Here’s how the makers of the “Suyu” Switch emulator plan to avoid getting sued
Here’s how the makers of the “Suyu” Switch emulator plan to avoid getting sued
the Suyu development team has decided to avoid "any monetization,"
Should of always been like that
of
*have
(Or "Should've")
Either emulation is legal and you're therefore okay with devs getting payment for tgeir labor or it's illegal and they need to keep as low a profile as they can
I hate people who try to be on both sides
Switch emulation would be 1/10th of where it is now without it.
Disagree. People deserve compensation for labor, and the Yuzu devs did good work. It's our laws that suck.
Anyone trying to make money on a licensed IP they don’t own is in hot water.
Congratulations, you've shown everyone how dumb you are.
Sad_face.jpg I try not to be 👉👈
Ehhh.. it's ok if there's money involved but they definitely pushed it too far. However even if there was no money involved Yuzu made actions that shut them down.
Smart if you can self fund, but at the end of the day there's a lot of costs that people ignore when it comes to emulation or things in the space. Working with a group called Retroachievements.org (small plug) and they accept donations for server costs but that's it. Signed up for 1 dollar on Patreon and wanted to give them 10. They refused, which is a good sign.
They could start by developing in the open and not in some shitty discord group.
SueYou is an awesome name for N**tendo emulator
Still the same Contributor License Agreement as Yuzu to make proprietary versions. They've learned nothing.
well they're not completely proprietary...
ea is just latest master, merged with unspecified list of work-in-progress prs, and built together with custom branding.
there's zero proprietary code in it....
but you don't know what code specifically was used to build it.
well they’re not completely proprietary…
The point of a CLA is to eventually sell proprietary versions. There is objectively no need for a CLA in a fully FOSS/GPL application because the GPL already clarifies everything that's needed.
Edit: "suyu also needs to be a product. We need to find ways to monetise the project" Direct quote from https://gitlab.com/suyu-emu/suyu/-/wikis/Contributor-License-Agreement-Policy
This is one of the most clever names I've seen for an emulator.
Reminds me of sosumi, a Linux util for one-click MacOS virtual machines. Sosumi also happens to be the name of the alert/error sound in early MacOS.
Sosumi (the alert sound) was named due to Apple having a long running court battle with a music company called Apple Corps, link here.
I was excited to see but I see is now archived. Is there a successor or new maintainer? I have to try this
So how long until Nintendo tries to claim copyright to the code that was previously open source and threaten to sue the Suyu team just to scare them into settling?
They'd face a mountain of opposition from the open source community at large.
Yuzu was licensed under the GPL. Even if Nintendo are the new owners of the Yuzu code, they cannot retroactively close-source the previously open code, per the license.
If they tried that and it looked like they could set a precedent, it could spell serious trouble for other GPL projects like the Linux kernel. And they've got some serious financial backing.
It's illegal for them to un GPL it, though. They could try, but they would fail. The only precedent it would set is to encourage people to not waste their time.
I mean, many thought the same of Yuzu.
In reality, Nintendo doesn't want to go to court. They didn't want to go to court vs Yuzu. They just wanted a settlement so they can 100% control the narrative. That's traditional Japanese corporation 101. Yuzu's case was never actually about piracy, copyright infringement, or anything else.
I would not be shocked to see Nintendo either attempt to un-GPL the code, claim some sort of copyright over forks, or even to maliciously inject new code in an attempt to gain access to user IP addresses and just send out letters to every Yuzu user. Nintendo really is that petty, look at what they did to Gary Bowser. They will 100% go after other emulators like this now that they know the developers will just give up in a week.
You know what's a really good defence: Not being based in the fucking US.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
"Suyu currently exists in a legal gray area we are trying to work our way out of," contributor and Discord moderator Sharpie told Ars in a recent interview.
The Suyu project arose out of "a passion for Switch emulation" and a desire not to see "years of impressive work by the Yuzu team go to waste," Sharpie said.
But that passion is being tempered by a cautious approach designed to avoid the legal fate that befell the project's predecessor.
The Suyu devs have also been warned against "providing step-by-step guides" like the ones that Yuzu offered for how to play copyrighted games on their emulator.
Those guides were a major focus of Nintendo's lawsuit, as were some examples of developer conversations in the Yuzu Discord that seemed to acknowledge and condone piracy.
Suyu, by contrast, is taking an extremely hard line against even the hint of any discussion of potential piracy on its platforms.
The original article contains 297 words, the summary contains 154 words. Saved 48%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
They are still running afowl of the anti circumvention rules in the dmca. Just saying you have to provide your own keys isn't enough.
A switch emulator that wants to be safe from nintendo has to have no capability of circumventing the copyright protection mechanisms nintendo employs.
Look at vlc for inspiration. It can play blurays, it can't circumvent the copyright protection of blurays. But if you provide the keys and the library that decodes the content then it can play them just fine. This keeps vlc safe.
This appears incorrect. Multiple emulators have ways to circumvent the copyright protection mechanism. None of them are being hit. Dolphin legit has the keys in their package. It's why Steam didn't platform them, but Nintendo knows and Dolphin is not changing. It would be literally the cost of the letter to get Dolphin to change. Nintendo hasn't even sent that letter.
What Yuzu did wrong was outside of "anti circumvention rules" that you seem afraid of.
ok but how does the bluray library stay safe? its still a similar problem. for piracy sites, a lot of them seem to deal with it by just having it be hosted in a country that doesnt care enough to shut them down.
Like you already pointed out there are ways for the library to stay safe, the important point is being disconnected from the emulator.
That's assuming the Suyu team is based on the USA, where the DMCA can screw them over. As they're hosting their code on GitLab istead of GitHub, it may hint they got this covered.
One thing is for sure: no other fork will have a name this good.
Nuzu was a pretty good name even if it's already dead
bullied to death literally
I'd go with Yuza, the Korean version of the Yuzu fruit. Could be verbalized as "yowza."
I just hope the one for the next system is called tuzu lol