Q. Why did Nintendo force GitHub to take down an emulator? A. It was stuffed with ROMs

Nintendo has demanded GitHub take down a JavaScript-powered Game Boy Advance emulator. An outrage against perfectly legal software? No. The emulator was apparently bundled with more than three dozen copies of copyright-protected game titles. Code-hosting site GitHub has posted a copy of the DMCA takedown request it received …

[asdf]

can't resist

Nintendo has done some rather questionable things regarding copyright in the past (such as trying to invalidate Fair Use provisions in the US) but hard not side with them here. Guess with their latest console being a flop they really do need to protect that Super Mario Paper 3D Smash Brothers Party 23 revenue stream.

[asdf]

ironic who the victim is

>Bundling both emulator and roms together is wrong and not necessary.

I agree but if Nintendo had their way they would make owning any rom file illegal even if you own the original cartridge and ripped the rom yourself. As I said Nintendo and Fair Use have never played nice together.

[imanidiot]

Re: ironic who the victim is

Nintendo is also the company that keeps insisting trading used games is piracy, so I'm not sure we should be paying much attention to their opinion if it's not in the law (And/or they are not about to get it made into law)

[Captain Underpants]

Re: ironic who the victim is

I remember getting quite annoyed with Nintendo's attitude to old games when they'd pull silly tricks like release a Zelda Retrospective disc to promote the release of Windwaker - and include the NES games, the N64 games and a trailer for Wind Waker on it, but not A Link To The Past (the one that I at least consider far and away the best, not least because I played it first) because that instead got a full-price release on the Gameboy Advance. (Of course, the GBA also saw such unfettered greed as a Classic NES series of ports released at silly prices, because nobody in their right mind would think that ExciteBike - fun though it was - would be worth paying the bones of £20...)

They've gotten a bit better about this since then with the Virtual Console on the Wii (in that at least there was a legitimate way to access older games, particularly for those less interested/able to go through the faff that can be involved in getting emulators to work), but I still find it irritating that games companies in general think that, having bought one or more copies of a game on previous platforms, the end user should have absolutely no right to do anything enabling them to play that game on other hardware once the original platform is obsolete and unsupported by its vendor.

[Danny 5]

who me?

I may (or may not) have pretty much every rom of every Nintendo cart ever made :D

I may (or may not) also say the same for Sega, Atari and all the other classic consoles.

Just roms from carts mind you, disks are too big.

[Annihilator]

I do find it odd, that the sytem and games were discontinued over 8 years ago, yet it's still illegal to have downloaded versions. Where is the loss of income for Nintendo on these emulator ROMs?

[Kane]

@Annihilator

This seems to be the direction of travel for the industry. This is not a Nintendo specific example, but there are a lot of shenanigans afoot from the big hitters in the industry around the use of offline/unsupported/abandoned software/hardware. Some salient quotes from the linked article:

"There's no such thing as an obsolete game when you can revive it on any platform at any time. It's digital. From our perspective, there is no merit to the term 'obsolete.' There is no need to allow people to hack or otherwise open up these things or create competing economic enterprises."

"It is not uncommon to improve upon or re-introduce a game at a later time or to iterate upon the software after server support has ended to obtain a return on this valuable investment. Allowing circumvention to enable access to third-party game servers after a video game publisher ends online support harms the market for these new copyrighted works."

This is why there has been such a big move away from physical media for the current gen consoles; it is becoming more common to provide download links/codes for the games when buying a console bundle. Less physical media=greater control of the product for the company.

[Captain Underpants]

Re: @Annihilator

@Kane:

The problem with that wording is the thing they slyly skip:

"There's no such thing as an obsolete game when you can revive it on any platform at any time." is that it doesn't account for license transfer. Which is what they want - "oh, we brought it back for you - just buy it again". Err. No, I paid once already, get lost.

HD remakes at least theoretically get some work put into them, but a port to a new platform is of buggerall use to me if what I want is to play it on the original platform (unless they want to offer some sort of free licence program, which is exactly what they want to avoid...)

[DropBear]

I suppose it's the age old "just because I have no use whatsoever for this property of mine doesn't mean you're allowed to use it instead, even if that would mean zero inconvenience for me" argument - one of the classic cases where what's legal and what's moral are at polar opposites. I wonder when, if ever, will people finally realise that "lawful" implies no correlation whatsoever with "reasonable", "moral", "the right thing to do", "decent", "sane" etc.

[sisk]

I wonder when, if ever, will people finally realise that "lawful" implies no correlation whatsoever with "reasonable", "moral", "the right thing to do", "decent", "sane" etc.

Exactly. The law isn't always right and what's illegal isn't always wrong. Case in point: Disney's oldest copyrights. They are still making money off stuff that everyone who put any kind of investment (time, money, or talent) into has long since died.