Nintendo has recently launched a number of DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) take-down requests against GitHub, including one for a popular tool called Lockpick.
Lockpick is a tool that lets users export keys from their Switch consoles, which can be used to decrypt important information from game data and system files. Nintendo believes that such a tool would violate its copyright and intellectual property rights, so it has asked GitHub to remove the related code base.
However, this move has caused a lot of discontent and opposition from Switch users and developers. They believe that Nintendo is too harsh and overbearing, and does not respect the legal rights of users, nor does it understand the spirit of the open source community. They point out that tools such as Lockpick are not for pirating or cracking games, but rather allow users to freely backup and manage their game data and system files. Moreover, these tools can only export keys from the user’s own Switch and not from elsewhere, so they do not cause substantial damage to Nintendo.
Currently, GitHub has removed the codebase for tools like Lockpick at Nintendo’s request, but there are a number of other similar tools and projects that have not yet been affected. It is claimed that Nintendo has some other downgrade requests in progress, but the specific details have not yet been made public.
