Discord has shut down the Discord servers for the Nintendo Switch emulators Suyu and Sudachi and has completely disabled their lead developers’ accounts — and the company isn’t answering our questions about why it went that far. Both Suyu and Sudachi began as forks of Yuzu, the emulator that Nintendo sued out of existence on March 4th.
Sean Hollister at The Verge
This is exactly what people were worried about when Nintendo and Yuzu settled for millions of dollars. Even though it’s a settlement and not a court ruling, and even tough the code to Yuzu is entirely unaffected by the settlement and freely shareable and usable by anyone, and even though emulators are legal – the chilling effect this settlement is having is absolutely undeniable. Here we have Discord going far beyond its own official policy, without even giving the affected parties any recourse. It’s absolutely wild, and highlights just how dangerous it is to rely on Discord for, well, anything.
I wish that for once, we’d actually see a case related to console emulation go to court in either the EU or the US, to make it even clearer that yes, unless you distribute copyrighted code like game ROMs or console firmware, emulators are entirely legal and without any risk. You know, a recent court ruling we could point to to dissuade bullies like Nintendo from threatening innocent developers and ruining their lives because of entirely legal activities.
And let me reiterate: don’t use Discord as for anything other than basic chat. This platform ain’t got your back.
I can’t even use discord, every time i signed up the account got cancelled within a few minutes with the same automated message, and their support completely ignores any questions. The automated email claims a violation of some terms, but i’ve not even got as far as posting any messages. I even signed up through an intercepting proxy and took a complete log of all traffic back and forth.
My best guess is it’s due to the use of CGNAT here, as discord don’t have IPv6 all of my traffic hits their servers from the same address as other customers of the ISP – perhaps one of them has done something to get the shared address space banned.
That sounds about right. I briefly had a Discord account for game chatting back when I played Rust, but my account was locked because my user name was “offensive”. It’s the online identity I’ve used for decades (kaidenshi) and I’ve never had an issue with it anywhere else. Like you, any questions or attempts to get it rectified were ignored, and I didn’t care enough about it to ever push back so I just dropped the platform altogether. Good riddance to bad rubbish.
Thom Holwerda,
Yes, it’s dangerous to leave one’s identity in the hands of another subject to their arbitrary whims. I say the same thing about all centralized proprietary platforms including Discord but also Twitter and the rest. We shouldn’t be so dependent on them, and yet we keep walking right into their traps.
To be honest, I’m not entirely sure a US court would rule that way under the DMCA. Different courts can rule inconsistently and lawyers generally advise clients to be precocious and settle/comply with takedown notices if they don’t want to foot the costs of going to court. Even innocent parties have to worry about lawsuits and I can’t blame those who prefer to avoid it all. I agree that we need to get more case law on the books though. Until that happens, the cloud of uncertainly will continue to loom and people will continue to get badgered by corporations even if they aren’t guilty of anything.
Yuzu was charging money for builds that would play switch games **before** they were officially released. That’s why they got nuked. If you want to blame someone, blame them for dragging all other emulators with them
Huh? It’s well within the rights of the GPL-3.0 license to sell the software, and Yuzu didn’t ship with decryption keys for any particular game.
This is like saying “VLC can play movies before they were officially released”. As long as they don’t provide the content, they are not responsible for what other people do with the software.
They reportedly got in trouble with the anti circumvention parts of the dcma, and supposedly offered directions/instructions. Pay walling their product and being able to settle for 2.4 million indicates the discovery part of the trial would have been horrendous. Plus the paywall certainly would look awful to a jury.
Ugh, I hate Discord SO MUCH, that so many communities have moved all discourse to it. Specifically, the Game Boy development community. There is so much valuable information, questions and answers, and more and more added every day, that is locked behind a proprietary service, with no way to view the information in any sort of “threaded” format, and no way to find that information publicly through search engines. I’ve started scraping the most valuable information to me from that server into a local text file on my computer, just so it’s easily searchable and won’t ever be lost.
Isn’t it ironic Discord, the platform that was supposed to support freedom and all of that because Twitter was being destroyed by Elon Musk, turns out to be a bunch of hypocrites that love censorship?
Considering the amount of times I’ve read “Discord banned me for something I said on a private server”, I don’t know why people keep using it for real work.
People should move to IRC, it maybe old, but it is still alive and better than Discord
A lot of IRC networks also have ridiculous rules, like requiring you to run an ident service which not only serves absolutely no function outside of multiuser unix boxes, but can’t be done at all if you’re stuck behind CGNAT or the provider blocks inbound IPv6 traffic.
Also expecting you to have reverse DNS, despite the fact that the vast majority of users have no control over that.
There’s also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matrix_(protocol) which is trying to be an open federated protocol that’s more like Discord/Slack, and the Wikipedia page says some projects have moved to it from IRC.