The notice was filed on developer platform GitHub, which Nintendo claimed housed repositories that “offer and provide access to the Yuzu emulator or code based on [it]” which “illegally circumvents Nintendo’s technological protection measures and runs illegal copies of Switch games.”
GitHub said it contacted the owners of the repositories to provide an “opportunity to make changes” before taking down the repositories, in addition to providing legal resources and information on how to file counter notices.
↫ Sophie McEvoy at GamesIndustry.biz
The legal troubles around Yuzu are a little nebulous to deal with, as there’s a lot of chatter online that Yuzu contains, or at least used, code from leaked Switch SDKs. If that is indeed true – I haven’t seen any definitive proof yet – then it makes Nintendo’s aggressiveness a lot more understandable, even for someone like me who believes emulation should be 100% legal and accessible.
Thom,
That is an interesting topic. If Yuzu contained copyrighted SDK portions, it opens a can of worms to many other emulators as well.
When Compaq cloned IBM’s BIOS they had to prove they used a “clean room” reverse engineering process and prove this in court. Obviously this is beyond the financial capabilities of many open source projects. Even Android had to spend over a decade fighting against Oracle’s claims. And hence, most projects will just say “do not contribute any code if you ever looked at leaked [project]”
Another issue, again coming back to Google/Oracle Android/Java fight is there is only so many ways you can design a system. If you have the syscall names (open, read, fork), and function parameters also match (EAX=handle, ECX=error), there is not much you can do to avoid being claimed similar.
And, finally, lazy actors, or even bad actors, could intentionally pollute the source code with “non kosher” contributions. This is of course not limited to open source projects, as many closed ones are caught red handed stealing others’ code. But it is much easier to do and also detect for OSS.
Bottom line, the best defense is just a disclaimer on github asking to stay clean, and possibly the image of adhering to that process. Even that is of course insufficient by itself, but at least seemed to help ryujinx so far.
Btw, this will get even more interesting as PS3 emulator for example requests download of official firmware manually by the user (fortunately it does not have an encryption that limits this). What about PS4, or Xbox Series? They literally have entire large operating systems capable of running modern applications. (In case of Sony it is BSD, in case of Microsoft it is a limited version of Windows, which can even run full* native applications if you pay the $100 dev free to unlock it).
sukru,
Edit: bah…can’t fix erroneous submit.
I was going to say it’s obviously not the first time Nintendo has pursued emulators.
https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2023/05/the-solid-legal-theory-behind-nintendos-new-emulator-takedown-effort/
Yeah, copyrighting implementations makes sense, but I’m pretty sure the majority of software engineers feel that copyrighting interfaces is stupid. The judge in the google-oracle case was ignorant and short sighted for changing decades of earlier precedent. Good on google for eventually getting a fair use exception, but frankly that’s not good enough. We need the law to be clear that others are free to implement APIs by themselves without having to worry about defending themselves against a deep pocketed opponent court.
It couldn’t matter less what non-business owning software engineers think about the validity of copyrighting interfaces, or software patents, for that matter. In America, we don’t have democracy, we have capitalism. That is, capital drives policy, not democracy. Opinions about any given topic only matter in politics when they are written on the backs of very large checks.
CaptainN-,
I realize that, although interestingly the first judge in the google-oracle case happened to also be a coder. His ruling was reflective of that. Of course there was no way this case wasn’t going to be appealed and the next judge was not competent on tech 🙁
https://www.theverge.com/2017/10/19/16503076/oracle-vs-google-judge-william-alsup-interview-waymo-uber
Well, IMHO capitalism and democracy could co-exist fairly, but I agree there are major problems with our implementation of each.
It blows my mind that in the US legal system you need to prove that you are inocent instead of they having to prove that you did wrong.
kwanbis,
The US has different types of courts, criminal courts have different standards than civil court. The “right to an attorney” and “innocent until proven guilty” still do apply in criminal court. I’ve never dealt with criminal courts, but in my experience the local civil courts can be quite corrupt with the judge representing his own employer’s interests. It sucks, but with government budgets being as strained as they are, creating programs that can issue thousands of citations every year and hiring a rubber stamp judge to automatically enforce them against challenges is technically a “solution” to low budget. Unfortunately a lot of people are getting snared by this corruption and the governments hire rubber stamp judges to side with their own interests.
The American criminal court has different rules than civil court, and is ostensibly “innocent until proven guilty” but there are a lot of reasons that fails to work out. First of all, most judges are elected, and they run essentially as second prosecutors, with “tough on crime” narratives, and touting their conviction rates, just like prosecutors (who are also elected). Public defenders are woefully underpaid, and over worked.
So you have this strong incentive to “get convictions”. The police see their job as “getting convictions” too, there is basically no component of the American justice system that sees their own purpose as “getting to the truth.” There’s a little bit of a wink and a nod about how a “oppositional” legal system is meant to balance concerns here, but it fails to do that in laughably obvious ways. One just has to look at the difference of outcomes based on how much money is spent on defense attorneys – showing once again, that capitalism ate a second pillar of the American system.
Capital supersedes democracy in the legislative branch, and capital supersedes justice in the judicial branch.
We didn’t even get to the problem of plea bargains, where the police, the district attorney and the judge conspire to elevate the charges WAY higher than whatever crime the defendant is accused of would merit, just so they can “plea down” to an appropriate charge, and avoid a trial. The problem of course, is that this corruption is systemic, and fully half of the American population (a minimum estimate) can’t understand systemic effects, so it’s almost impossible to explain it to them.
I don’t know why people use that site, it just centralizes things for Nintendo so they can kill off the emulation community more easily. Better to just host your own site so you are not at the mercy of these companies.
And do it offshore, outside Nintendo’s legal reach. Otherwise, they could legally demand your hosting provider to shut your repo off permanently.
Orisai,
I agree that’s what needs to be done,. Although I think some users will always prefer mainstream centralized platforms over random websites.. I wouldn’t care where a project is hosted, obviously as long as sideloading is not blocked.
Alfman,
We have seen the overreach possible during COVID times. Not saying they were correct, but the conspiracy theories were first blocked by YouTube, their accounts banned by Twitter and Facebook, and then later on their hosting was cancelled as well.
Again what they said was stupid, but that’s beside the point.
If they really want you off the Internet, it would be difficult to find a home. (Except TOR/freenet/similar).
What happens if they just move the repo to a country where dmca has no jurisdiction? or even a country where nintendo has no presence.
That’s what the SuYu emulator is, which is headquartered in Brazi. Really, hosting your emulator in a country like the USA (aka the country of DMCA anti-circumvention provisions, APIs being potentially copyrightable, and enforceable software patents) is like Playboy moving their headquarters to Iran. And yet, this doesn’t stop people from trying.
That is why we have many media libraries hosted in Europe as well.
VLC was happily hosted in Paris, France, and FFmpeg should be the same, afaik.
Even torrents had found (temporary) home in Sweden, but they were found to be liable and sentenced to one year in prison. (Which would be much more severe here in the USA).
Refusing to takedown content that violates copyright is illegal in most countries (although this could change with countries like Russia and Belarus allowing some copyright violations of US and EU content as a form of counter-sanctions).
The problem with the US is that there are multiple ways a lawyer can screw you even if you haven’t copied anything: anti-circumvention provisions, copyrightable APIs, software patents. Each one of them a possible minefield.