kiriamaya

Kiri's Cohost Mewsings

@kiriamaya

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Super-nerdy 42-year-old trans lesbian :3
(Sometimes I post NSFW stuff so 18+ ONLY)

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kiriamaya
@kiriamaya
Maverynthia
@Maverynthia
haloopdy
@haloopdy

The 3DS emulator Citra is gone

You might've been hearing about Yuzu, the switch emulator, coming under fire. As part of the settlement, citra, basically the only 3DS emulator, was taken down with it. The github is gone, and I'm sure the website will be gone soon too.

https://github.com/citra-emu/citra
https://citra-emu.org/

This is serious. You were worried about the precedent, it's already happening. Nintendo will have this case to draw on for future litigation against any emulator it wants (see first comment, it was settled out of court; a quick search will yield many articles, take your pick). This effectively took down two emulators with just bullying alone (not rom sites like in the past); this still sets a bad precedent in my book.

I really want to drive this home: citra was the only playable 3DS emulator. 3DS emulation is currently dead, until someone picks it back up. The discord was nuked today, there is currently no organized community. Yuzu was not the only switch emulator, but there is no other 3DS emulator.

Edit: The final post on the citra discord:
Hello yuz-ers and Citra fans: We write today to inform you that yuzu and yuzu’s support of Citra are being discontinued, effective immediately. yuzu and its team have always been against piracy. We started the projects in good faith, out of passion for Nintendo and its consoles and games, and were not intending to cause harm. But we see now that because our projects can circumvent Nintendo’s technological protection measures and allow users to play games outside of authorized hardware, they have led to extensive piracy. In particular, we have been deeply disappointed when users have used our software to leak game content prior to its release and ruin the experience for legitimate purchasers and fans. We have come to the decision that we cannot continue to allow this to occur. Piracy was never our intention, and we believe that piracy of video games and on video game consoles should end. Effective today, we will be pulling our code repositories offline, discontinuing our Patreon accounts and Discord servers, and, soon, shutting down our websites. We hope our actions will be a small step toward ending piracy of all creators’ works. Thank you for your years of support and for understanding our decision.

Please don't pester the Yuzu/citra devs, this isn't their fault and their lives are probably ruined owing 2 million dollars in damages to a company worth 66 billion

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in reply to @haloopdy's post:

titular-d-lott
@titular-d-lott

this is definitely something to be concerned about, emulation is necessary for game preservation, but this case was settled out of court and thus no legal decision or precedent was come to. something to watch out for in future legal cases though

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haloopdy
@haloopdy

Thank you, I made an edit to indicate as such. It unfortunately doesn't change the fact that currently, we don't have a 3DS emulator beyond people sharing/hosting an unsupported final build from potentially untrustworthy sources.

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xkeeper
@xkeeper

Nintendo will have this case to draw on for future litigation against any emulator it wants

i strongly disagree with the "it doesn't set precedent" comment. it doesn't set legal precedent, sure, but do you wanna be the next lucky winner of a big N suit?

who is going to take up the torch of Yuzu or Citra, ostensibly "open source" projects, and continue them, knowing N has a documented, recorded win of $2.2M.

sure, it's not a "legal" one. but a win is a win. do you feel like you have enough money and legal power behind you to take them on? no?

then you'll settle, too.

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xkeeper
@xkeeper

yeah. i have just seen unironic takes (not necessarily only here) that the settlement is effectively meaningless to the rest of the emulation community because It Didnt Go To Trial Emulations Still Legal, without considering anything about how, uh, there's a giant monster in the room and it's already eaten someone.

edit: two someones.

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YuushaRuby
@YuushaRuby

Yeah I don't think this is meaningless, just want to make sure that's clear. It is scary. But, I hope that maybe we could see a big case that gets settled in court that says "emulation and hardware modification is fine actually." Which, really should be the case? Like I own my switch let me dump the firmware and game carts if I want fuck you Nintendo. I mean I think legally that is the case in the US currently, at least for anything that hasn't been released by Hollywood or the music industry. But obviously that could change very fast for video games if Nintendo is doing shit like this.

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armormodekeeg
@armormodekeeg

IIRC I believe the term for this sort of situation where the threat of legal action is enough to intimidate and deter despite no legal precedent being set is "chilling effect", and I think it would be a good idea to call this that to avoid getting confused as to whether we're talking about precedents in the colloquial sense or the legal sense.

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deafhobbit
@deafhobbit

fuck this. very glad i grabbed backups of the source code and installers for both of these over the weekend.

thankfully, both are still on flathub. linux users can download from there, build a bundle after installing it, and back up the bundle in case they get pulled.

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