Wait but why is Valve involved at all, then? Not like it’s their fault that some people they have nothing to do with are building a game based on those APIs, so shouldn’t Nintendo approach the developers of the port directly instead?
Valve removed it because it used official N64 APIs that Nintendo holds as classified information. I think if it had totally been bottom-up crafted from scratch, it would have survived. But Valve does NOT wanna deal with a Nintendo lawyer.
hikaru755@lemmy.world 10 months ago
viking@infosec.pub 10 months ago
Valve holds the copyright to Portal, so Nintendo probably just “encouraged” them to pull some strings.
woelkchen@lemmy.world 10 months ago
Nintendo probably just “encouraged” them to pull some strings.
Nintendo have their own litigation-happy lawyers. With the exception of the Portal Collection release for Switch, both companies have nothing to do with each other.
mint_tamas@lemmy.world 10 months ago
Nintendo sues everyone they encounter in the faintest context of their IP with the power of a thousand suns. See also, the failed launch if Dolphin on Steam. Valve is justifiably cautious here.
woelkchen@lemmy.world 10 months ago
Valve is justifiably cautious here.
Valve doesn’t distribute the port.
Mango@lemmy.world 10 months ago
Right, but what the heck is up with Nintendo clinging into ancient obsolete stuff? They’re not stupid right?
starman2112@sh.itjust.works 10 months ago
Yes, Nintendo is stupid. They see capitalism as a zero-sum game, and so any time someone has or keeps their own money, that’s the same as Nintendo losing that money, so they do whatever they’re legally able to do to ruin people financially, going as far as taking 30% of your income for the rest of your life if you do wrong by them.
ShustOne@lemmy.one 10 months ago
No but Nintendo is fiercely protective of all of its IP. We know there’s not really harm being done here but it is within their rights to block this and that is the road they always choose.
Demdaru@lemmy.world 10 months ago
I may be overinterpreting this but it almooost seems, if you stretch it a bit, as if valve saved poor guys. Valve said stop, Nintendo’d say pay up.
boaratio@lemmy.world 10 months ago
Classified?
woelkchen@lemmy.world 10 months ago
APIs fall under fair use: arstechnica.com/…/how-the-supreme-court-saved-the…
yaaaaayPancakes@lemmy.world 10 months ago
Hi, Android dev here. This is a different issue albeit a tangential one. But ultimately it has no bearing on the matter.
The Oracle v Google case revolves around Google’s reimplementation of the Java APIs on the Android platform. This is key. Back when Android started, they used Apache Harmony to provide the Java API set on Android. Harmony was an open source implementation of the Java API set. Sun (the creator of Java) didn’t care, they held the copyright to the Java implementation, but made their money in different ways, so they let the Harmony project live.
Fast forward a decade. The Apache Harmony project is dead. Android is stuck at Java 6 level APIs because of it, Android devs are annoyed they can’t even get Java 8 features. And Oracle bought Sun, and is monetizing the shit out of Java. They started charging money for the official Java SDK. Google didn’t want to pay Oracle, so they started reimplementing the newer Java APIs into Android, to pick up where Harmony had left off. Oracle saw this, found some code in Google’s reimplementation that was similar to the official implementation from Oracle (which is out in the open in the openjdk project) and sued the shit out of them looking for the payday they didn’t get when Google refused to pay Oracle a license.
Ultimately, the SCOTUS ruling says that APIs themselves are not copyrightable (ie you can’t copyright the .toString() function name). But you can copyright the implementation of that function. Ultimately Oracle still won a bit, because they found something like 6 function reimplementations that Google could not successfully defend as clean room implementations.
Why this is irrelevant to the Portal64 issue, is because the dev is not using the open source reimplementation of the Nintendo APIs. He’s literally using the Nintendo owned implementation of the APIs. That’s why he says he needs to switch to open source libraries. Those open source libraries have the same functions within them, but the implementation of said functions aren’t the same as the Nintendo ones (or they are and Nintendo just hasn’t sued the project into oblivion yet, I have no idea about the details).
lawrence@lemmy.world 10 months ago
I like tech history. Loved your explanation about the Google vs Oracle legal battle.
woelkchen@lemmy.world 10 months ago
Then the people here using the term “API” should have rather used “libraries” or “frameworks” or whatever. I cannot look myself because the Github repo is private now.