Nintendo might not need to individually sue emulators out of existence to drive them deeper underground. Today, GitLab cut off access to Nintendo Switch emulator Suyu, and disabled the accounts of its developers, after receiving what appears to be a scary email in the form of a DMCA takedown request.
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GitLab confirms it’s removed Suyu, a fork of Nintendo Switch emulator Yuzu
Today, GitLab cut off access to Nintendo Switch emulator Suyu, and disabled the accounts of its devs, after receiving a scary email that looked like a DMCA takedown request.
âGitLab received a DMCA takedown notice from a representative of the rightsholder and followed our standard process outlined here,â spokesperson Kristen Butler tells The Verge.
Suyu was a fork of Yuzu, the emulator that Nintendo successfully sued, but this isnât about Nintendo now having the rights to Yuzuâs code â or maybe even Nintendo at all? Nintendo didnât necessarily win the rights to Yuzuâs code in its settlement, and GitLab didnât tell The Verge that Nintendo is behind the takedown.
Instead, as you can see in the email above â one of several being shared in Suyuâs Discord and published earlier by Overkill.wtf â whoever sent the takedown request is trying to piggyback on how Yuzu allegedly violated DMCA 1201 by circumventing Nintendoâs technical protection measures. Oh, and maybe also subtly threatening GitLab with unlawful trafficking (also part of DMCA 1201) while theyâre at it.
Iâm not a lawyer, but a couple of lawyers told me two years ago that a valid DMCA takedown request should technically contain âIdentification of the copyrighted work claimed to have been infringed,â and that DMCA 1201 is not the same thing as DMCA 512, which covers takedown requests.
Also, Suyu has claimed it does not include the same circumvention measures as Yuzu.
But those lawyers also told me that valid or invalid, it doesnât necessarily matter all that much, since a platform like GitLab doesnât have to host anything that it doesnât want to host. It may not be worth the time and effort to push back on an invalid DMCA takedown request to protect something you might not even care to protect â particularly if the alternative might be Nintendo coming at you with an actual lawsuit.
GitLab didnât immediately answer a question about whether itâs company policy to disable userâs accounts before giving them the opportunity to delete their projects or file a DMCA counter-notice. The companyâs online handbook does not say why GitLab might decide to block or ban a user from its platform; only that âwe may, in appropriate circumstances, disable access or terminate the account(s) of the reported user(s).â
Suyu appears to have already found a new home. About an hour ago, its leader wrote âIâm most certainly going to host a copy of the code.â By that point, another member had already cloned the repository to git.suyu.dev.