Re: Nintendo maybe going to court for N900 Nintendo emulators.
 

It looks like we've already reached "a little bit dangerous".

It'll be an ugly situation if we have to have another repository (or multiple ones) for free software that maemo.org cannot host, and the other repository is not easy to reach through the regular Maemo GUI.

But this seems to be what commercial Linux distributions do, so it's no surprise.

Btw, have a pleasant weekend, zerojay and everyone else :)

Re: Nintendo maybe going to court for N900 Nintendo emulators.
 

This could suck even more for Android, since the OS is designed to allow removal of apps that they deem to be "dangerous" to the network.

This situation will be good to see if Android actually fires the weapon if pushed on it. There are still ways around it, but the market could be impacted and the one very rare good point about the Android market will be shot to 5hit.

Re: Nintendo maybe going to court for N900 Nintendo emulators.
 

Indeed. I know I keep harping on about Fedora, but it's just the system I'm most familiar with; while emulators and various other potentially troublesome bits of software are excluded from the main distribution there's a very well supported effort at RPM Fusion that includes them, packaged in a way the integrates smoothly with the rest of the OS.

It may be that there's a need for a 'Maemo Fusion', but I expect it makes sense to wait and see for a little while first.

Re: Nintendo maybe going to court for N900 Nintendo emulators.
 

Let's not jump to conclusions yet. I'm sure most of the decisions have yet to be made.

Re: Nintendo maybe going to court for N900 Nintendo emulators.
 

This won't do at all. SNES emulators are basic functionality that people expect on a phone these days :p :D

Re: Nintendo maybe going to court for N900 Nintendo emulators.
 

Portrait mode SNES emulators. Don't leave the house without one!

Re: Nintendo maybe going to court for N900 Nintendo emulators.
 

But could forcefully remove apps if the person was running custom firmware?

Re: Nintendo maybe going to court for N900 Nintendo emulators.
 

Can the maemo community sustain maemo.org financially as it is?

If not, respect that this is a goodwill gesture to Nintendo on Nokias part. Their sponsorship of maemo is more important than hosting a few emulators on maemo.org; they are open-source and can be hosted by the maintainers.

Let us keep our priorities straight, ladies and gentlemen.

(edit: ps. Of course i dont like it either, but i am not surprised. , I know some have been wondering why i did not push my emulator builds from 2007-2008 to extras; now you can infer the reason yourselves)

Re: Nintendo maybe going to court for N900 Nintendo emulators.
 

Inducement.

Re: Nintendo maybe going to court for N900 Nintendo emulators.
 

Depends on what was compromised in the framework for the hacked rom. Droid and Cliq to name two have not been hacked- Android team and Motorola took steps to make it more difficult.

For now and maybe "for ever", could be stuck with official versions for most devices. This especially will be an issue as hardware becomes more fragmented and Android hackers become more spread out.

Best bet is to buy an HTC device (not the 7201 chipset ones now) next year, since then you would have XDA forum community on your side to make roms. They only deal with HTC devices.

Re: Nintendo maybe going to court for N900 Nintendo emulators.
 

Well I'm sticking with the n900 for now, it was more a question for down the line in 3-4 years.

Re: Nintendo maybe going to court for N900 Nintendo emulators.
 

I've never owned any sort of gaming device whatsoever: never felt I would make enough use of it to justify the outlay. I play a few bits and pieces of the free includes on the desktop or phone.

Realising I could (in theory) access some of the older, conventional games on my new device had given me a sniff of interest - I could try them out and see whether I actually liked these things. Now don't get me wrong, I'm certainly not talking about aquiring hot software - or even warm. I'm far to ethical for that. ;) But I was at the point of asking how to go about getting a legally purchased game and trying it on My Mo.

And now Nintendo have just lost themselves a new customer. Back to solitaire. ;)

Re: Nintendo maybe going to court for N900 Nintendo emulators.
 

Just to turn the knife a little: remember the first gta's ? The one that were insanely fun to play? The producers are giving them away. And they were (and possibly still are) so popular!
Wait, what was my point? Oh yeah, nintendo are penny-pinching jackasses (yes, i know it's been said, but it's worth repeating)
Here's my prediction: they make a few waves, possibly sue and get their suit thrown out in 2 days, then everything calms down. The only question is whether nokia will be spooked into never hosting emu's on their sites again

Re: Nintendo maybe going to court for N900 Nintendo emulators.
 

This seems rather unfortunate, but I understand Nintendo has always been very very protective about their stuff, maybe even more so than Apple. That is also their right, I'm guessing they don't want to allow their games to any other platform because that could affect the sales of their own devices (frankly I think it would only be advertisement) . Don't think they can really go against the emulators though.

The game situation is sadder though, I've never owned a console besides some ancient one that had variations of Pong, so I don't know if the old classics are still available for example through net for Wii or maybe for DS, but at least there still is clear holder of the copyrights who could possibly republish them at some point.

When it comes to C64 or other old computer platforms, most of the game companies don't exist anymore and it is very difficult to establish who owns the copyrights anymore so it is very hard to legally obtain the games for emulators and it would be risky for any company to distribute them in case the copyright owner would show up and sue them. Which means lot of our cultural heritage will be lost because of idiotic copyright laws.

Re: Nintendo maybe going to court for N900 Nintendo emulators.
 

Instead of filing these hostile lawsuits, they should just adapt and start selling their ROMs on iTunes or whatever. The emulators we are talking about are for hardware that stopped being manufactured a long time ago. They could capture a percentage of the people that are downloading illegally.

Just like the music industry had to start distributing online due to the changes in technology, Nintendo should recognize that many people want to play their games on a given device and try to profit from it.

Re: Nintendo maybe going to court for N900 Nintendo emulators.
 

They already do. Nintendo's Virtual Console on the Wii gives you access to tons of old games on different platforms.

Re: Nintendo maybe going to court for N900 Nintendo emulators.
 

Couldn't agree more. ;)

There's only one little detail:

Somebody must have decided to remove them from maemo.org (which, officially, is not part of Nokia, but an independent community).

It would have been cool if this somebody also informed the members of this very community about this step... like "Hey, you read this article about Nintendo, right? We have no idea what it means to us legally at the moment, but be thought we'd better be safe than sorry and remove packages a, b and c right now. We'll keep you informed about what's going on, but don't expect any news until after the weekend."

Re: Nintendo maybe going to court for N900 Nintendo emulators.
 

Mirrors: http://talk.maemo.org/showpost.php?p...1&postcount=13

Re: Nintendo maybe going to court for N900 Nintendo emulators.
 

I contacted the council first and then we did our best finding the maintainers and the people who actually can remove packages from extras (that are not Nokia employees). Everybody answered fast, efficiently and with a good common understanding. Good willingness has been clear. Now let's see with time and calm what is the situation and the right solution.

In theory I could have started the same procedure opening a Talk thread, yes. I'm not sure how faster or better the actions would have been taken, and anyway the minimum people agreeing and applying changes would have been the same.

Thank you for your understanding.

Re: Nintendo maybe going to court for N900 Nintendo emulators.
 

Indeed, Emulators are not necessarily illegal. However, any software to circumvent copyrightprotection is illegal thanks to the DMCA and the works.

Btw more info here: http://www.nintendo.com/corp/legal.jsp#emulator

Re: Nintendo maybe going to court for N900 Nintendo emulators.
 

benny1967 : I agree about the lack of information on this matter.

There are tons of emulators for other devices, for instance I have a gb emulator on my current mobile phone which runs under Java and they never had any problems with Nintendo.
There have been Nintendo emulators for years, and even the most recent ones (Dolphin, which emualtes the NGC and the Wii) don't seem to have any legal problems.

I think Nokia's big mistake was officialy advertising classic gaming on the N900 in one of their Presentation videos. However, I doubt that there will be any problems for Nokia.

Re: Nintendo maybe going to court for N900 Nintendo emulators.
 

As Quim said, the members of the community that this directly affected, the authors of said packages as well as community council, were informed about it.

The action taken wasn't because of a simple article either.

It was late on a Friday afternoon/evening when this all came down... not exactly the best time for these sorts of issues. They decided to act fast with the knowledge they had. Also, as I said previously when there's a possibility of legal problems, you don't usually go out and talk about it all over the place.

The most important things here is that:

a) Action was taken swiftly.
b) All involved were easy to get a hold of,
c) All involved agreed to the action taken.

If there's anything else the community needs to know, Quim and Peter will tell us.

I'm sorry there's not some big news announcement about the takedown of the emulators. This is probably down to the fact that a decision has probably yet to be made as to whether or not the emulators should be in Extras on a permanent basis.

Let's see what Monday brings, okay?

Re: Nintendo maybe going to court for N900 Nintendo emulators.
 

This doesn't affect me, but thank you for telling us what you can, Zerojay. Tough day for you, no doubt.

Re: Nintendo maybe going to court for N900 Nintendo emulators.
 

Re: Nintendo maybe going to court for N900 Nintendo emulators.
 

You should put this link in the other thread, not this one...

Re: Nintendo maybe going to court for N900 Nintendo emulators.
 

I'm respectfully requesting that anyone mirroring classic-gaming-wallpapers to please remove the package until we know what's going to happen with the Nintendo issue, thank you.

Re: Nintendo maybe going to court for N900 Nintendo emulators.
 

which thread ?

Re: Nintendo maybe going to court for N900 Nintendo emulators.
 

The one you started ;)
http://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php?t=35385

This one is about the problems Nintendo might cause, if I understand correctly.

Re: Nintendo maybe going to court for N900 Nintendo emulators.
 

The DMCA only applies to the USA and countries that were bullied into accepting the DMCA by the USA. (and sadly more may follow if the ACTA treaty is signed).

Re: Nintendo maybe going to court for N900 Nintendo emulators.
 

It hate Nintendo! <-- VERY CONSTRUCTIVE CRITICS

Re: Nintendo maybe going to court for N900 Nintendo emulators.
 

... waiwaiwait ;)

I read from Quim's response (and yours) that my post on that matter was not as clear as I think it was.

I wasn't talking about whatever Nokia (or Quim) said to the council or the authors/maintainers, nor was I questioning the decision making process.

(I don't know the facts, all I understood was that something had to be done quickly, and I think what you did was not only right, but the only way to do it. Period.)

Everything I said I said about the communications towards the community after the decision had been made and the packages were removed.

And this is why I cite the above paragraph of your post:
"…the members of the community that this directly affected, the authors of said packages as well as community council…"
It's my understanding that above all, it's the end users who are affected. They are because they can no longer download an application they saw the day before. Neither the council members nor the author are affected by this as much as a single end user. You could see questions coming up in this forum about the why and the how, and it took some time before everybody knew what had happened.

So from the point of this one end user who suddenly finds a package gone, the communication was only close to ideal. No damage done, actually, but one point on the list for the next time.

... well again, I trust you made the right decision and all that... but there's yet another aspect to it:

The whole thing brings up the question of independence from Nokia. In another thread, I wrote I wasn't convinced why moving free software to the Ovi Store would be desirable. My point then was that Ovi is under Nokia's control (unwanted content, go away) while maemo.org isn't and can host packages that are not endorsed by Nokia.

Of course I knew, when I wrote this, that maemo.org financially depends on Nokia, but I haven't yet seen them exercise their power here.

Even in this particular case, I don't see what you say happened last Friday as something "Nokia did". The way I read it something had to be done anyway, and Nokia issued a kind warning before it was too late. Right?

But you see where I'm heading? The more Nokia interferes, the clearer things must be communicated. It's crucial to tell in this case that it was not Nokia who deleted the packages without asking anyone. The way Quim explained it above (Quim talks to council, they try to get in contact with maintainers, community members take down packages) makes all of this acceptable even for someone who says: "Let Nokia pay for this community if they want, but let us decide for ourselves".
And I'm deeply convinced this is important. It's important because it's one of the assets that Maemo has: A powerful community that has established equally powerful decision making processes, including one for handling a high quality community repository.

So don't make people jump to conclusions ("Nokia's lawyers deleted..."), tell them how it was handled. Which Quim already did now. ;)

Re: Nintendo maybe going to court for N900 Nintendo emulators.
 

Ok, first, a reminder / disclaimer:

I am a community council member, and I saw the e-mails.

In this particular case, I find the distinction between Nokia doing something and the community doing something quite blurry and difficult to find. The responses I saw from the developers tended to be, "I don't think my packages are illegal, but if you tell me that they must be removed, then go ahead," and most of the actual takedown was done at the request of Nokia employees by people paid by Nokia (although not actually Nokia employees).

Almost all of this happened while I was asleep, during the very early hours of the morning in my time zone, so it wasn't a case of a unanimous council decision or something. There was almost no discussion within the council, and we weren't asked to approve, we were mostly CC'ed.

I'm not saying that it was the wrong thing to do, I'm just saying that this wasn't really a "community" decision in any way.

If the final decision from Nokia is that the emulators and wallpapers cannot be returned to official Nokia distribution channels (Ovi, Maemo Select, etc) then I think we'll need to have a real community decision made about the maemo.org repositories, where, at the minimum, we get a unanimous decision from the elected council members (because I believe we have a fairly wide representation of opinions on the council this term).

This will also become an issue if we don't see some movement in the next week or so from Nokia in regards to this. One of the reasons I haven't protested more is because we were told this is a very temporary situation until things can be clarified.

Re: Nintendo maybe going to court for N900 Nintendo emulators.
 

We're both talking about different decisions here, benny. :)

I wasn't refering to the decision of whether or not to pull down the emulators for the weekend, but the long-term legal decision of whether or not Maemo official repositories will host these packages. Maybe I missed Quim's post today, but as far as I know, that actual decision has yet to be made. I'll look around in case I missed it though.

Re: Nintendo maybe going to court for N900 Nintendo emulators.
 

Oh. Do we. :rolleyes:

OK, this is so completely not what I was talking about... Certainly you couldn't and shouldn't make announcements about things that you don't know of yet. ;)

I referred to this post, guess you read it... at least you thanked him for it.


Oh, and about "the decision": Independence is all nice and such, but when it comes to filthy, disgusting legal issues like so-called "intellectual property" (I hope we're all aware that there's no such thing and the term as such is propaganda), it wouldn't do any bad to listen to the advice of Nokia's lawyers. I assume at least the council members will be getting this advice for free. Other communities would have to pay for it. ;)

Re: Nintendo maybe going to court for N900 Nintendo emulators.
 

I've said it before but I'm going to (very briefly) say it again - we could possibly learn from the setup that the Redhat sponsored Fedora have with legally 'iffy' packages being relegated to the entirely separate RPM Fusion.

Does anyone have any idea how feasible it would be for someone to duplicate the maemo-extras build system to create something that worked the same way without using maemo.org resources?

Re: Nintendo maybe going to court for N900 Nintendo emulators.
 

I don't know much about Fedora... so how is it set up then? Someone outside the community just makes a repository? The same people host it? How exactly does using something along the lines of RPM Fusion relieve us of any legal responsibility (whether you believe emulators are legal or not) of hosting the packages in question?

Re: Nintendo maybe going to court for N900 Nintendo emulators.
 

Just to make sure we're clear here-- in the US the principle of IP is not propaganda but is actually codified in our Constitution.

Now, we can easily debate the silliness wrapped around the core principles, but without an actual amendment the core concept, at least for the US, stands.

I won't speak for other nations.

Re: Nintendo maybe going to court for N900 Nintendo emulators.
 

Fedora is community run, but its main infrastructure is sponsored by Redhat in a similar manner to Nokia sponsoring maemo.org. Various things that could cause legal trouble for Redhat are forbidden from being included in Fedora. This is a community decision - Fedora could decide to include these things, but at the cost of making it difficult for Redhat to continue their support, which would be in no-one's best interests.

RPM Fusion is a volunteer effort that is nothing to do with the Fedora project, and isn't sponsored by Redhat. It is, however, very much a part of the community, and many of the packagers that maintain software in Fedora proper also maintain related packages in RPM Fusion.

It's main strength is that it provides a well know one-stop-shop for 'forbidden' items, and maintains that similar quality standards to the main project; essentially it follows the same rules as Fedora, with the exception of inverting the 'forbidden items' list. It gives users an easily configured source of reliable packages and minimises the creation of multiple independent, mutually incompatible repositories hosting packages of unknown quality.

Re: Nintendo maybe going to court for N900 Nintendo emulators.
 

... which, by itself, wouldn't rule out the possibility that it is a propaganda term. - But AFAIK, the U.S. constitution doesn't even use the term "intellectual property" in its so-called "intellectual-property-clause".

What I meant was this.

(And I recommend reading this.)

I love RMS. Can't help it.

Re: Nintendo maybe going to court for N900 Nintendo emulators.
 

I see what Gnu is saying, but I also think the term "IP" is in and of itself innocuous. I see no harm per se in an umbrella term for copyright, patents and trademarks and feel that some of the ire is much ado about nothing.

Rather than going to war over semantics, they should focus on battling the bastardization of the principles (ie, stupidly long copyrights, et al). What Gnu and others don't seem to get is that "IP" has become a strawman, a foil for arguments that dilutes the real dissension and induces time wasted on things of lesser importance... like terms.

;)

EDIT: that last comment was meant half tongue-in-cheek. It just doesn't come across, sorry. Need a new smiley...