Wii Homebrew Channel in limbo: 'It was built on a pile of lies and copyright infringement'

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The Homebrew Channel, a critical component for modding Wii consoles to run custom software, has now ceased development amid allegations of copyright infringement.

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(Photo Credit: Anton Retro)

Wii modding may be at a standstill when it comes to homebrew applications as one of the major players in the space has stopped updating the Homebrew Channel. It's been revealed by the digital wizards at fail0verflow that the Homebrew Channel was essentially built on pirated code lifted directly from Nintendo Software Development Kits (SDKs). As a result, updates and development on the Homebrew Channel have been shut down, potentially preempting any potential legal action from Nintendo.

"The Homebrew Channel (HBC) is a vital tool for Wii homebrew enthusiasts. It's essentially a launcher for homebrew applications, allowing users to access them directly from the Wii's main menu," reads a quick description.

The Homebrew Channel depends on a collection of libraries/code called libogic in order to function. Now it's been confirmed that libogic was actually based on copyrighted code from Nintendo, and that libogic's developers had stolen code directly from another real-time operating system RTEMS.

fail0verflow explain the situation in a readme post on the Homebrew Channel page:

This repository is archived and will not accept any further contributions.

Like most Wii homebrew software, this software depends on libogc.

After development of The Homebrew Channel had already started, we discovered that large portions of libogc were stolen directly from the Nintendo SDK or games using the Nintendo SDK (decompiled and cleaned up).

We thought that at least significant parts of libogc, such as its threading implementation, were original, and reluctantly continued to use the project while distancing ourselves from it.

It has recently been revealed that the threading/OS implementation in libogc is, in fact, stolen from RTEMS. The authors of libogc didn't just steal proprietary Nintendo code, but also saw it fit to steal an open source RTOS and remove all attribution and copyright information.

This goes far beyond ignorance about the copyright implications of reverse engineering Nintendo binaries, and goes straight into outright deliberate, malicious code theft and copyright infringement.

The current developers of libogc are not interested in tracking this issue, finding a solution, nor informing the community of the problematic copyright status of the project. When we filed an issue about it, they immediately closed it, replied with verbal abuse, and then completely deleted it from public view.

For this reason, we consider it impossible to legally and legitimately compile this software at this point, and cannot encourage any further development.

The Wii homebrew community was all built on top of a pile of lies and copyright infringement, and it's all thanks to shagkur (who did the stealing) and the rest of the team (who enabled it and did nothing when it was discovered).

Together, the developers deceived everyone into believing their work was original.