I'm surprised GitHub honored these requests as they aren't valid to begin with. DMCA takedown notices can only be used for traditional copyright violations, not allegations of protection measure circumvention.
None of the big copyright distributing sites really play by DMCA. DMCA is just the formal, legal process.
Most sites are putting some sort of self-managed process in front of DMCA. They can remove anything they want because their terms allow it. It in turn makes copyright holders happy without any of the risk of false DMCA complaints.
Can this problem be solved by having 2 independent projects: one emulator that doesn't deal with decryption, and a convertor that allows to remove encryption from a legally obtained game?
Ah, the destruction of property rights by contract law. Sprinkle in some "technological protection measures" and all of a sudden exercising consumer rights is now a felony offense. As Cory Doctorow says, felony offense of business model. See Mark Lemley's two decade old Terms of Use, https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm
I love technology because I think it enriches & enhances individuals. Our ability to impact the local & broader world goes hand in hand with our tool-making & tech (often is the same thing). Technology is amazing & great.
But layer in Intellectual Property law & suddenly technology is the infernal machine, is the anchor sinking humanity & tyrannizing the spirit. I feel a religious obligation above that of my state's requirements to smash this hell.
I read this DMCA notice, and it's... completely reasonable. Emulators are legal. Distributing copyrighted crypto keys is not.
If Yuzu devs want their emulator to stay up, they shouldn't include those crypto keys. All they have to do is provide a user interface for users themselves to provide these keys.
Mind share issue. Russia, as most of Ex-USSR, is a PC gaming country. To have an active emulation community, there has to be a massive following around the certain console in the first place.
The most successful Nintendo items in the region were Chinese NES clones.
Has any specific Yuzu fork been established as the new standard yet? Early on there were a bunch of clout chasers announcing forks and then only making surface level tweaks to the branding, because they really had no idea what they were doing.
Nope. There was a bunch of hype around `Suyu`, even in the news, before it was discovered the developer was a minor who had no idea what he was doing.
No rational person is going to fight a DMCA from Nintendo. Nintendo would in no circumstances not file a DMCA against a Yuzu fork. Additionally, the settlement required that all of the core developers, who would know it best, are never permitted to work on a Nintendo emulator ever again. Thus, Yuzu is completely dead.
Well, at least we still have Ryujinx. Citra getting caught in the Yuzu crossfire is worse because there isn't another mature 3DS emulator to fall back on.
The profit has nothing to do with it. Bleem! was profit driven by design, for example. (Bleem! is also irrelevant being decided before the DMCA provisions came into effect.)
Is it a smart idea? No; but a profitable emulator should be just as legal as an unprofitable one. But where it involves breaking digital locks, as Nintendo may successfully demonstrate, the DMCA makes both illegal.
I think the bigger issue is that they were using a leaked copy of TOTK to develop their emulator and the Yuzu developers didn’t want that to come up in discovery so they settled
In this case, insult was further compounded because of a prerelease leak of a Legend of Zelda title _and_ charging for early access to an update to make it playable with Yuzu.
That Yuzu reportedly has generally better performance than a Switch console couldn't have helped, either.
Making money and credible potential to eat into sales. A less litigious company would still have complained.
> _and_ charging for early access to an update to make it playable with Yuzu.
From my understanding, this part is not true (though it is widely touted).
There were third parties that made the necessary fixes to run the game in their own forks, but Yuzu proper did not release any fixes until after the game came out, even in the pre-release versions.
I mean it shouldn’t be a shocker that this happened. Nintendo made their case clear in court the DMCA is strongly in favor of copyright holders. Obviously people can file a counter-notice, but that immediately opens them up to a lawsuit from Nintendo, which, well, we all saw how that went with yuzu. If the yuzu developers didn’t want to risk the fight, would any rational person who forked it?
A lot of these settlements involve announcing a fake value of money to be paid as part of the agreement, then agreeing to waive the settlement value if some undisclosed imposed contractual obligations are met.
Arguably this is likely the case with this situation (and nintendo benefits by our not knowing for sure), not that being forced into such an agreement with no trial is not worrisome in itself.
The first part of the sentence is "the DMCA is strongly in favor of copyright holders". Well no that's my point, the DMCA hasn't been used in this case. Nobody knows if the DMCA would have been enough to take down Yuzu because that hasn't been judged.
If you read the lawsuit, Nintendo cited the DMCA laws regarding the breaking of "technological protection measures" extensively. The DMCA is broader than just takedowns.
Even if Yuzu succeeded in overturning the takedown, Nintendo could prevail in the court of law on the merits of the DMCA. Overturning a takedown is easy - just file a counter notice. Expect to be seen in court if you do that, though.
Edit: For the "On the technological protection measures, it hasn't been judged," look at Apple vs Psystar. A case where breaking TPMs came up, which actually was fought to the point of where a SCOTUS appeal was the last step remaining. Psystar was annihilated - and let me tell you, emulating macOS on non-Mac hardware sounds a lot like emulating Video Games on non-Nintendo hardware.
Nintendo can say all they want, they aren't judges.
On the technological protection measures, it hasn't been judged and it's kind of a gray area since Yuzu didn't came with any in it to my knowledge at least.
That's also maybe why the settlement is there.
Edit: for your edit, Psystar wasn't emulating anything, they were actively modifying software. That's closer to a software crack on how it works than emulation.
Apple vs Corelium is closer to the concept since Corelium was emulating the hardware.
I was referring to the DMCA takedown process, which is what Nintendo expressly used in this example. The actual lawsuit relies on elements of the DMCA for the case but they didn’t use the takedown procedure.
