people were watching, ignoring the cost of the equipment.
An alternative theory is that media companies consolidated and became monocultured, and that this would've happened without piracy.
he has access to my LLM chats and, unlike the people who run google, has no qualms about violating my privacy, let alone IP, so i don't really want to piss him off haha
> ... This process protects Nintendo’s copyright-protected video games
Does Nintendo use LLMs to write games? AIUI, LLM output doesn't qualify for copyright protection. I guess maybe there's an argument for their older catalog.
Copyright requires the subject matter to have a modicum of human creativity. Nintendo's games absolutely qualify, they have people designing the games and the artwork.
"LLM output doesn't qualify for copyright protection" is an oversimplification. You aren't automatically disqualified from copyright protection if you've touched an LLM. It's just that copyright protections only apply to human creativity. You can qualify even when you use LLMs if you were humanly involved creatively with the output to a sufficient degree.
There's more to copyright than the code + the Switch came out in 2017, so even if 100% of everything they did today was via LLMs (I'm sure it isn't) and this line of thinking applied to all of it then it still wouldn't be relevant.
Also the focus seems to be on bypassing "technological protection measures" portion of the DMCA, which is much easier to go after than the code. Decomps are much more focused on purely the code angle and, for now, still don't seem to be in the focus of these attempts (I assume because it's harder to go after with the same kind of claim, but really only Nintendo will know why they haven't tried yet).
Reminder to all that barring access to internal docs, use of internal software/firmware components and information obtained through nefarious means, emulation is 100% legal pretty much everywhere in the world.
Edit: of course there's the gray area of scrapers, game downloaders etc... but those are not emulators.
but also: distribution is often not legal
of emulators, or of copyrighted games/code?
It is not illegal in Europe!
it depends.
For the US, DMCA bans circumvention devices. It is possible to argue that emulators run afoul of this provision.
Note that there is the following exception to dmca circumvention provision:
"Computer programs and video games distributed in formats that have become obsolete and that require the original media or hardware as a condition of access, when circumvention is accomplished for the purpose of preservation or archival reproduction of published digital works by a library or archive. A format shall be considered obsolete if the machine or system necessary to render perceptible a work stored in that format is no longer manufactured or is no longer reasonably available in the commercial marketplace."
Some people find this confusing. Section 1201 of the DMCA has two parts. One part bans circumventing DRM, and the other part bans distributing devices that can circumvent DRM. The Section 1201 exemptions published by the Copyright Office only apply to the first part, not the second. I imagine it works this way because the companies lobbying for the DMCA to be passed didn't want to make it legal to sell or distribute circumvention devices as long as someone has a legal right to break the DRM, as that would defeat the purpose of the law.
From where is that quote?
https://www.copyright.gov/1201/2006/ although see sibling comment, i may have misunderstood how broadly it applies.
Also i think i was quoting an old version that has since expired. i guess https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/FR-2024-10-28/pdf/2024-2... is the current version maybe.
DMCA is so weird. Anything can be a circumvention device. XOR. Harsh wording with an if then.
I started to think about this like physical locks and that made it seem less weird. You don't need a great lock to communicate "this is a private space" and there's no "but your honor is was a crappy lock" defense to trespassing. Circumventing bad copy protection still establishes intent to circumvent so you're still in trouble.
Notably, neither lockpicks nor lockpicks are illegal.
By making circumvention itself illegal the DMCA gives the producer to essentially invent new IP law.
Want to take a DVD you bought while vacationing in China and play it back home in the US. That is perfectly legal. However, if the DVD has even the flimsiest form of region locking, you would need to circumvent them, which is a crime.
>Notably, neither lockpicks nor lockpicks are illegal.
As someone with lockpicks and practice locks, sure. But as soon as I pick someone else's lock without permission, it very much is a crime.
> But as soon as I pick someone else's lock without permission, it very much is a crime.
Right, but no one's installing a modchip on someone else's Switch without permission. No one's stealing Blu-rays to rip. I'd actually challenge you to find any DMCA anticircumvention claim where the people accused of violating it were doing things to hardware or media they didn't own or have permission from the owner to access.
>But as soon as I pick someone else's lock without permission, it very much is a crime.
The analogy is broken and doesn't apply.
The better analogy would be someone installing a lock on your property which you have the right to enter and use, and you going to jail for breaking the lock.
In real world, of course you can break someone's lock without permission when they put it on your property without getting your permission to do it.
And you buying property means the locks are no longer someone else's. They are yours to pick, cut off, melt, or throw into volcanoes.
Nowadays, it wouldn't be your property, you just licensed it from the manufacturer.
Even so.
If your landlord decides to put an extra lock on the unit you're renting, breaking that lock is not a crime.
It's a rental contract violation, maybe, depending on jurisdiction. Your landlord may try to charge you for the cost of the lock if you destroy it.
Picking the lock to get access to the property you are legally entitled to have access to is not a crime.
Lockpicks are illegal to possess in some jurisdictions (locksmiths obviously exempt)
In Illinois, owning lockpicking equipment without a locksmith license is prima facie evidence of intent to break into someone's home. You can be charged with attempted burglary just for having the lockpicks.
This is an intent thing. A protected auth checksum verification step could be the number of letters in the packet and still count, it is not a technical provision
Circumventing a xor by xoring it back is still attempted circumvention.
The "arguing in favor of a bad law by saying they'll just look at your intent" thing is completely invalid for the DMCA because your intent is the thing they don't care about. That's why it's such an absurd law.
Suppose you commit unambiguous copyright infringement. Then they could already sue you regardless of whether there is any circumvention and anti-circumvention is completely redundant. It has no actual purpose that exceeds what you would get from presuming willful infringement if someone had to circumvent copy protection and then having different penalties for willful and unintentional infringement.
But now suppose you don't commit copyright infringement. You make a fair use copy of the work. Completely different intent. They don't care. It's crazy.
Where this gets really wild is the prohibition on circumvention tools.
Suppose the copyright expires on a work previously under copyright. Happens all the time. You now have a bunch of works with a "technological protection measure" preventing you from copying them, even though they're not copyrighted. Your intent is now to publish a tool to help everyone remove the DRM from those public domain works. But maybe the same DRM is also used on other works that are still under copyright -- and you may not even know that. So does your intent matter or not?
To clarify by intent I mean whether the intent was to circumvent or not wrt strength of technical DRM not whether the intent was to use it fairly or not; nothing to do with morals or ethics. I make no comment on whether it is right, just, or absurd.
When people say intent matters, what they generally mean is intent to do something wrong. It implies that having no malicious intent would exculpate you. Applying it exclusively to the intent to do something innocuous is... I believe the technical term is cheating.
And does the DMCA have even that as an intent requirement? Suppose you tell your local AI to copy something without even knowing that it has any DRM, and it does. Is that still a violation? Obvious loophole if it isn't, but intent requirement 100% fully absent if it is.
Programmer runs into the fact the law runs on intent and actual happenings rather than the form of a thing, gets confused.
Anything can be a murder weapon too. Kitchen fork. Rubber ducky.
Yes, I agree with all that. But we accept that reverse engineering is often a correct, honest, morally legit thing to do. But tape on a padlock made of paper onto the thing and suddenly you are criminally liable for repairing your tractor.
It's morally correct to go back in time and kill baby Hitler, but you'd still be charged with murder.
I didn't know what to make of this.
To onlookers it would be a baffling and cruel action. (Also some would say, it would not be morally correct, because the baby didn't do anything wrong.)
But repairing ones' tractor should hardly elicit such reactions.
Paypal explicitly bans emulators as do some other services, although that's not really a legal issue per se.
Right - the trouble is now that we're seeing emulators and recompilers that are obviously derivative works of NDA-restricted SDKs.
These SDKs are lavishly documented, full of worked examples and have top-notch toolchains. More than enough for Claude and a really big stack of tokens to turn into an emulator.
So who's to tell whether a new emulator didn't come from forbidden information? If there are any honest efforts left, this will surely drown them.
I don't think it works that way. Putting information behind an NDA does not make it "forbidden information" that nobody can ever use. It means that one party (the one who signed the NDA) can't disclose it. To the extent someone either violates the NDA or the owner is sloppy and posts the information publicly, there are no restrictions on what people NOT party to the NDA can do with it.
Nintendo (and others) are free to go after those who violate NDAs, and to go after scrapers or whatnot, but they can't declare the information itself off-limits to everyone.
Trade secrets are absolutely protected by law. There are limits of course, but they are protected.
If the owner of a trade secret publishes (non-trivial) documentation about it, even accidentally, isn't it then no longer a trade secret?
Is it that trade secrets are protected or that corporate espionage is prohibited?
Both
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uniform_Trade_Secrets_Act
They’re protected in certain ways. Notably though, they are NOT protected from reverse engineering.
This myth needs to stop being spread. Emulation lies in a legal grey area and only some parts of it have been tested in court. Only those parts are defined as legal.
It may well be legal, it may not, but until it's tested in court then nobody can fully claim it's 100% legal
Googling turns up some court cases. Among them this which included copying of a copyrighted artifact:
"Sony Computer Entertainment, Inc. v. Connectix Corp. (2000): The Ninth Circuit ruled that Connectix's intermediate copying of the Sony PlayStation BIOS during reverse engineering to create the Virtual Game Station emulator was fair use."
That is how legal things usually work. Legal by default because it's not illegal.
We are about to get a flood of new nes, snes, gensis, etc games. Corporations that require moats to exist are in serious trouble, we don't need new drm'ed hardware for entertainment. It's going to be the 90s again but even crazier.
FWIW Nintendo, I refuse to give you guys any support after you went after Bowser. I genuinely found that to be awful behavior
Probably not worth losing lifelong customers and PR over piracy concerns.
Yep, similar. Was big into Switch 1, but have moved on permanently from Nintendo.
Same here. The switch 1 will be my last nintendo console.
I'm willing to bet that the number of people who would genuinely boycott nintendo over that, along with the crossover with people who pirate software is an absolute drop in the bucket for nintendo to care about
Edit: Also Gary Bowser he had a criminal case brought against him by the US before he got sued by Nintendo and was sentenced to 3 years in prison
“Give up and give in”
Wow thanks for the pep talk.
Yeah I gave up on them for the multiple DMCA and copyright bullshit they keep pulling. I'm not really a console guy, but my friend gave me a Switch 1, and that was wonderful at a time I was in the hospital. But ever since then they've just become another rentier trading in their games, but attacking users and fans over and over. Screw em. I wish more people understood and felt like that, but most people don't care about the politics. They just want another Mario game for their kids.
The sad part is I would gladly fork over money, the new Zelda looks really nice, but, I'm not that desperate. I'll pay for another yacht for Gabe over Nintendo these days.
It’s funny that in gaming circles, the sentiment is the exact opposite: in the time of live service games, microtransactions, pay-to win schemes, premium currencies, gacha games is Nintendo taken to be one of the last big gaming companies that will sell you a complete, single player, physical game made as a labor of love for the craft.
wdym ever since
this is like their entire business model since they started selling console games
Here is a video of the gaming historian “Tengen: Atari Games vs Nintendo” as one of the early examples.
https://youtu.be/fLA_d9q6ySs?is=j-b9CGIUo9JHzkGw
I have absolutely no sympathy for Team Xecuter. They knowingly bricked consoles, misled customers, stole GPL software and shipped buggy software leading thousands of users to getting banned. This goes way back to the Gateway 3DS days (same team) where they did the same shit.
Bowser didn't belong to the core team, he was someone that helped maintain the site and handled customer support and feedback
I read all of these comments and was feeling absolutely outraged. The more I read about the actual case, the less I felt that way. He wasn't just some random guy screwed for handling a landing page and customer support, he did that and:
- Operated rom-bank.com, which provided downloadable libraries of >10k ROMs for the users
- Handled additional product marketing sites, distributor reviews, and advertising.
- Received ~$320,000 in direct payments and website ad revenue, which he fully knew came from this company selling pirating hardware/software as he operated the above to enable them to do so
- Probably more, I lost interest in trying to find actual details over repetition of minor pieces of it
This operation made 10s of millions, he made hundreds of thousands and clearly knew what was going on for many years. I'm not saying I'm happy with the punishments handed to him, but I also don't buy the claims he was just some dude that got fucked out of left field because Nintendo was pure evil (emphasis on the pure). I still feel like they could throw the dude a bone at this point though, but maybe the popular 5 minute take is already so set in people's minds that Nintendo just sees bringing the topic up in people's minds again as a massive liability for backlash. Or maybe they just don't care and wanted more. Either way, he's no martyr for those who just want fair use of what they buy and it doesn't make me hate Nintendo.
320k for the period of time he worked for the group amounts to a meager 44k a year, it's a low salary.
Also piracy doesn't work like that, it's a speculation on damage but no real damage is done. It's not like people stopped buying games and consoles because they could emulate. Quite the contrary, emulation works almost as advertising. Those that stay on emulation wouldn't purchase the console and games anyway, and those that would is always exaggerated in these kinds of plea.
In https://www.theguardian.com/games/2024/feb/01/the-man-who-ow... Bowser says that fighting the charges would cost a lot of time and money and pleading guilty is simpler to deal with, so I would take information from the plea deal with a pinch of salt.
So he provided great service to people for a relatively low salary, and that's why it's OK to jail him and fine him millions...?
I thought they have to protect their IP or risk losing the ability to defend it later.
That's trademark, I don't think it applies here.
Went after Bowser? Isn’t Bowser like the central villain character?
Gary Bowser, dev behind Team Xecuter https://www.theguardian.com/games/2024/feb/01/the-man-who-ow...
GP may be referring to Doug Bowser [0], former president and COO of Nintendo of America, but a brief search didn't turn up any reasons why Nintendo would have ousted him.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doug_Bowser
Yes, same here.
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And the people before Bowser didn't bother you?
I mean 6/7 right? What do you expect? Nintendo never allowed it, always went for these 'projects'.
I don't think Nintendo lost any lifelong customers because lifelong customers don't need what Bowser and co did. so
The outcome was obvious.
Anyway, the team behind Yuzu is still at large and the development will continue elsewhere, from aside, like in older days of emulation. Not everything has to default to GitHub, and not everything can.
Hosting in GitHub is a terrible approach for these kind of projects, I don't get why this is the norm when the outcome is so often the same.
It's because slews of these emulators are vibecoded and the maintainers don't have much experience, if any. All of the serious efforts host their own code.
The new hotness these days is Lichii, which also supports Switch 2.
Which is a fork of Eglantine, which is a fork of Eden, which is a fork of Yuzu.
thanks for that lineage, TMYK
There's a bunch of different Eglantine forks around right now (and a few other non-Eden based), different ones can sometimes be better for specific games.
Their goal is almost certainly to keep the practice of running current gen console games outside their console fringe.
So they don't need to stamp it out completely. Pushing it further underground is good enough.
It's a bit late though as far as I can see NX2Navi the static recompiler for the ocarina of time remake is still up and being updated.
This seems mostly them whipping their layers who respond by doing what they can, not necessarily what Nintendo actually wants.
It's firmware for modchips? But the modchips are still being sold, installed and the people involved have access to the firmware.
I think AI is going to make some kind of p2p github style decentralization closer to reality. The gap is the unique identifier vs the hash identifier and identity/signature management.
But the tools are all there to create some kind of dark web, especially as the real web is going to be flooded with garbage.
https://knotless.dev/ (not mine, I just think its a fine primitive for distributed version control. git on atproto with your code in a pds)
Knotless.dev is now in the app store, manage your repos in your pocket - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50462272 - November 2026
There is also a pds that supports being backed by an object storage system, for trivial pds node hydration, warmup, and underlying data durability: https://vlpds.jazco.dev/docs/overview | https://vlpds.jazco.dev/
Additional resources recently released:
https://rainshare.dev/
https://bsky.app/profile/rainshare.dev/post/3n27litnp7k2q
- Got leftover AI usage that's going to expire? Use Rainshare to find people who could use a hand with a software project/issue. Nobody pays, and anyone can ask.
- Introducing mutual aid, for AI coding plans & usage limits! Use Rainshare to find people who could use a hand with a software project/issue. Anyone with spare usage can send their agent to pitch in so it doesn’t get wasted. Nobody pays, and anyone can ask. Works with @tangled.org and @knotless.dev
(again, no affiliation, I just think its cool!)
Radicle has this kind of identity management, and it supports Tor as a network transport.
Git is already decentralized? What are you envisioning?
> the team behind Yuzu is still at large
Huh? Sure no one got imprisoned but virtually all Yuzu developers stopped contributing to emulation entirely after the lawsuit. New people came up but few of them are driven by the same passion as the old guard, so collective knowledge and experience fell off a cliff as a result.
Progress continues (much slower than before), but it's strange to claim things move forward like nothing happened.
Where do the projects move to if they've been banned from Github?
Edit: Where would they host it and not get taken down by DMCA?
https://tangled.org/ or https://gitflic.ru/
.ru, sure a secure place to put important things there...
Security wasn't the criteria asked for. You can always have another copy for that.
in any case, safe from the crazy American laws)
GitLab should be the closest comparable one. After that there are a bunch of smaller hosts for different niches.
There no lack in choice if you search, especially for these kind of project that don't need a ton of tool integration or CI/CD tools.
GitLab also complied with some DMCAs in the past few days
Self host? Github isn't a monopoly
Eden, the biggest one, is self-hosted.
Nintendo can DMCA you unless you host it somewhere remote.
Seems like there are several countries which are willing to ignore DMCA. https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/dmca-igno...
Anyone can DMCA anything for anything. The relevant factor is how likely different providers in the chain are to respond drastically to bullshit requests.
For instance if I sent a DMCA to HN insisting that your comment violated my copyright, they'd probably ignore it, or ban my account.
Nintendo doesn't have a fucking clue what you have locally until you publish it for the world to see. Until you host it somewhere remote, there is nothing to DMCA.
Is there anything like bittorrent for github repos?
That was always the appeal of people exploring shared compute and storage on crypto networks, it was overhyped and burdened by the financial speculation (though I imagine it also helped fund development), because the cool thing for me was people trying to build resilient distributed systems that protect from these kinds of issues
That would be... git. It's specifically designed to be used in the distributed manner that you describe.
tangled.org but they had some security issues a few months back
what issues? i think you are thinking of radicle https://radicle.dev/2026/09/23/disclosure-of-vulnerability-i...
ooops yes sorry about that got them totally mixed up
Or Git
Several, choose a flavor:
P2P https://radicle.dev/
Nostr https://git.iris.to/ https://gittr.space/ https://gitworkshop.dev/ https://nostrapps.github.io/nostrgit/
Ty! o7
Setting up forejo on a VPS takes an hour, at most, for someone who has already done it a couple of times.
Every single Switch 2 emulator is still available on Github and Gitlab.
And just checked most Switch 1 emulator is still available too because they are not hosted on Github but rather on self hosted repos with their own domains.
Not that it matters because they will be back next week either way.
The only surprising thing is the PicoFly firmware but that's such a niche. Most peope who have a chipmodded Switch never touch that.
At the rate we are going, we won't need emulators sooner rather than later: We will have direct "ports" of binaries for different platforms. I wonder how feasible is to use JVM (or CLR) technology to make these ports multi-platform. What's the state of GPU access in the JVM
> We will have direct "ports" of binaries for different platforms
It is already happening at record pace. Just look at all the new ports, recomps and decomps coming out lately: https://www.youtube.com/@VideoGameEsoterica/videos
Almost all of these are native cross-platform PC versions of specific console games.
Everything even up to Switch 2, Xbox One and PS5 are now getting working static recompilations.
The emulators are already in the weights. It's just a matter of one or two prompts to patch them into a running binary.
The business world is slow but it will eventually see that an open system will sell better.
Not even sooner or later, it's already happened. Friend of mine has already beat the new Ocarina of Time remake through a native PC recompilation as of two days ago and that game only released five days prior.
We won’t need them on Macs because of the same ARM architecture between the Switch and Apple Silicon. Funnily Macs are now the bleeding edge well at least as Switch games goes.
https://github.com/seedds/nxnative
Well... shit...
Hell, we probably won't care about ports anymore once people flood the market by cloning the ever loving daylights out of every popular game.
Emulators always, without fail assume piracy. Let's say you bought a cartridge, dumped it and grabbed an emulator. You bought the game but "stole" the console sale.
Nintendo's business is not just games, they need HW sales as well for the whole thing to make sense. Since I have both the game and the console, I can feel justified, but it's not their TOS and that's enough for me. Game/book/music preservation is another story I guess.
Tangent, but the new Zelda Ocarina of Time runs butterfly smooth in insane melees on an S2. Got it on day 1 and we are both over 40, pathetic. Sucks for me, she usurped it and I don't watch next to her so that I can go through the story on my own. Just watched a few encounters to get the tasted. Great game so far, 1-2AM isn't unusual.
> Let's say you bought a cartridge, dumped it and grabbed an emulator. You bought the game but "stole" the console sale.
Let's stop assuming stuff.
I own a switch 1, I own Zelda Breath Of The Wild, yet I have been playing it on Yuzu on my computer. First when the switch stopped working and needed a new battery, then I realized I could run it at better resolution on my computer, in any room with larger screen on my laptop thanks to moonlight and I don't have to actually look for it and find it abandonned and discharged by my daughters or that the joycons started drifting again and in need of a repair.
Did Nintendo lose a sale? No.
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> Emulators always, without fail assume piracy.
An emulator is a piece of software and can't make assumptions. I'm not sure who you're referring to doing the assuming in your sentence.
> You bought the game but "stole" the console sale.
Not buying something and then not getting it isn't stealing or piracy.
> they need HW sales as well for the whole thing to make sense.
Nintendo has no legal entitlement for their business plan to work financially.
An emulator is a piece of software and can't make assumptions. I'm not sure who you're referring to doing the assuming in your
Ok, fellow pedant! By dumping and decrypting the ROM, one is breaking the license agreement. And these ROMs slip into the wild. You've read the EULA? It's DRM circumvention. You don't need to like it. No skin off of my nose, but this isn't a John Deer right to repair situation.
1. License Grant/Restrictions; Third-Party Content. Subject to the terms of this Agreement, Nintendo grants you a non-exclusive, revocable license to use the Software solely on the Console for your personal, non-commercial use. For clarity, the Software is licensed, not sold, to you, and you may not make use of the Software except as expressly authorized by this Agreement. Without limitation, you agree that you may not ( a) publish, copy, modify, reverse engineer, lease, rent, decompile, disassemble, distribute, offer for sale, or create derivative works of any portion of the *Software;*
NA EULA, perhaps different in your country - https://en-americas-support.nintendo.com/app/legal/a_id/6858...
Nintendo has no legal entitlement for their business plan to work financially.
Their lawyers will craft it. See ya!
> > Nintendo has no legal entitlement for their business plan to work financially.
> Their lawyers will craft it. See ya!
The EFF actually coined a term for this in its analyses of the impact of the DMCA: "Felony Contempt of Business Model". Of course, when they wrote those words they expected the very phrase to constitute a kind of reductio ad absurdum.
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/06/felony-contempt-busine...
Obviously privileging arbitrary business models over others isn't one of the legitimate purposes of the law. So what makes you think there's a public interest in supporting Nintendo's business model beyond what existing laws, which do not prohibit emulation or even the sale of compatible consoles, already do?
> Their lawyers will craft it. See ya!
If lawyers could have, they would have.
> Their lawyers will craft it. See ya!
This is a utterly empty response. What is it that you're arguing exactly, that a company can use the law to be a nuisance and that the actual letter of the law doesn't matter at all?
If so, then why even quote law in your arguments? Because by your own admission, none of it matters.
I thought they sell consoles at a loss? [1] So wouldn't you be saving them money by not buying one?
[1]: https://www.ft.com/content/a781c853-3fed-4dfc-b940-413754618...
They definitely do with the Japanese version which is local region locked and subsidized (this is the only one you can get off the shelves, the english global version is online store exclusive and more expensive, matching the global price)
Not sure, but the installed base grows and so does the walled garden :) Nintendo always held the line on console prices, was my impression as opposed to Sega/Sony/PS. "Outdated" components and in-house circuitry, besides the ancient Tegra on the S1. I am spitballing from memory, someone else here might provide real insight. Regardless though, they require Mario Kart running on their HW, not a PC. Their margin is their decision.
There is also a very juicy accessory ecosystem. A Pro Controller is $90 these days. I've tried clones, but Nintendo paywalls a few things, like powering up from the controller.
> You bought the game but "stole" the console sale.
No? Virtually every game I've ever played under emulation, not counting emulators ported to consoles for official re-releases/collections, is for a console I've bought. Many of them are games and consoles I still have working copies of both of right now, and I play under emulation because I want save states or FPS unlocking patches or a more convenient cheats system or whatever. At the same time it's not at all unusual to use other original hardware (e.g., a Wiimote) with your emulator. So it doesn't prevent hardware sales in that sense either.
And even if you do have the hardware, it's perfectly legitimate to buy it used, or pick it up out of a dumpster! "Piracy" is deliberately a loaded word and we should probably avoid using it altogether. But regardless of the choice of words, the world doesn't revolve around forcing people to buy new hardware from the likes of Nintendo. No angel is stripped of its wings every time someone buys an FPGA-based, cartridge-compatible emulation device instead of buying a used SNES at a garage sale.
Yes, "deliberately loaded", on purpose to protect copywriter owners. Once a ROM is out in the wild, it's free for all, doesn't matter if you yourself if have the hardware and bought the software. Not many are as pious as you.
It's not piracy to not give someone money just because they wanted your money.
We'd better ban the sale of used consoles because that's piracy! Send the police in to raid the thrift stores!
they literally tried to do this
TIL: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2006/mar/30/guardianw...
May the forks live on. Also people seriously need to consider Radicle.
- https://radicle.network/
Please stop trying to shill this. The crypto aspect always made the project look shady, and the massive security oversights really hammer home the fact that this is not a serious project.
What's the difference between this and https://tangled.org? This is the first time I've seen it mentioned, and it sounds like it's trying to a build a similar solution.
Also, why are we basically re-implementing a P2P network for VCS when we already have a really good generic P2P networking system which also has Git support?
https://reticulum.network/manual/git.html
IIRC Radicle is ActivityPub/traditional federation style (servers talk in a mesh) and Tangled is built on ATproto which means it's trying to work with a logical single firehose feed of everything everyone does.
I'm not a fan of how they handled this situation.. they failed to verify that the encryption in their software was actually working and then tried to sprinkle sugar on it by calling it a "security vulnerability in the network protocol used by..". It wasn't a vulnerability in the protocol, they just didn't use it properly. If you make a mistake like that, you need to just own it.
https://radicle.dev/2026/09/23/disclosure-of-vulnerability-i...
Came here to suggest this, happy to see it already suggested.
Looks like there are several backups/forks of Yuzu already shared there. Nice to see!
Why would they self host when they can just keep rehosting them on GitHub or similar for free every few months?
If there is one thing the emulator community is already good at... it's backing things up!
Presumably to have a "central" place to submit issues+PRs to.
They still do, except for a several hours over a year (less than GitHub downtime anyways).
Not only is it free, but every time Nintendo does this it's free advertising via Streisand effect.
I do not want to hate on them but they did have a pretty massive oversight of ... not checking that any of their traffic was encrypted or authenticated.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49817524
I thought I had the right to use circumvention procedures to back up my own games. If I own game and run it on an emulator with a firmware extracted from my device, what law am I breaking?
As far as I understand it, the way it works is that section 1201 of the DMCA has two parts. One part prohibits breaking DRM, and one part prohibits trafficking in devices or software intended to circumvent DRM. The part that prohibits breaking DRM has tons of exceptions so previously legal behavior doesn't become illegal just because something has a digital lock. However, the part that prohibits trafficking in circumvention devices has none of these exceptions. That's the part that Nintendo uses to go after emulators.
Emulators have neither "breaking DRM", "circumvention devices" nor circumvention code though.
That's why Nintendo usually tries to avoid going to court for emulators unlike when they sued for the R4 cartridge for example, they are afraid of the result.
Nintendo Switch games are stored as encrypted data, and then decrypted at runtime by the console. Nintendo's legal position is that because the emulator will only run Switch games if the user provides decryption keys dumped from a Switch, it counts as a circumvention device and is therefore illegal to distribute. Nintendo sued Yuzu, one of the most popular Switch emulators, and the Yuzu authors chose to settle rather than going to trial.
That seems like a weak argument, but the courts make all sorts of surprising decisions these days.
In the past, Nintendo tried using their trademark as a watchdog -- the console would reboot if the game did not display it at startup -- then sued unlicensed games for trademark violation. The courts ruled the trademark was purely functional in that use case, and not a trademark, then ruled against Nintendo.
I imagine a similar ruling, if the defense is: The user has a valid key, and a copy of the media. Any circumvention happened before that point in time. We're simply building a compatible device.
Of course, I'm not a lawyer, and the DMCA is a terribly designed law.
> In the past, Nintendo tried using their trademark as a watchdog
That was Sega v Accolade [1]. Although Nintendo also uses boot time trademarks, I don't think they sued over them.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sega_v._Accolade
That case was before DMCA made it generally illegal to break any copyright protection measure.
It also wasn't protecting the games from being copied. It was protecting Nintendo (actually Sega) from competition from other people making their own games. The Nintendo Game Boy uses the same technique.
Rather than a value judgment of whether or not Nintendo is rightly applying the law, Yuzu settling must be viewed as a fundamental inability for a small group of independent devs to defend themselves against the deep pockets of a famously litigious major global corporation in the modern court system.
Not necessarily, powerful counterparties settle all the time if it's cheaper for both. Yuzu chose not to fight in court, but so did Nintendo.
Wasn't this same thing a huge deal back with the DVD DRM keys? The keys were leaked, but it's technically illegal to distribute software that uses them in unlicensed ways, even if you don't distribute the keys.
> Nintendo's legal position is that because the emulator will only run Switch games if the user provides decryption keys dumped from a Switch
This is not true, Switch emulators can also run unencrypted games / programs if you provide one.
Games are usually shared encrypted, that's true, but that's just a custom, not something required by the emulator.
if you just dump the decrypted memory, you're not "picking the lock" so you should be safe. (don't believe me: IANAL)
Sounds like someone should take them to court.
Laws are here to preserve power, not to be just, unfortunately.
Yes you do.
GitHub also has the right (responsibility, some say) to pre-emptively take down anything Nintendo complains about from their platform and optionally ask questions later.
It's baffling how these projects keep choosing Microsoft as their host.
The issue is that the law is meant to protect billionaire corporations from you, not the other way around.
Congress has now illegally approved copyright theft of millions of works from small authors, EVEN where everything was illegal about it, down to the torrent client used to get the works in the first place. Oh and this was illegal for Congress too, you see, just about the only thing Congress isn't allowed to do is to change the law retroactively (OpenAI, Meta, Google violated the law BEFORE congress made it legal. So that doesn't matter according to the law. A lot of states even created criminal responsibility for copyright violations. Do these companies or CEOs get convicted for that? No, of course not). But to protection billionaires congress gladly ignores the law (yes, technically congress didn't do anything, the "copyright office" did, but it's a part of congress and you can bet your firstborn if 10 congresscritters disagreed with the font the decision is published in they would have changed it immediately)
Even courts do it. They make up equally absurd justifications. I mean, in order to protect the billionaire AI labs from software engineers claiming copyright they have now declared AI models persons [1]. The reasoning is that because if they are not persons they cannot create a copyright, and so cannot give it to customers, in other words: AI labs would have nothing to sell. You wouldn't be legally allowed to use AI outputs, as they would be owned by the people the model learned from. What do you think the odds are that AI models will now be treated as persons when it doesn't benefit billionaires? I believe we have found the first example of odds bigger than 100%.
Congress does NOT apply copyright used against billionaires, but it does apply when billionaires sue 9 year olds with download software, without proof even, in most cases. 9 year olds get threatened with 2 months prison plus 300,000 PER INFRACTION, billionaires get to violate the law. Oh, and by the way, the EU commission has, separately, agreed with this way of doing things over the objection of German courts (the EU AI directive, like any other directive, comes from the commission. They had the good manners to let parliament vote on it, but is there anyone who doesn't remember what happens when parliament votes against it, say, something like "Chat Control" for example?)
And this is after copyright violation was made criminal in many places. The CEOs of these companies have admitted to hundreds of millions of copyright violations, so at 3 months per violation ... even if they were the first human ever to evolve they would still not even have 1% of their prison sentence served if the punishments applied to normal people were applied to them, as the law clearly dictates.
Fundamentally, Anthropic and OpenAI (and Google and Facebook and ...) are based on massive violations of copyright. If any of these companies were held liable to the standards courts hold 9 year olds, their billions wouldn't be enough to protect them from bankruptcy (violating millions of works at hundreds of thousands per work adds up fast).
Can someone explain to me how I get to do that? If I can violate the law millions of times making up a billion dollar company is trivial, for obvious reasons. How do I get courts and congress to find technicalities to never hold me responsible. Because under the deal Sam Altman, Larry Page, Elon Musk and Dario Amodei get from courts and congress, and even from the EU, anyone can become a billionaire ... Just make the Netflix everyone wants for starters, and I have zero problems coming up with 100 more ideas.
[1] https://www.courthousenews.com/coders-lose-appeal-in-copyrig...
I reached out to both this legal team and SFC about cases where all of the LLMs will license strip open source code. In cases where BSD licensed code was copied into thousands of projects and millions of forks, it appears the training is so embedded that it will produce functions down to the formatting decisions. In the case of `strlcpy`, no human written version looks like the OpenBSD version, but most commercial LLMs will license strip the OpenBSD version when asked to implement. Depending on the context (not trying to trick them, just other programming questions), I’ve had them all produce it without license (100% score in JPlag).
I keep wondering how this can of worms is going to play out. Right now it doesn't get them into trouble because they're taking from OSS communities, but what happens once one company finds out code they released with a restrictive license got copied verbatim into a closed product? Will they retaliate? Will they decide together to not open pandora's box? I wonder really
Anthropic and OpenAI offer indemnity for this situation for their enterprise customers if such a suit were to happen. They will defend you and cover costs.
It doesn't matter. The courts are entirely unfair. Take the copyright office's arguments: it states the court should explicitly address "Market Harm". Essentially, ANY fair use, such as AI training should be illegal, if it harms the market for the original authors EVEN WHERE THE LICENSE WOULD NORMALLY ALLOW THAT USE. That was reasoning applied to protect billionaire profits from the horror of library lending. The copyright office's position documents this extensively.
https://www.copyright.gov/ai/Copyright-and-Artificial-Intell...
See IV. Fair use, D. Factor Four
In other words, no matter the license, the fact that OpenAIs fair use of the works for training MIGHT take opportunities from the plaintiffs should, BY ITSELF, be an argument to make that AI training illegal. Even if the software programmers agreed to allow AI training, then still sued OpenAI, that is a valid argument accepted from billionaire companies.
In case you're wondering how the court argued that in this decision? It didn't. Not covered at all. Obviously brought up by the plaintiffs, not adressed. The weirdest pro-billionaire arguments are just accepted by the court (the big one is accepting AI models as making new works despite the copyright act clearly stating, 50+ times, only "natural persons" can make new works), and the most reasonable, long established principles, such as market harm (if the use of a copyrighted work harms its authors in the smallest way, even lost sales, even lost job opportunities, lost licensing opportunities, ...) is enough to forbid it's use EVEN WHERE THE LICENSE STATES DIFFERENTLY.
This was required because they wanted to forbid digital lending out of Disney's movies, where the lending software would guarantee that only one copy is actually in circulation (ie. use of DRM to let a library just show a movie without the patron coming to the library to get it). In other words: when billionaires want to make money of works, and the first sale doctrine as well as long standing fair use principles for libraries were in the way, the courts declared that market harm superseded fair use. And, of course, suddenly, when it protects programmers from billionaires, it doesn't apply anymore.
The courts deciding this way has done incredible damage to the availability of older works, to the point of destroying them entirely, since libraries cannot legally keep collections of older works and make those available over the internet, and it is impossible to keep the physical media in working condition and available over a large area, like the united states, for example.
Repeating theme here: absurd arguments to protect billionaire profits, silently rejecting and ignoring reasonable arguments to protect normal people.
I looked into this a few years ago for lending older games or unique prototypes or press copies to researchers without having to send them a copy. VGHF argued for this use case with the copyright office and was denied an exemption to the DMCA, as the use case was not considered fair use (which affects DRM free media as well which is not affected by DMCA).
Given what happens if you ask Claude to reproduce some well-known game, especially FPS games ... you can be pretty damn sure it's seen the game, maybe they even trained on all the leaked source code they could find. But I find it very hard to believe that style, that code, the best game styles came from open source code.
I mean if it trained on open source, you'd expect it to always come up with Quake essentially. That's not true at all. It's always very close to Call Of Duty in how they play.
Very hard to believe in coincidences.
90% sure Anthropic did just that.
> just about the only thing Congress isn't allowed to do is to change the law retroactively
[IANAL] The Constitution prohibits ex post facto laws which retroactively criminalize (or increase criminal penalties of) past legal conduct. This does not apply to civil penalties, and does not apply to reductions in criminal penalties or decriminalization.
> they have now declared AI models persons [1]
Your citation says no such thing. Maybe there’s more in the case itself (in which case, cite it), but I think you’re inferring that based on what I think is an incorrect understanding of what’s going on, also revealed in the rest of the paragraph.
(I’m not commenting on other parts of the comment directly, though I feel not identifying the “‘fair use’ exemption” claim or reacting to that in such a long tirade is a bit off.)
True, you have to look at copyright law as well. The only thing that can create a new work with copyright according to both US law AND the international convention is a "natural person".
It cannot even be a company according to the law (because copyright is split up in my textbook into what's called natural rights, such as authorship, and economic rights, such as the right to set a license. It must always have a natural person origin because that natural person retains the right to state they were the author forever, no matter what agreements he or she entered into. Meaning it's never the employer that gets that right)
That means what the AI created is new (not always) but also not copyrightable. What will vibe coding companies do when they realize none of their software is protected by copyright? A EULA can’t prevent the use of public domain works. (In reality everything will increasingly move server side and no one will be able to access anything resembling code anyway).
That's another way courts could go. But once again that would make life very hard for billionaires. So not a chance.
No, that’s already where it’s gone <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_intelligence_and_co...>, continuing the tradition established before AI <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey_selfie_copyright_disput...>. The machine output is not directly copyrightable.
Really surprised to see you get downvoted. This has been known for years and for a long time was more or less a pillar of thought in hacker spaces, at least since Aaron Swartz was killed by it. Copyright has basically only been used to keep society down.
If someone writes a really great Harry Potter (or whatever other character) book that you wind up really liking and you give them a buck for it, but then some faceless corporation yanks it out of your hands and throws them into prison because they weren't the original Harry Potter author, what has society really gained by doing that? Seems like we just put a guy in prison and burned that book that you liked for basically no reason.
We have the sum of all human knowledge at our fingertips thanks to the digitization of academia. Great! Huge positive for society, we should be in a golden age where anyone can learn anything they want to, but we're not because some guy in a suit says you owe him a million dollars to get access to the journal some paper was published in (a paper which was made by someone unrelated to the suit on your tax payer dime). Unbelievable, debatably apocalyptic net negative for society.
Nintendo doing this is just more of the same again. It won't ever stop until the law is fixed to fight for you and me instead of being used to kill people like Aaron.
I don't see how they are going to stop the re-compilation projects like nxrecomp and others as they are not redistributing anything.
Besides the ones who cave simply from intimidation or costly (even if pointless) lawsuits, or from customers stopping the flow of cash into Nintendo in the first place, there is nothing to stop them.
In the long term, the only way for them to fight this is streaming video games. But even then AI can be used to recreate gameplay from video material..
> But even then AI can be used to recreate gameplay from video material..
Sorry what? Is there an example of AI recreating a nontrivial, modern game from just video material?
Low complexity, but to test fable 5.2 I gave it this instagram reel of a Kikis delivery service inspired seedance video: https://www.instagram.com/reel/DXKjMSIkv97/?mdxt=OHBwaW5yamV...
And told it to make a game, and it made: https://petalwake.non.io
Vid is here if you prefer that: https://x.com/pwnies/status/2119987174884143348?s=46&t=bwJTI...
Yes, it can create a new game based on the style of a video, that's not really what anyone cares about though?
The claim is that AI can recreate GTA6 from a GTA6 stream, not create an off-model GTA6 clone from video footage.
It's getting there. Most games are sitting on top of engines that do almost all the heavy lifting, so the AI just has to reverse engineer the assets, gameplay and levels from footage. It can even run the game alongside the clone to see what sort of differences it finds.
> Most games are sitting on top of engines that do almost all the heavy lifting
What? Yes, most game use engines, but all of them customize gameplay systems, graphics/shaders, UI, etc dramatically. That's like saying that most programs are easy to reverse engineer because Windows/Linux are doing almost all of the heavy lifting.
> so the AI just has to reverse engineer the assets, gameplay and levels from footage.
The word "just" is doing an incredible amount of lifting here, you're basically appealing to "AI is magic and will eventually be able to do everything". If that's your argument I can't dispute it I guess, but the fact is that at the current time there has not been an example of AI reverse engineering a modern video game from gameplay footage alone.
Google's Genie and Dreamer models have 'reverse engineered' Minecraft and other games, but to a low fidelity so far.
https://deepmind.google/models/genie/
I suppose this gets into world models a bit, but I honestly don't know this is a reasonable question. Do you really care to know it was already done or do you care to know if it could reasonably be done if it were the best available way? GP seems to be talking about the latter but you seem to be talking about the former.
aren't there games that forbid streaming them
And that's one of the problems of creeping copyright maximalism that will lead people to be fed up.
How do these licenses gatekeep streaming when the only right granted by copyright is control over who can copy?
Don't forget the justification for copyright in the US is "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts". I don't see how blocking streaming fits under that justification.
Yes, they always require special licenses. GTA 6 won't stream to PCs on day one for example.
Nintendo in particular leans way too hard on old intellectual property.
The first step to their continued survival is admitting that they lost. They put up a good fight, but betting the farm on nostalgia was already pissing in the wind 20 years ago. AI is a hurricane in comparison.
Do you think Nintendo, Disney, and other IP holders, are going to roll over? Just like RIAA did when MP3s were being traded? They are bigger now than ever and the rest of us are stuck with laws that threaten fair use, eliminate first sale rights, and threaten people who just want to fix the stuff they bought.
The bear will only be poked so much before it decides to get up. If the fight seems existential, it’s not the content owners who are going to end up losing.
I'm excited because the tighter their grip, the more quickly people will realize that intellectual property is obsolete.
Intellectual property is a violation of nature anyway, so good riddance when that time arrives.
And OpenAI and Anthropic get to pick up all the pieces and control the lifetimes of work and billions of dollars spent to create it?
I’m all for copyright reform, but handing it to two companies puts us in a significantly worse position, imho.
So what? If it wasn't those two corporations it would be other giga-cap corporations. IP has been subverted by large companies with full time staffed lawyers to make sure they always win. The only way to beat them is to be another huge company with teams of lawyers.
If you think individuals have any of these rights anymore, then your're living in some alternate reality.
GameCube/GBA era was the last time they made great games with any consistency. Every single series had a significantly worse game for Wii/DS, yet the Wii sold way better and all the IGN reviews were great. 10/10 for Skyward Sword.
I'm sorry, I disgaree firmly, there's tons of great first party games on both the Wii and the DS.
That's alright. Smash Bros, Zelda, Mario Sunshine/Galaxy, Mario Kart, Mario Party, Paper Mario, those are the big ones where I was disappointed in the Wii sequels. And the motion controls were overall a downgrade, which it seems even Nintendo admitted. Do you prefer the Wii ones, or are you just saying they were still great?
There are also people who say Nintendo lost their way with the GameCube and that the N64 was the real deal. Well, I can see that with Zelda at least. I was a kid at the time and went back to play Ocarina.
I'm saying mario galaxy is generally just as well regarded as sunshine and 64, I grew up on sunshine, its obviously my favourite but galaxy takes the second place over 64 for sure. we also had metroid prime 3. MKDS was the best portable mario kart at the time, MK Wii was also a great game even if it didn't have the same kinds of advanced techs (which casual gamers don't even care or know about), paper mario is almost impossible to compare since it changed so much from ttyd but also an quality game. none of those to me signal the loss in quality like we saw with all the "new super mario/luigi" rehashing that we saw during the wii u and 3ds era.
Agree and disagree. The OoT remake that just came out is basically all-in on banking on nostalgia, and it's sold out basically everywhere, so obviously what they're doing works even today. Them taking stuff down like this though is just obviously out of line, for much the same reason. If your stuff is flying off the shelves and selling out the world over, it should not matter to you that some people are ripping stuff for free on the internet somewhere. You made your money already, what more do you want?
Nintendo fans are a special breed. Thinking AI will disrupt them by cloning games from videos is like thinking Six Flags is a threat to Disneyland.
It might be an anecdote, but the Gary Bowser decision got me to stop buying Nintendo, even though platformers are my favorite genre. My third video game was Super Mario World and I have every home Nintendo console from the SNES to the Switch and handheld from the Game Boy Color to the 3DS. It didn't hurt that my Steam Deck is also pretty good for games. I like having an open platform and it actually delivered on what I wanted with the OpenPandora.
I stopped buying Nintendo when it became their official policy to brick your device if they don't like what you did with it.
https://www.ign.com/articles/nintendo-revises-user-agreement...
Oh wow. I haven't thought about my openPandora preorder in a long time.
I'll also add that the indie scene on Steam is amazing. We're consistently getting great games at prices that are a fraction of any Nintendo game. Frankly, I don't miss Nintendo.
OpenPandora? Isn't it super old?
"Clones".
Oh, sweet summer child... either native or emulated, but 100% the same game.
This is the exact reason why I refuse to purchase anything from Nintendo. Support community devs, not the corps that refuse to let people have their freedom to tinker.
Never subscribe, never buy, always torrent/darknet/whatever. Don't be a paypig; keep your capital for important life sustaining goods, eliminate reliance on services as much as possible, but most importantly never pay for entertainment!
Pay for entertainment as much as reasonable within your budget. If you're poor then ok pirate stuff. If you have a 6-figure salary, pay up.
Put that money into what you want to see more of. Suggestions: indie studios, crowdfunded projects, open hardware/open source platforms, places like Good Old Games, relatively open platforms like Steam, game studios that play nice with their fan community, etc.
Nintendo is waaayy down on that list. Go ahead buy their stuff after you've given above options a spin, and still have time or money left.
Why not pay for services and entertainment?
This sounds like a very naive point of view, you might as well say "don't breath".
The entertainment industry EMPLOYS people in such a wide variety of direct and indirect roles. People involved in creating the entertainment, translating the entertainment, marketing the entertainment, manufacturing and distributing the entertainment. Every aspect of creating an entertainment product (music, games, movies, theatre and more) employs people directly, and all of those direct employees spend their income in indirect ways that benefit you, for example spending in local businesses, paying their mortgages (which underpin pensions and economic stability), transport services (like busses, taxis etc), their family (days out, on kids etc), in their community, investing and also... on TAXES of all shapes and sizes.
You might have the opinion of "F the world", but unless you're living under a rock you directly benefit from all of the industries that are part of a functioning (local or global) economy.
How do you suppose entertainment is to be made? Or are you suggesting entertainment has no value?
After the Switch emulator takedowns - yuzu and ruins - I decided to permanently boycott Nintendo.
Long may they live and keep making money - I wish them well, but no money will come from me.
A boycott is not a strong way to send signal but it's better than nothing!
I vowed never give Nintendo a penny again when they began DMCA'ing gameplay footage for games they don't even republish. They are complete bastards who don't need anyone's sympathy. Nintendo would love it if the culture they contributed to got erased from existence so our only choice is to buy their gimmicky tech demo style games.
All empirical evidence shows that boycotts don't work unless they're extremely big. Say, if you could get two thirds of the Nintendo fanbase to not buy a Switch 2, that would probably work. If it's only you, then you're just hurting yourself. If nothing else, you're cutting yourself off from the possibility to get a Switch 2 and hack it.
I'm of the same opinion. I also have my pet boycott, which is Microsoft, but I don't delude myself into thinking that it's anything but my little expression of feeling betrayed by them. No signal is being sent here, these entities are larger than us than I am for the ants in my garden. Realistically, it's a waste of attention to care, unless someone specifically wants to do so. Instead, I found that the more varied things I partake in, the better quality of life I have.
That makes sense if their hardware is so bad that it's not a strong enough differentiator.
As somebody who is involved in the rom hacking scene and cares a lot about game preservation, I think the "bleeding edge" emulators do us a lot of harm. Want to emulate the Game Cube? Awesome. Want to allow people to run the Ocarina of Time remake on PC less than a month after its release? I mean come on. I want to support these projects for purposes of preservation, but because we often do so little to distinguish between retro and current, the outright piracy makes the whole community look bad.
I sympathize with your sentiment.
But the fact is Nintendo is one of the most litigious of the copyright monopolists, a class of rent seekers who have systematically robbed us of our fair use and public domain rights.
There is no reason to believe they'd leave you alone if you refrained from hacking their latest games and consoles. In fact, they have repeatedly proved that they won't do that.
They have already made their fortunes many times over. They have already been more than adequately rewarded for their works. Even the Game Cube and its games are already old enough that they should be in the public domain, but Nintendo couldn't care less, they will absolutely hoard even NES games from the 80s, and they will absolutely reserve the right to sell you that exact same Mario ROM over and over again until the end of time. You and I will be dead and buried before this stuff enters the public domain. If they ever do. Who's to say the trillion dollar industry won't buy laws, I mean lobby the government for yet another copyright extension?
I just can't deal with it anymore. I think people should radicalize, not play nice with these monopolist corporations. I seriously hope AI hammers in the final nail into the coffin of intellectual property.
I have no love for Nintendo's litigiousness, but the reason to believe they'd leave you alone if you refrained from hacking their latest games and consoles is that they've left alone developers who refrained from hacking their latest games and consoles. Emulators for everything before the Switch are still widely available and untouched by Nintendo. Even Yuzu, the Switch emulator Nintendo lawfare'd out of existence, lasted six years - almost entirely contemporary to the hardware - until they flew too close to the sun by soliciting donations to the tune of hundreds-of-thousands per year and encouraging piracy of TotK at launch.
Citra (3DS) shut down with Yuzu. So not exactly. And Ryujinx did not take donations nor encourage piracy of TotK at launch, yet met a similar fate.
Regardless, for previous generations included, work on emulators and hacking consoles happened when the console was still current, of course.
You can’t start the reverse engineering work only after the console is superseded, by then it is too late for preservation, especially with live service games.
Citra shut down with Yuzu because they were owned by the same company that
It's true that Nintendo hasn't always sicced its lawyers on emulator developers for current gen - I'm fondly remembering the GBA era, when emulators based on leak dev kits started popping up before the console was even released - although that really only hurts matheusmoreira's point all the more; they're clearly OK with giving devs a fair amount of leeway. As for why that didn't apply to Ryujinx, it's hard to say, though my best guess is Nintendo was trying to get ahead of the "Yuzu alternative tears of the kingdom" Google searches.
This is a minor point, but I'll mention there really weren't any real NES or SNES emulators during their lifetime and yet they're among the most well-preserved consoles. Although sadly this did mean we lost quite a bit of Satellaview content, speaking of live services.
Btw the Mario ROM and the NES emulator they sell you are lifted from the "filthy pirates". nintendo doesn't dump its own old NES games, it just downloads them like the rest of us do. iirc this was caught in some of their headers referencing pirate groups.
Instead of fixing their broken platform, they would rather spend time and money on lawyers.
Personally cannot wait for AI emulation and recomps to kill nintendo hardware / $700 Zelda machines. 4k framegen dlss5 on essentially mobile games is a joy.
Leave community-built projects up just long enough to further foster those communities and reinforce interest in your products across long time spans....
Then crush them?
Ironic considering Nintendo's origin story.
Should use that leak of GitHub source code from some years back to fire up an `.ru`-based clone at this point. These people are clowns.
You don't even need github source code. You could spin up a gitlab community server (or Forgejo or 50 other options) today to host these projects, but your domain/server provider will shut you down in two hours.
And if that doesn't happen, wait till you find a legal letter sent from Nintendo lawyers in your mailbox.
Unless you want to play hide and seek like z library or pirate bay which will become a full time job.
Run a radicle node over Tor. No letters, no door knocks, easy for others to mirror.
(Also, some random emulator will never become as big of a target as the giant hub sites like TPB.)
There are plenty of providers that don’t do any form of KYC and in jurisdictions where emulators are legal.
This isn’t nearly as time-consuming as you’re making it out to be.
> but your domain/server provider will shut you down in two hours.
> And if that doesn't happen, wait till you find a legal letter sent from Nintendo lawyers in your mailbox.
The issue with all these projects is they host `ObliterateSwitchDRM` on GitHub under their account @FrankJohnson with the bio "The one and only Frank Johnson at 123 Mainstreet Ave. In San Francisco, CA working for Google!" and go all shockedpikachuface when Nintendo sends them a 'fuck you' letter through their gaggle of lawyers.
If you're @schizomariofan185 who hosts the project on a Gitlab/Forgejo/whathaveyou on fucknintendo.su hosted on a VPS in Bulgaria/Russia/Romania paid for with crypto, they will literally NEVER find you. Such an effort could easily be crowdfunded by the community. Bonus points if you yourself reside in one of those countries, so they can't even do anything to you, if they somehow did.
You're talking about gitflic.ru
Why would one need Github source code to clone what git does, even if there were not already several dozen off-the-shelf self-host solutions (Gitlab says hi)?
The Lars Ulrich award for 2026 goes to…
Ironic taking into consideration Nintendo's origin story.
When will people learn to stop putting Nintendo emulators on GitHub?
what's there to learn? it got a massive amount of attention and they just need to move it to somewhere else now, nothing was lost
I think people have learned they get x months of free hosting on a platform everyone already knows about & how to use for the low cost of $0 for each time they upload it to GitHub.
Never, apparently
Luckily, that's a fight Nintendo won't win
Winning isn't limited to a court judgment in your favor. If Nintendo wouldn't win at trial, but successfully suppresses the thing it wants to suppress without going to trial, they won.
Not talking about a trial. Nintendo is not going to win on any plane; forks and recomps pop up like mushrooms. It’s nice to see corpos eat their own slop for once.
GenAI making cloning IP trivial
Nintendo
Match made in hell.
Barbra Streisand
On the one hand game preservation is a wonderful thing, a gift to humanity. It's the reason why I can play Eternal Sonata today on my computer in 4K instead of never again probably.
On the other hand, it's fucked up people are playing Ocarina of Time for free 2 days after launch.
What's the answer here?
> On the other hand, it's fucked up people are playing Ocarina of Time for free 2 days after launch.
Yet most of those are not lost sales. They never even want to buy the game to begin with (most of them doesn't even have a Switch 2). Also as easy emulation gets nowadays it's still a "technical hurdle" for most people.
The game sold 5.2m copies in 4 days https://www.nintendo.co.jp/corporate/release/en/2026/261111....
It's all guessing. My guess is that about half of those are lost sales. The kind of person who does this is obviously interested in the game. Emulating Switch 2 isn't a hacker task but isn't easy, so they were determined to play it. I think they'd buy it if there were no other choice. This emulation also requires a powerful PC, so they have money.
An opposite example would be emulating random NES games, probably only trying them out. And those are still sold on Nintendo's virtual consoles.
There's an easy way for Nintendo to shut down most piracy from people who just don't want to buy a switch 2 and pay an arm and a leg for the super-fast cutting edge microSD only compatible (at this time at least) with the switch 2 - just make the games available digitally on every platform. I don't want a bunch of locked-down consoles with different stores when I have fully owned-by-me PCs and handheld systems capable of playing everything already.
They don't want this though, and they're the ones who make it. It'd also cut down on piracy if they made the games very cheap. Like how the music industry cut down on piracy by going from $12 albums (in 1990s money) to pennies per album, because they had no other choice.
Just absolutely unfounded guessing here. You're literally just spitballing based on vibes and nothing else.
Yeah, I said so myself. So is the parent.
I don't really think it's fucked up. It's not something I participate in for various reasons, but you are never going to catch me feeling bad for any business as large as nintendo. I don't hate them or anything, but they're big enough that they don't need defenders.
Well said. These companies are not our friends.
1) Reasonable copyright duration. Long enough to give creators a chance to recoup their investment. Short enough to not get in the way of enriching the public domain. For games, something like 5..10 years should do. Books? Maybe a bit longer.
2) For creators: offer your products at a price & in a way such that for the vast majority of (potential) customers, your product is the most attractive. Jack up prices, add draconic DRM, and customers decide that pirates offer the better product. That's on you, not those pirates fault.
Failing that, Nintendo & co loose the moral high ground, and have no right to complain when people break DRM, distribute illegal copies to run on emulators etc.
Or maybe conclude that copyright laws don't serve the public, so maybe it's better to abandon / ignore the concept entirely.
Copyright has overstepped its boundaries when we have to break it to preserve works that their own creators don't even care about until someone else starts to do their work for them.
Release it on PC, so people interested on the software but not the hardware can purchase it and play it legally.
Exclusives don't make any sense in this day and age.
It's actually insanely based that people are playing Ocarina of Time for free 2 days after launch. It's Nintendo, they don't need the money
They don't need the money, but they certainly deserve it
for what
By definition they do not. Some poor family out there NEEDS money, as in money to live, and Nintendo does not. If a kid in that family decides to play Zelda for free, Nintendo does not suddenly deserve claim over that family's money, because Nintendo doesn't need it and that family does.
Money is a tool to exchange one commodity for another and not some divine arbiter of goodness, where the more you have the more good you are. To say some corporation deserves money when they have all the money they could ever use is so ridiculous to me. "Yes, we have made hundreds of millions, but poor little old us deserved billions!"
I think you misread my comment. I said that they don't need the money.
I'm glad another person has common sense. I love retro games so use emulators a lot. Even owning and collecting old games, the hardware breaks, so like you said, game preservation is amazing.
However, pirating brand new games sucks. The game industry itself and people's jobs rely on companies making a profit from the games they create.
Yes, Nintendo has a lot of money and is a huge company, they also have shitty legal practices, but they make great games and deserve to continue to make a profit on the huge investments they make in games.
Games are cheap compared to how expensive everything else has gotten. Just buy the damn games. There are so many other shitty companies you can pirate from, but most game companies aren't it.
>However, pirating brand new games sucks.
You should consider who it is, that is pirating these games. It's basically entirely one of 2 categories of people
1. people who don't have the money to buy the game. And consider this too: maybe they had to make the choice between this game or another game. Either way, they only buy one game, and not both. There's no sale lost.
2. people who just decided that nintendo doesn't deserve their money for some moral reason and if they didn't have an emulator, they just wouldn't by the game anyways. Again, there's no sale lost.
OoT is still selling like hot cakes.
Can we start worrying about the money for Nintendo when it's actually a problem? They made a remake of an existing title they already got money from and already owned the story/assets and sold extra 5.2M copies in 4 days, for at least $60 each... They'll be fine and the optimal amount of fraud is non-zero.
The answer is just to let people pirate.
If they have the money to buy, let them buy.
If they don’t, then they won’t.
Being an asshole about it because you’re desperate to squeeze every last cent out of prospective players is evil
the discourse on this stuff has really gone downhill. that said...
17 years ago, there was this guy who thought suing college students for pirating music was righteous, as it was the RIAA's only real recourse to enforce their rights. now he is president of the greatest copyright violating institution in all of history.
it is really unfair to go and point at the end user and say, "cognitive dissonance." the polite way of saying that someone is a moron. because the harvard and stanford dropouts leading these near $1T valuation companies, well, they changed their minds for money. to me, flip floppers are also morons. or perhaps, nobody's a moron. at the end of the day, piracy will lead to less Crysis titles and more Monopoly Go and Roblox brainrot, so time will tell if culturally we are better off.
I appreciate this two-sided comment. I also suspect that movie piracy is what made new movies very safe, like remakes or sequels.
> movie piracy is what made new movies very safe, like remakes or sequels
elaborate? I don't see the connection
It used to be worthwhile to task risks in filmmaking because if you made a smash hit movie, you could keep it in theaters for a long time before offering at-home access, and still charge a lot for that. I know people talk about how much cheaper theaters used to be, but ~$10 meant a lot more in say the early 2000s, and that was per-person, and they had more volume.
Piracy set a ceiling on the price and fuss they can ask for. A producer taking big risks will take the same losses as before but can't milk the hits. It's now better to aim for a steady supply of ok media to keep people paying subscriptions. Bonus if they can fit into some franchise so they can also milk the IP in non-piratable ways like merch and theme parks. Some point to tech alone (minus piracy) for killing theaters. Yes, but that's a different point. Without piracy, they could've charged a lot for digital streaming new releases. This did actually happen for some period of time. You only broke even vs theater tickets if like 10 people were watching, ignoring the cost of the equipment.
An alternative theory is that media companies consolidated and became monocultured, and that this would've happened without piracy.
Ugh. worthwhile to take* risks
Who was the guy?
he has access to my LLM chats and, unlike the people who run google, has no qualms about violating my privacy, let alone IP, so i don't really want to piss him off haha
Greg Brockman, OpenAI
> ... This process protects Nintendo’s copyright-protected video games
Does Nintendo use LLMs to write games? AIUI, LLM output doesn't qualify for copyright protection. I guess maybe there's an argument for their older catalog.
Copyright requires the subject matter to have a modicum of human creativity. Nintendo's games absolutely qualify, they have people designing the games and the artwork.
"LLM output doesn't qualify for copyright protection" is an oversimplification. You aren't automatically disqualified from copyright protection if you've touched an LLM. It's just that copyright protections only apply to human creativity. You can qualify even when you use LLMs if you were humanly involved creatively with the output to a sufficient degree.
There's more to copyright than the code + the Switch came out in 2017, so even if 100% of everything they did today was via LLMs (I'm sure it isn't) and this line of thinking applied to all of it then it still wouldn't be relevant.
Also the focus seems to be on bypassing "technological protection measures" portion of the DMCA, which is much easier to go after than the code. Decomps are much more focused on purely the code angle and, for now, still don't seem to be in the focus of these attempts (I assume because it's harder to go after with the same kind of claim, but really only Nintendo will know why they haven't tried yet).