this post was submitted on 28 Feb 2024
634 points (99.2% liked)

Open Source

31396 readers
79 users here now

All about open source! Feel free to ask questions, and share news, and interesting stuff!

Useful Links

Rules

Related Communities

Community icon from opensource.org, but we are not affiliated with them.

founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
 

Seriously what is this? Nintendo argues that by instructing users how to extract the prod.keys from their own switch the yuzu developers are essencially infringing on the DMCA.

So what? Now you can't even freely use your own property anymore because it goes against the design intentions of some big company that just want's to milk their users?

Nintendo goes directly after this argument in its lawsuit, arguing that buying a Switch game only means you "have Nintendo's authorization to play that single copy on an unmodified Nintendo Switch console."

top 50 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[–] [email protected] 163 points 9 months ago (1 children)

My favorite thing about the modern world is how we don't get to own the computers we purchase...

[–] [email protected] 52 points 9 months ago (1 children)

I love how people just keep giving such companies money.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (10 children)

is there a choice? every machine is like this now.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 9 months ago (4 children)

Yes. You never and have never HAD to buy Nintendo.

load more comments (4 replies)
[–] [email protected] 11 points 9 months ago

Most desktops have a freely accessible ROMs, its definitely getting worse though but most consoles are a portal to subscriptions

[–] [email protected] 4 points 9 months ago

I build my main PCs from parts. Have since I was a kid and I always will because of bullshit like this.

Every other device I have can serve as a dumb terminal connected to my main PC via either SSH or Moonlight.

load more comments (7 replies)
[–] [email protected] 90 points 9 months ago (1 children)

There is no such thing as justice in courts. Lawsuits are corporate weapons.

Like (first hand experience in California) if you do not have 100k in liquid assets available right now, and you get injured by someone else, you're not going to get jack shit for some lawsuit. You can't navigate it on your own because of all the bullshit, and you'll need lots of "expert witnesses". Here is a little secret, expert witnesses are all academic opinion mercenaries that cost around 6k-10k each on an open market. You'll need a bunch of them to counter whatever the other side does. In the USA it is all a formality in court. Whoever buys the most mercenaries wins the game. The insurance company or firm on retainer gets a bulk discount on mercenaries. The Supreme Court is not the only extremely corrupt institution here. Right, wrong, it's all irrelevant. We are all worthless serfs in neo feudalism.

[–] [email protected] 34 points 9 months ago (14 children)

Dude. Can we make a giant list called america bad and put all the dystopian shit on it and pull it out when any idiot comes around and tries to defend that corporate shithole of a country?

I mean, I‘m frustrated and embarrassed of the country I live in but stories like this make me feel like I‘d surely be dead by now if I was in the US (where my mother grew up btw).

Like, why dont people who can just move? Especially the IT peeps who make tons of money should immediately go for northern europe. Everyone speaks english, the corpos are not half as strong (afaik) and people are friendly (my personal experience). The US would scream in terror if their top talent would start to move away. If the election this year goes bad, just vote with your feet folks.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 9 months ago (3 children)

It costs a lot more money than most Americans have available, especially if wanting to move to the EU or Canada and want to work.

I can speak Mexican Spanish and have considered moving there. The biggest obstacle are the Americans who want a cheap version of the US and are essentially colonizing these towns.

If I move to Mexico (or any other country), I want to experience that culture, not displaced American consumerism.

load more comments (3 replies)
[–] [email protected] 8 points 9 months ago (2 children)

Tech pays way more in the US than anywhere else.

load more comments (2 replies)
[–] [email protected] 5 points 9 months ago (2 children)

It does exist: that's what Late Stage Capitalism was all about.

load more comments (2 replies)
load more comments (11 replies)
[–] [email protected] 85 points 9 months ago

Streisand effect is currently very active on this one. Thousands of news outlets, many extremely casual and geared towards average joes who never new emulation existed, are now all being told that "this thing called yuzu can play switch games for free". Nintendo is shooting themselves in the foot. Even if Yuzu dies, it will get forked and people who never knew emulation existed, now do, and look for alternatives.

[–] [email protected] 58 points 9 months ago (1 children)

instructing users how to extract the prod.keys from their own switch

Yuzu's quick start guide links to the old download link for Lockpick RCM from the same repo that is still inaccessible ever since Nintendo's DMCA takedown last year (source: arstechnica). They never updated the page to link to any mirrors of Lockpick RCM or any other options to extract the keys; the guide doesn't even work right now. You can see in Yuzu site's changelog on github that the only changes made to that page in the last year are to minimum/recommended hardware requirements.

It seems even more absurd to argue that instructions are somehow infringing when the allegedly infringing part of them has already been broken for almost a year. Even the standing for taking down Lockpick RCM in the first place seems questionable, and telling users to use it with a broken link seems several layers further detached from that.

[–] [email protected] 36 points 9 months ago (3 children)

Just owning lockpicks does noy make you a thief.

[–] [email protected] 20 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Ethically, I agree with you. More than that, using a lockpick on a lock you bought shouldn't make you a thief. Unfortunately, DMCA has abysmal anti-circumvention measures that make the legality of using a device you own in ways you should be able to become questionable under US law, in the digital equivalent of Master Lock suing you for picking a lock you bought from them.

load more comments (1 replies)
[–] _haha_oh_wow_ 7 points 9 months ago

Unfortunately, a lot of places have insanely draconian laws regarding "criminal tools".

load more comments (1 replies)
[–] [email protected] 46 points 9 months ago (3 children)

Were they sleeping for almost a decade now? Doesn't the prod keys users extract belong to them? Fuck capitalism

[–] [email protected] 23 points 9 months ago (1 children)

This is Nintendo's point, making use of the prod keys goes against the DMCA

[–] [email protected] 17 points 9 months ago (2 children)

If Nintendo can prove that the primary purpose of Yuzu is to circumvent Nintendo's encryption, there is a very real and very scary chance they could win the lawsuit.

17 USC §1201 (a)(2)

No person shall manufacture, import, offer to the public, provide, or otherwise traffic in any technology, product, service, device, component, or part thereof, that—

(A) is primarily designed or produced for the purpose of circumventing a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title;

(B) has only limited commercially significant purpose or use other than to circumvent a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title; or

(C) is marketed by that person or another acting in concert with that person with that person’s knowledge for use in circumventing a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 9 months ago (1 children)

It's less about being right and more about Yuzu devs willing to spend a million dollars to defend themselves and risk a tens of millions of dollars ruling against them. The best case Yuzu will have is winning and court costs. Worse case is owing God knows how much to Nintendo. The system is bullshit.

load more comments (1 replies)
load more comments (1 replies)
[–] [email protected] 21 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (1 children)

No you misunderstood, when you bought your Switch you didn't buy the hardware and the software on it, you only bought the right to use the hardware and software. It still belongs to Nintendo, and you better watch out you do nothing bad with it!

[–] [email protected] 17 points 9 months ago (1 children)

The thing is, Apple already went through the same lawsuit against jailbreaking a while back and lost. I don’t think Nintendo is going to like where this goes.

[–] [email protected] 38 points 9 months ago

They're not betting on winning. They're betting on Yuzu developers being too poor to fight back

[–] [email protected] 6 points 9 months ago

Obviously not ^^

[–] [email protected] 40 points 9 months ago (3 children)

Welcome to the age of the licence, where you pay to be given permission to use something in a specific way.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 9 months ago

This is nothing new. There is no "age of the licence". "Intellectual property" is much of what modern "capitalism" is about, and has been for several decades.

The initial idea of capitalism was to have capital to back up your activity, and use that activity to develop your capital. The capital was composed of whatever you could "retain" as yours, by your own means. Meaning you had to get the skills, you had to actively retain the capital, etc. So it was self limiting. One cannot possibly retain more than one estate or learn more than a couple lines of work all by themselves.

But then, people started selling services in addition to goods, and those who had capital quickly realised that it was far more profitable to pay someone a fraction of their capital to extend their possibility beyond their own means.

So capitalism became some kind of club: if you already had established trust with a group that let you grow capital beyond your own means, you could effortlessly obtain capital, and grow it steadily, with virtually no limits. It was then still possible to become part of that club (given some starting capital and an ever increasing amount of work).

However, that changed in the 70s when nixon decided to abandon the gold standard in 1971. This move essentially got rid of the need for a tangible capital, and allowed the mental concept of "trust" to be the only necessary metric by which capital is measured.

This is the exact reason people like trump can strive. Con artists love this system, because they only need their skills, which consist solely of lying, to develop any amount of wealth, out of thin air.

The damage effected by nixon on the north american societies, and by extension on the western societies, and by transaction, on all societies worldwide, will only be truly understood in centuries, by historians, when our epoch will be studied as a static set of facts, rather than a dynamic stream of information of varying veracity.

Anyway, to the point: this in itself was the beginning of the end of capitalism as a meaningful economic system. But it wasn't the last blow to its integrity. Progressively, Intellectual Property, a falsehood according to which information exhibits the same set of properties as matter, went on to relentlessly turn capitalism into a kleptocracy.

Since the 80s, and the advent of computing, information has taken an ever more important part in society. And with it, "intellectual property".

By now, any capitalist with the "title to" an information can effectively forbid anyone else from having that idea.

This is the actual problem. That and the imaginary money. It allows all kind of abuse, and it does so nonlinearly. Which is an especially bigger problem now that anyone can automate nearly anything.

People naturally have issues understanding nonlinear progressions, and that is why Ponzi schemes work. And, also, why no meaningful majority rebels against our current system. They simply are unable to truly understand it.

[–] _haha_oh_wow_ 13 points 9 months ago

If buying isn't owning, the piracy isn't stealing.

Shit, piracy isn't stealing either way if you ask me but that's another debate entirely.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (1 children)

According to what scott ross from the accursed farm youtube channel discovered, you actually don't have the right to own the software you bought ! if you live in US

load more comments (1 replies)
[–] [email protected] 27 points 9 months ago (9 children)

Where do we donate for legal fees?

[–] [email protected] 7 points 9 months ago
load more comments (8 replies)
[–] [email protected] 19 points 9 months ago

Maybe instead of going after a way to make switch games more accessible to people outside of your ecosystem, you should expand your ecosystem to include them.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (3 children)

Never heard of this thing. Does it work well?

[–] [email protected] 14 points 9 months ago

Yuzu and Riyujinx (another switch emulator) work great, expect a bit of setup though

[–] [email protected] 14 points 9 months ago

Streisand effect :)

load more comments (1 replies)
[–] [email protected] 9 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (4 children)

Which emulator should I use for the latest Zelda on Linux?

CEMU and BotW worked great. Yuzu wasn't really working at the time but maybe it's the better option now?

[–] [email protected] 10 points 9 months ago (1 children)

You can also try ryujinx if you can't get yuzu to work.

load more comments (1 replies)
load more comments (3 replies)
[–] fsxylo 9 points 9 months ago

So now in addition to "right to repair" we now need a "right to break" so companies can disappear off the planet if they try this shit.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 9 months ago (1 children)

wants* to milk their users

load more comments (1 replies)
[–] [email protected] 7 points 9 months ago (1 children)

The username just cracked me up btw.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Trust me. I speak the truth :)

load more comments (1 replies)
[–] [email protected] 6 points 9 months ago

Well that program is downloaded now.

[–] ZugZug 4 points 9 months ago

I fucking hate Nintendo buytI do like to pirate their games.

load more comments
view more: next ›