Discord has shut down the Discord servers for Nintendo Switch emulators Suyu and Sudachi, and completely disabled their lead developers’ accounts – the company didn’t answer our questions about why it’s reached this point. Both Suyu and Sudachi started as forks of Yuzu, an emulator that Nintendo sued on March 4 to cause it to cease to exist.
“Discord responds to and complies with all lawfully valid Digital Millennium Copyright Act requests. In this case, the court also ordered the removal of these materials, and we acted in compliance with the court order,” Kellyn Slone, Discord’s director of product communications, said in a statement wrote. edge.
developers Based on the images shared, Suyu and Sudachi received only vague information about how they shared content that allegedly infringed on intellectual property rights. edge. Meanwhile, Discord tells us it’s following the normal process for DMCA takedown requests, but it’s not at all clear whether there are valid DMCA takedown requests or whether these communities are actually infringing on intellectual property rights, and it’s likely that Discord isn’t following its own process policy and kick them out.
Remember, Nintendo let Yuzu settle rather than prove its case in court, and the settlement did not give Nintendo rights to the GPL v3 code that Yuzu could freely copy. The developers of the Yuzu fork also claim they are making further code changes, among other things, to avoid angering Nintendo. In any case, the code is not hosted on Discord.
But despite these promises, people may still be sharing Nintendo encryption keys, firmware, or even entire pirated games in these servers. Ultimately, most people looking for a Nintendo Switch emulator want to play Nintendo games on it. But with servers gone, it’s hard to prove either scenario.
Even if Suyu and Sudachi infringe, Discord’s policy does not suggest that it will permanently ban on the first violation, let alone nuke the entire server. Discord did not respond to questions about whether these users were repeat copyright infringers, had received any previous warnings, or had received any takedown requests.
Sudachi developer Jarrod Norwell told me the incident came as a surprise: “Their first email was saying my account was in violation of the terms of service but didn’t provide any other information.” He claimed that Sudachi did not commit any infringement. He was later told it appeared to be related to intellectual property, but said Discord still had not given him any details.
DMCA takedown requests have traditionally been about content, rather than people or groups of people, and Discord’s policies are designed to reflect that. A valid takedown request must include a description of the infringing content and where the content can be found; the platform then removes the content and can reinstate it if the user submits a “counter-notification” claiming that the content is not actually infringing. At this point, Discord has done its job and Nintendo can pursue the developer via a counter-notification and sue the developer directly if they choose.
But that doesn’t seem to be what’s happening here. It looks like Discord is de-platforming these emulators simply by breaking their communication channels.
Although the court order mentioned by Discord Do Prohibiting certain third parties from “offering, marketing, advertising, promoting… or otherwise trafficking in Yuzu or any source code or functionality of Yuzu,” it specifically talks about third parties that “actively cooperate and participate with Defendants.” Discord won’t tell me that any Yuzu developers are associated with Suyu or the Sudachi project.
Ultimately, platforms like Discord have no obligation to host anything they don’t want to host, as we discussed when GitLab did something similar by de-platforming the Suyu code. Maybe Discord does see evidence of software piracy in these Discords. However, this does not currently justify the erasure of these channels.
For some Suyu developers, this may be the last straw: one insider told me that, following the infighting, a team has splintered off to work on its own projects that may or may not be related to emulation; here’s a Pastebin, one of the “real Suyu developers” claims that the core development team has left the project due to Suyu’s “radioactivity” and its allegedly egotistical leader. (From what insiders have shown me, this leader does tend to bark orders.)
In the meantime, Sudachi’s developer told me he’s still working on all of his projects.
Nintendo’s latest round of takedowns targets not only the Switch emulator, but also some of the tools that help them: It sent a DMCA takedown request to GitHub to remove 27 forks of the Sigpatch updater, as well as Lockpick_RCM, kezplez-nx, and Incognito_RCM, which help the Switch Owners and developers obtain encryption keys.