Nintendo submit Yuzu DMCA request to Internet Archive

ardi60@reddthat.com to Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ@lemmy.dbzer0.com – 412 points –
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Since they're back at it again I have to jump onto my alt and re-share the fact that I totally backed up Yuzu's source code, their progress reports, their Github issues pages + pull requests, and all the latest available binaries right before it got taken off of Github. No illicit materials in my archive (ROMS/Firmwares/Keys). Freely available as a torrent.

https://lemmy.ml/post/12810167

Otherwise I wish the best of luck to the nascent Suyu project.

Thanks. Just added this to my torrent server and will seed until the server dies

Shit I might add it to my collection of stuff I tagged "Forever :)"
Right now only the rarbg_db torrent is on it with a ratio of 46x (17gb upload).

I don't seem to be able to add the magnet. Can you check if the link is still valid and if yes, give me a reply?

The magnet link is very alive. I haven't stopped seeding it, but there are clearly other seeds with far better connections than mine in the swarm.

Weird. My seedbox was unable to convert it to a torrent.
I never had issues with me inserting magnet links.

Anyway I solved it with a magnet to torrent converter.

archive.org is cool and all, but a centralized service will never be a reliable way to truly archive something.

this repo still lives and we still have Suyu that looks promising, So, no worries atm https://github.com/pineappleEA/pineapple-src/releases/tag/EA-4176

Github probably didn't receive a cease and desist yet, but I doubt they'll put up a fight against Nintendo.

I highly suggest starting to familiarize ourselves with federated git repos. I‘m testing forgejo atm hoping to be able to host it publicly at some point. That way, once something is out there, its pretty much everywhere.

the issue isn't federation or anything like that, the issue is finding a repo hosting service in a dmca resilient country

Yeah, I get that. But I dont think that its possible to really dmca every fork of a repo on 20 countries without running out of resources at some point because when one fork is taken down, people will make 10 more. the important part is discoverability imo. Feel free to educate me in case this is missing a point.

its easy enough to send angry shit to every server, dmca and whatever rights violations they can think up, and it can become an issue.

Of course, the Federation is great, but you still need an instance that's in one of those privacy-oriented countries.

You can get chatgpt to do this. Or write a simple script.

-- A wild Codeberg appeared. --

Codeberg is a collaboration platform providing Git hosting and services for free and open source software, content and projects.

Website: Codeberg.org


The organization selected the European Union for their headquarters and computer infrastructure, due to members' concerns that a software project repository hosted in the United States could be removed if a malicious actor made bad faith copyright claims under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.

Wikipedia: Codeberg e.V.


In June 2022 the Software Freedom Conservancy's "Give Up Github" campaign (in response to the GitHub Copilot licensing controversy) promoted Codeberg as an alternative to GitHub.

Conservancy: Give Up GitHub!

Certainly better than the U.S. in that regard but I wouldn't consider Germany "resilient" either.

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Unfortunately using codeberg itself is kinda crap. Its not the worst thing in the world, but it still has zero discoverability , and is missing features like code search.

it does have potential though if it is resilient.

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Federated git repos doesn't mean that the source code will be replicated across instances. It just means you can do things like create tickets and pull requests across instances.

Not sure I understand. I should be able to fork a public repo across instances, no? Why bother otherwise?

Federation has nothing to do with that capability. git clone exists since the beginning of git.

hmmmm... I see your point. Maybe I wasnt explaining my point clear enough. Right now, I cant see someones fork of some software if I'm on some gitlab which is not federated afaik. I should have said discoverability I guess. Does that make more sense?

I mean, not saying anyone should, because evading copyright is bad. But technically, you could run say forgejo as an onion service. Connecting git to clone from it would take some extra steps but, if hidden well it'd make it somewhat harder to take down.

My man, you're commenting on the piracy community, in the piracy instance, run by a former /r/piracy mod.

Evading oppressive mechanics is always a great idea imho but I digress.

I'm not really talking about making it unable to be taken down, which is already what happens when you put it in a non public repo. I'm talking about exhausting the corpo and damaging their image for going after people using software to play their bought games on their pc. It could kick off a trend of peeps shaming corpos (especially nintendo) for going after legit players who want control of their devices and property. (whoever feels like pointing out that "technically you just own a license", just dont).

Well, I run forgejo for my own stuff. So, let's say I decided to host something that is subject to a copyright complaint. As soon as people start using your repo and their lawyers get a whiff of it, they'll just take the IP of your server and DMCA the owner of the IP. Whether it be me, or the host. It's an entity they can go after and will need to yield to appropriate law. The effect would be the same as the DMCA going to Github.

But on tor, it hides the entity operating and running the server. Making it a lot harder to find the person to even send the DMCA to, let alone start the legal wheels turning, if it were ignored.

Thats pretty awesome, ngl. Definitely something to keep in mind.

But think about 10.000 forks and 10.000 letters to 10.000 ips. This would create so much damage its not even funny. :)

Like a tiktok trend. „go to againstcyberoppression.com and download this hardcoded, federated forgejo instance with this repo to give nintendos lawyers something to choke on“

I bet they would give up if this goes viral!

I’m talking about exhausting the corpo and damaging their imag

All you'll be exhausting is an AI. They're using AIs now to write the DMCA requests, which actually does lead me to wonder if such takedown requests are even legal (an AI can't, to my knowledge, legally represent the interests of a legal person). But the point is, if you're thinking of "exhausting a corpo" you're thinking it wrong.

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When I create a fork (in the web UI) does my instance not git clone from the source instance? Not going around cloning random federated repos I can see, but...

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At least not one that's hosted in a country where the IP mafia has any power, which is unfortunately most countries excluding places like Russia or China where you probably wouldn't want to host it anyhow due to a variety of other, uh… issues

As long as you host the checksums elsewhere so that users can verify the repo hasn't been tampered with, you can host files in China or Russia just fine.

That's assuming that the only potential issue you care about is tampering though

What else would I care for? We're talking about piracy, so I wouldn't turn the choice of a server location into a human rights debate.

You can definitely care about whatever you want. Human rights aren't the only potential issue though, but there's things like eg. do you trust that you'll be able to retain control of the site. So for example if you set it up in Russia and you're not Russian, do you trust the Russian government not to pull the rug out from under your feet at some point?

Well they might, even if I you were Russian. But that's what off-site backups are there for. It's less likely for them to pull control than it is for a Western platform though, so still a win vs. Github.

What kind of logic is that? It is perfectly reasonable to care about human rights and totalitarianism but not for copyrights. In fact it seems a bit questionable that you would use the speeding ticket of online rule violations as an excuse to completely discard any other moral considerations.

Ultimately it's your choice of course, but still. Questionable reasoning

A server is an emotionless piece of hardware, regardless of where it stands. Geo-arbitration is just that, in my eyes.

(I am not the person you replied to)

The problem with this argument is that you are ruling out entire countries for the acts of corrupt governments. Thing is there is no such thing as a clean government. Everybody has skeletons in their closet.

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This isn't hard. Torrent with a seed box somewhere outside of copyright enforcement is likely the best option as a "backup" source.

🤔torrent based git server, is this a thing?

will never be a reliable way to truly archive something

I think they're doing a damn fine job archiving something, and in reliable ways too

Til it gets taken down and dismantled. Yes.

I wonder if IPFS would help in this case...

::: spoiler Anti Commercial AI thingy CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 :::

Your license thingy broke since that thread where you explained your script. It doesn't spoiler anymore.

What does it look like for you? I'm on the web client

::: spoiler Anti Commercial AI thingy CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 :::

Nothing good is allowed to exist but in shadows. Shadow archives are essential.

Assassin's Creed 1 & 2 were trying to tell us something.

IPFS?

A decentralized storage providing service based on blockchain technology, if I understood that correctly

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Nintendo brass = scumbags. Trash corpo who hates its customers except for milking their money.

It is morally good to pirate all Nintendo products, crack all their hardware, and disparage all their advertising.

Even if there's nothing by them you want to play, pirate some anyway. Seed generously.

Been seeing BOTW for awhile now at just 75kbps up (phone internet.)

Looks like I've seeded 17 copies thus far 😎

It's easily my most active torrent and I'm glad to help!

Sure trash company where everyone wants to play there games.

The fuck sticks at Nintendo would love to take everything Nintendo related down for "copyright" if they could on the Internet archive.

How does Internet Archive has so many epub books if they are restricted by DMCA? Honest question

They turn a blind eye as long as no one files DMCA notice. They do limit downloads of some popular pirated materials behind login though.

The Internet Archive operates under the principle of fair use, which allows the use of copyrighted material for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, or research. They also adhere to legal guidelines and protocols to avoid infringing on copyright laws. Additionally, they often rely on user-contributed content, public domain materials, and works with expired copyrights to build their digital library, which helps mitigate copyright issues. However, they do occasionally face legal challenges or takedown requests, and they respond to those according to the law.

This comment smells like chatgpt.

Could be Gemini.

I've just taken to calling it "AI" instead of shilling for any brand.

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if you believe this copyright claim was made in error

It definitely was, since Yuzu doesn't break copyright....

Did they transfer ownership of the code to Nintendo? If so, it might be a violation of Nintendo's copyright on Yuzu itself.

To everyone who downvoted this: You are of low relative quality. Friggen jerks! I dress better than you! GET A LIFE! 😡😡😡😡😡

In case this is a real question: AFAIK* that is not possible for them to do. The project was open source and it accepted code contributions from everyone using a FOSS license. This means:

  1. Everyone who has seen the code explicitly has rights to redistribute it, and this right cannot be revoked
  2. The core team does not own the entirety of the code - to transfer ownership to Nintendo they would have to get approval from every single contributor that ever made a pull request that got merged. This is impractical to say the least

So no, there is no and there cannot be legal basis for Nintendo to claim copyright on Yuzu. They might have other claims, but I won't weigh in on how good they might be because I'm way out of my depth already.

* I'm actually making a bunch of assumptions about Yuzu's licence and number of contributors that I haven't bothered to check, so take this with a grain of salt. I'm still pretty confident about point 1 though, I'd be really surprised if this was a wrong assumption, and it alone is enough.

"In case this is a real question?"

Anyway, I just read through the settlement and I didn't see any explicit transfer of ownership of he code in there. I'm not a lawyer though, there are some things in there I may not understand the implications of.

Could have been just a hypothetical or rhetorical question from my POV

FWIW I am not one of the jerks who downvoted you, I think your comment contributes to discussion even if I'm the end it turns out to be wrong. I think people just see the downvote button as a "disagree" or "you're wrong" button, don't let it get to you.

Don't worry about it, the angry edit was meant to be humorous- in general I agree that it's a mistake to let downvotes upset you.

(And because I'm the admin of my own instance, the votes are made visible through the UI. So if I wanted to be a vindictive weirdo about it, I could... 😉)

No they can change the license.ots of Foss products doing that lately. It can ways be formed from theast foss version though. But I have no idea whaticense yuzu used.

I bet Nintendo wouldn't think twice to request books be burned if the yuzu source code is printed on them.

Nintendo, and any publicly-traded corporation, would rape your children if they thought it would make investors more money.

In fact, they have a fiduciary duty to do so.

N I N T E N D O C A N E A T S H I T ! !

Why is "Nintendo of America Inc." in a different font?

Probably because it's a template and somebody copied and pasted without remembering to paste as plaintext

LMAO, get fucked Nintendo. You'll never take our archives.

I started storing program setups and driver packages as well as firmware tools on my PC.
Seems like that it was a good choice to store the Ryujinx, Citra and Xemu emulator setups...

Stop giving these corporations money.

They will always use it against you.

Just copy all the source code to one giant book and distribute it through Tor.

How dare they want their copyrighted material not stolen

there is nothing in Yuzu that Nintendo has copyright to. Emulators are also precedentially legal.

so yes, how dare they want "their" copyrighted material not "stolen"....

Isn't it the decryption keys? and also the fact that they used an unreleased leak of tears of the kingdom to playtest paywalled compatibility?

They don't actually provide decryption keys, the user has to either extract them from their own Switch or find them elsewhere online. However, it could be argued by Nintendo that using an unreleased game ROM for testing proves that the devs themselves were guilty of piracy, and were therefore somehow condoning the use of their emulator for piracy.

Either way, we won't know how well Nintendo's arguments would have held up in court, because the devs settled rather than fight it out.

If it's not illegal then why did yuzu get shut down? Maybe you can represent yuzu against Nintendo, it'd be a slam dunk.

ask bleem who actually beat Sony in court but went bankrupt. its not about the legality, its about the wallet.

This.

The legal system does not exist for poors.

It was a settlement. The devs decided, for reasons that are not public, that it would be easier to just pay Nintendo some money and take down the emulator than to fight them in court. It's very possible (even likely) that they figured it would be more expensive to fight Nintendo's lawyers than to just pay a fixed amount up front.

That's quite often the case with thee issues - it's simply a finance game by the player with the deep pockets - they can afford to effectively bankrupt a smaller player who may have done nothing wrong.

There should be penalties for that.

"Yeah, we know we're wrong but we're just going to litigate as much as possible to drain our adversary's pockets."

That kind of thing should warrant its own criminal case.

Also, in the future, emulation devs really shouldn't reveal their identity.

I wonder if 5heybwouldnt have started charging if Nintendo would have done anything.