At this point I’m very concerned about the open source industry relying so much on github. You have to remember that any project there can be swept away overnight because it doesn’t fit into the agenca of a large company, for example.
At this point I’m very concerned about the open source industry relying so much on github. You have to remember that any project there can be swept away overnight because it doesn’t fit into the agenca of a large company, for example.
Yeeeah, Nintendo sucks.
And it sucks that, despite this not killing the distribution of Yuzu or Ryujinx forks it does make them less safe and reliable for users, as well as hindering ongoing development.
Ultimately, though, Nintendo is acting within their rights. Which is not an endorsement, it’s proof that modern copyright frameworks are broken and unfit for purpose in an online world. We need a refoundation of IP. Not to make everything freely accessible, necessarily, but to make it make sense online instead of having to rely on voluntary non-enforcement. I don’t care if it’s Youtube or emulation development, you should know if your project is legal and safe before you have lawyers showing up at your door with offers you can’t refuse.
They aren’t working within any rights. Emulator production is a legal right that Nintendo has neither the ability to bestow nor deny. It’s the founding legal rationale behind virtualization as a technology. This is the equivalent of someone holding a gun to your head and telling you to shut up - the forced relinquishing of your rights through threat of force, and it’s a little frightening to watch people suggest otherwise. This has played out in court and is settled law. Bleem! went BANKRUPT to secure a legal victory against SONY and establish that emulators are completely legal and there is no “gray area” about them, and you should be in less of a hurry to throw legal rights away because “Well, Nintendo said so…”
They are absolutely within their rights to approach the developers of Ryujinx and threaten to sue them. Based on how things have worked so far they’d lose, and I agreee with you that the inequality in that interaction is terrible and should be addressed.
On the Yuzu scenario it’s more relevant, because of the specific proprietary elements found in the emulator.
And then there’s Nintendo targeting emulation-based handhelds and streamers for featuring emulated footage of their first party games on Youtube videos, which falls directly under the mess that is copyright enforcement under Youtube and other social platforms.
In all of those cases, a clearer, more rules-based organization of IP that explicitly covers these scenarios would have helped people defend against Nintendo’s overreach, or at least have a clearer picture of what they can do about it. We can’t go on forever relying on custom, subjective judicial interpretation and non-enforcement. We’re way overdue on a rules-based agreement of what can and can’t be done with media online.
The worst part is… we kinda know. There is a custom-based baseline for it we’ve slowly acquired over time. It’s just not properly codified, it exists in EULAs and unspoken, unenforceable practices. It’s an amazing gap in what is a ridiculously massive cultural and economic segment. It’s crazy that we’re running on “do you feel lucky?” when it comes to deciding if a corporation claiming you can’t do a thing on the Internet that involves media. We need to know what we’re allowed to do so we can say “no” when predatory corporations like Nintendo show up to enforce rights they don’t have or shouldn’t have.
You’re incorrect. Creating an emulator is not illegal. Nintendo has the legal right to threaten to sue someone, but if you are threatening to sue for something that is not a crime, and you know that, and you do it anyway in the hopes of bankrupting them before the case settles, that’s not a legal proceeding, it’s extortion. I can threaten to sue you for cooking pancakes in your house, and while it’s technically ALLOWED for me to do that, it’s clearly and obviously not a case I would win, but if the threat of making your life hell is prominent enough, you might get forced into backing down, which is exactly what’s happening here.
They would absolutely NOT lose in court for creating an emulator. I cannot stress enough exactly how legal emulation is. It’s as legal as making your pancakes. The only way they would lose in court is if there is some EXTRA thing they’ve done that we don’t know about. If all they’ve done is create and distribute Ryujinx, there is absolutely NO way Nintendo would win a case in the US. This is settled law, and saying it isn’t doesn’t make it so, although it DOES embolden companies to bullshit developers with more bogus threats in the future.
I did not claim that creating an emulator is illegal. You don’t sue people for a crime, either. “Illegal” and “criminal” are different concepts, and making an emulator without tapping into proprietary assets is neither.
We don’t know what Nintendo used to threaten Ryujinx, so we don’t know how likely it is that they would have won. We do know the Yuzu guys messed up and gave them a better shot than in the other times they have failed at this exact play.
You are very mad at an argument nobody is making.
Perhaps. But I see a lot of hand rubbing and “oh welling” from people when this is a legitimate moment for anger at the precedence this sets. I understand the urge to make it make sense, but the fact is people either tacitly accepting this activity as reasonable or arguing about the red herring of whether the source code is still available to sit and rot with nobody touching it but shady scam artists, not only moves the bar on what what Nintendo and other companies see they can get away with, it has a chilling effect on future preservation efforts among the constantly shrinking pool of people skilled enough in low level development to do this kind of work.
I guess my point is, I’m seeing very few voices that are sufficiently concerned or angry enough about this event considering the far reaching consequences it’s going to have.
We shouldn’t in ANY way be normalizing this activity, and our reaction shouldn’t be “Of COURSE they did this.” Although I guess I shouldn’t be surprised after we just watched Boeing murder a half dozen of its whistleblowers and the most people did was make a few memes. We’re living in a literal dystopia, apparently.
Well, there are a couple of caveats to that. One is that it’s far from the first time an emulator has been taken down for similar reasons and it’s historically been pretty ineffective in the grand scheme, especially when alternative forks are available. “Far reaching consequences” is a bit of an overstatement, at least for those of us that went down into the Bleem! mines back in the day. There is a chance that you may be connecting things that aren’t that directly connected here.
The second is that you’re still misrepresenting people not acting out their annoyance the way you’d like with people not being annoyed. I’m not here defending Nintendo, this sucks. I’m here saying that I don’t want to shame Nintendo into the same awkward gray area Google as an intermediary and every other IP holder currently inhabits, I want actually effective regulation that protects legitimate content creators from IP abuse, including from predatory corporations. You are looking to perform outrage in a room of like-minded people, and I get that you want to vent, but it’s not particularly useful to get mad at people that agree with you for not being in your same emotional level while they do.
This is a fair point. I just get so sick of seeing the constant erosion of individual rights in the technology space due to apathy and under reactions, and it’s a more or less constant, ongoing slide to the point where moments like this become absolutely infuriating.
The maintainer of the Apple M1 branch said that they literally showed up to the lead dev’s home in Brazil in a comment on Reddit.
That’s a good cue to mention that I don’t know the specifics of how this would work in Brazil and how they impact the situation one way or the other. That said, my objections to the current arrangement of IP and copyright are fairly international.