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.
"Discord responds to and complies with all legal and valid Digital Millennium Copyright Act requests. In this instance, there was also a court ordered injunction for the takedown of these materials, and we took action in a manner consistent with the court order," reads part of a statement from Discord director of product communications Kellyn Slone to
The Verge.
The developers of Suyu and Sudachi only received vague messages about how they were sharing content that allegedly violates intellectual property rights, according to images shared with
The Verge. Meanwhile, Discord tells us that it's following its normal process for DMCA takedown requests — but it's not at all clear there was a valid DMCA takedown request or that those communities were actually violating IP rights, and it's quite possible Discord isn't following its own policy by kicking them out.
Remember, Nintendo got Yuzu to settle rather than proving its case in court, and the settlement did not give Nintendo the rights to Yuzu's freely copyable
GPL v3 code. Developers of Yuzu's forks also claimed they were
changing the code further, among other practices, in an effort to avoid pissing Nintendo off. And that code wasn't hosted on Discord in any case.
But it's possible that people were sharing Nintendo's cryptographic keys, firmware, or even entire pirated games in these servers despite those commitments. At the end of the day, most people seeking out a Nintendo Switch emulator are looking to play Nintendo games on it. But with the servers gone, it's hard to prove either way.
Even if Suyu and Sudachi were infringing,
Discord's policy does not suggest it would permaban, much less nuke entire servers, on the first offense. Discord did not answer questions about whether these users were repeat copyright infringers, had received any previous warnings, or were forwarded any takedown requests.
Sudachi developer Jarrod Norwell tells me it came out of the blue: "Their first email was that my account has broken the TOS, with no additional information." He claims Sudachi wasn't doing anything infringing. Later, he was told it vaguely had something to do with intellectual property but says Discord still hasn't given him any details.
DMCA takedown requests are traditionally about
content, not people or groups of people, and
Discord's policy is written to reflect that. A valid takedown request has to include a description of the content that's infringing and where to find it; a platform then takes down the content, and users can get it reinstated if they file a "counter-notice" that claims it wasn't actually infringing. At that point, Discord has done its job, and Nintendo can sue the developer directly if it wants by using the counter-notice to track them down.
But that doesn't seem to be what happened here. It looks like Discord simply de-platformed these emulators by nuking their communication channels.
t the end of the day, platforms like Discord have no obligation to host anything they don't want to host, as we discussed back
when GitLab did something similar by deplatforming Suyu's code. And perhaps Discord did see evidence of software piracy in these Discords. That's not currently how it's justifying these channel wipes, though.
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