Nintendo Wipes Out 400+ Switch Emulator Repos in Single-Day GitHub Sweep * TorrentFreak
https://torrentfreak.com/nintendo-wipes-out-400-switch-emulator-repos-in-single-day-github-sweep/
https://torrentfreak.com/nintendo-wipes-out-400-switch-emulator-repos-in-single-day-github-sweep/
37 Comments
Andaith@sh.itjust.works · 69 pts · 1d
I didn’t think emulators were copyright infringement since they’re built from scratch. Why isn’t GitHub telling them to get fucked?
FireWire400@lemmy.world · 101 pts · 1d
They don't wanna be sued. Emulators are technically legal but Nintendo likes to abuse every loophole in the book to argue otherwise.
bigb@lemmy.world · 61 pts · 1d
Nintendo eternally sucks but the Yuzu team handed their asses to the lawyers on a silver platter. Taking donations is one thing but a paywall to play the latest big first-party games is legal bait.
Emulators have been a coding exercise that came with a nice side benefit. Devs were deliberate about separately the work from piracy. Then a group like Tropical Haze makes money on writing an emulator and release a 0-day update that runs Tears of the Kingdom.
Emulation isn't a place for entrepreneurs.
bilb@lemmy.ml · 4 pts · 18h
I don't think taking money for making an emulator is the problem per se, and it's unlikely it had anything to do with why Nintendo took action against them. It's... everything else you mention. The brazen, unquestionable, open piracy, and the publicity of being able to play a game that hadn't even been released as you say. And the DMCA in the US makes switch emulation itself a more viable legal target, because in this form it circumvents Nintendo's encryption like the article you link points out. You can sell an NES emulator, no problem.
LodeMike@lemmy.today · 2 pts · 5h
It... It does not "circumvent" Nintendo's encryption. It applies a decryption algorithm to an arbitrary file with an arbitrary key
Andaith@sh.itjust.works · 11 pts · 1d
If anyone can afford the lawyers and has an incentive to challenge Nintendo, surely it’s Microsoft…..
FireWire400@lemmy.world · 27 pts · 1d
I think they don't really care actually. Sure, they could afford to defend the people who voluntarily spent 100+ hours to build a repository using their tools but what's in it for them?
SkaveRat@discuss.tchncs.de · 5 pts · 23h
They don't have much money, as they need to pump every cent into their aiOS
then_three_more@lemmy.world · 3 pts · 23h
What's their incentive?
ryper@lemmy.ca · 2 pts · 22h
A little good press for GitHub to offset all the bad press from downtime.
frongt@lemmy.zip · 9 pts · 18h
This is good press for GitHub. Corporations are their customers, not us. They want to show how friendly and easy to work with they are to corporations.
then_three_more@lemmy.world · 5 pts · 20h
Doesn't seem worth the time or effort to lawyer up over.
frongt@lemmy.zip · 1 pts · 21h
I don't see an incentive for them here.
MonkderVierte@lemmy.zip · 38 pts · 1d
Maybe we could build a distributed Github you can't just delete with something decentralized and versioning, like Hypercore protocol or IPLD (InterPlanetary Linked Data), Ceramic Network?
About legality: that's (japanese) Nintendo using US media laws gone rogue to swipe repos on a US hoster (Github). Maybe don't use a US hoster next time.
And yeah, Europe isn't much better there.
warm@kbin.earth · 55 pts · 1d
Github =/= git.
Just stop using Github already.
filcuk@feddit.uk · 1 pts · 6h
I am not so sure this situation would be much better on other services. Nintendo could steamroll smaller companies.
mote@lemmy.ca · 20 pts · 1d
I have not tried/used it (yet?), but the kids are building Radicle for this very purpose. It gets a fair amount of techie coverage (blogs, comments, etc.) but sits in unique space compared to, say, Forgejo (classic self-hosted git).
MonkderVierte@lemmy.zip · 2 pts · 23h
Looks interesting, thanks!
But i thought more, like; since IPFS doesn't delete data, writes changes separately. If we had that with protocolizing (which IPLD seems to do), we would have something like a decentral git.
dudeface@lemmy.world · 18 pts · 1d
Git is meant to be decentralised
Zwuzelmaus@feddit.org · 20 pts · 1d
And it is.
Github isn't.
MonkderVierte@lemmy.zip · 3 pts · 23h
Yeah, but it needs a address to point to, to work with others repositories. Which with http is centralized. Wouldn't be with a distributed protocol.
dudeface@lemmy.world · 7 pts · 23h
I don’t think you know how git works
MonkderVierte@lemmy.zip · 3 pts · 23h
I do know that it keeps a local copy of the repo. But it's not designed to work with a pool, so it needs a specific address to work together/clone/share repos.
I'm by no means an expert in git, did i overlook something?
Anafabula@discuss.tchncs.de · 7 pts · 22h
Technically you can add as many remotes to a repo as you want and push/pull to any/all of them. Might be annoying though
mesamunefire@piefed.social · 1 pts · 15h
Its quite common in some industries. Lots of different git remote references no github. It works well when you dont care or dont want piulic repos out in the wild.
I used to do a ton of contract work that way. It went away forva bit but about 3 years ago its coming back. Ive heard complaits about ai and that github is much less stable.
You cant have downtime in some industries.
Fisch@discuss.tchncs.de · 17 pts · 1d
There are already alternatives to GitHub and I think Forgejo is still working on federation. The most active Yuzu fork (as far as I'm aware) is Eden and that has its own Forgejo instance.
MonkderVierte@lemmy.zip · 0 pts · 23h
There's also a p2p "plugin" to git, but things like that always feel like a workaround to me. The random hacker in India also doesn't know about it.
Fisch@discuss.tchncs.de · 3 pts · 22h
I don't really see what that solves tbh. Not having a central source of truth seems like it could cause issues and git is already pretty much decentralized because everyone who's working on a repo will have a copy on their own device and cam upload that to whatever forge they want. Aside from that, you lose all the features a git forge gives you, especially the ability for people to actually find the repo.
MonkderVierte@lemmy.zip · 1 pts · 22h
Vs. a random git URL or a centralized repo everyone knows?
Fisch@discuss.tchncs.de · 3 pts · 21h
Everything you can find on the internet is a "random URL" in that sense but that URL can be searched on search engines and shared. But I don't know how that p2p git thing works, so maybe I'm assuming it's more complicated than it actually is.
LemmyPlaceDN@europe.pub · 18 pts · 23h
Nintendo doesn't seem to care about all other emulators of their previous consoles nearly as much, hopefully it stays that way
danielfm123@lemmy.zip · 16 pts · 21h
If emulators are not illegal, why Microsoft take them down? This should be illegal, the same way information was censored in COVID times.
I hate big tech.
frongt@lemmy.zip · 18 pts · 21h
It's not because they're emulators, it's because they're including Nintendo's cryptographic keys.
LodeMike@lemmy.today · 2 pts · 5h
Where? Where are they? Point to the file. Oh wait you can't because they're not there.
riquisimo@lemmy.dbzer0.com · 15 pts · 16h
I know Nintendo=bad, but also, if their only leg to stand on is "these are distributing our keys" then just don't include the keys. Plenty of others don't.
I feel like all these repos knew their days were numbered because of that that, but they probably didn't care. It's easier to get everyone from one place than to look around online for the keys separately. May as well include the keys until Nintendo does something about it.
LodeMike@lemmy.today · 2 pts · 5h
They don't include the keys. Their argument is stretched really thin. They're saying that because it can use prod.keys that are obtained illegally then the program is legal. They phrase this implying that getting these keys is always illegal, which it's not.
Asetru@feddit.org · 7 pts · 1d
Every time I read stories like that I wonder if I should do more stuff with the hyphanet.