Interestingly, this rash of DMCA takedown requests is apparently related to the Garry's Mod DMCA strikes from a while back. Apparently, copyright protection companies have started using some kind of automated AI service to mass flag and DMCA hosters of infringing material. This is why it's all so haphazard and the emails full of spelling errors
Noooooo Vimms been going since I was literally a tiny child.
FUCK. Just used it the other day to download some PS2 games. FUCK COPYRIGHT, DEATH TO GAME COMPANIES.
It also seems like many of the Internet Archive links in the r/Roms megathread have been DMCA'd. for example all the PS1 links. There's still others but it still sucks
I know what's going to happen, this shit is going to get taken off the anglo western internet and you're going to be forced to use yandex to find pirated material. I mean it's not the end of the world if it's still available but it's going to be more annoying to find it.
Is this it? Have they finally come for the roms after all these years?
What's the endgame here just to make retro gamers miserable cos they sure as fuck aint selling em
ROM sites have always been illegal, video game publishers just haven't bothered to do much about them outside of some very specific cases. If the thing about AI is accurate, I think it's just a case where publishers, or rather the companies they've hired, have finally figured out a way to scan the internet and spam DMCA takedown notices using cheap automated tools without needing to pay employees to do it for them, lowering the threshold significantly. I expect a lot more shit like this and the Garry's Mod Steam Workshop takedowns in the future
They wouldn't need AI to automate this lol if that was really the issue then mass DMCA would have happened 10 years ago. Either way sucks all this to protect IP they refuse to sell hoarding a pile of nothing.
I'm waiting for the day microshit starts distributing stuff to remove roms directly from your PC
People are also speculating that Apple allowing emulators on the App Store played a part in this. A big part of why Nintendo went after Yuzu was that they were spooked about Android emulation eating into their handheld business. Now hundreds of millions of people can easily access Nintendo games on non-Nintendo devices they already own. Apparently people on TikTok were making viral guides about how to download roms from places like Vimms which probably didn't help either
The day that Russians and Chinese comply with DMCA is the day hell freezes
all the cool pirate sites I use are kicking the bucket one by one, you hate to see it
https://myrient.erista.me/
In case you are looking for something else
I recommend switching over to the myr* links in the r/roms mega for the time being.
I also recommend buying a 4TB hard drive and grabbing anything you think you'd plausibly play or care about.
Tooling around these takedowns seems to be rapidly getting "better" and it wouldn't surprise me to find out initiatives like this getting increased funding as they're a way to deploy AI to make it look like you're meaningfully doing something to "protect" revenue
I believe the "perfect" use case for these tools would be hentai sites considering just how much porn of copyrighted characters there is. Like it'd take years to manually copyright strike hundreds of thousands of smutty Samus or Link .jpgs but an AI could probably do it in a few days
I fucking hate capitalist so fucking much! The only respite I have from the hellworld are books and videogames. FUCK YOU ALL AND DIE!
I seem to remember there being a script for Emuparadise that revealed the download links, because the files were still on the servers its just that the links were hidden. Dunno if that's still the case or if it will be the case here.
I think they're still there. (Correct me if I'm wrong) Haven't used emuparadise in a while though
Any word of how successful they are at targeting private trackers this way? Could that be an answer?
Reminder that archive.org has full sets for pretty much every console
