Copyrighted content and pirated material have never been allowed on GitHub. If you're trying to pirate stuff off of GitHub, you're doing it wrong.
That said, I get the feeling that OP is referring to emulators, CFW, and ROM-Hacking tools; those have always been legal, despite some intents and implications hiding behind them, as they don't explicitly contain any copyrighted content in their repositiories. They merely utilize and manipulate existing copyrighted content. How said content is obtained is ultimately the responsibility of the user.
While I don't entirely trust Microsoft, their recent open-source initiatives and now their acquisition of GitHub seem to be PR moves with the open-source community. Zapping emulator repositories would be counter-intuitive, and ultimately detrimental to their image. That's not to say that doing so is above their standards, and that they might not do it later on down the line, but, strategically, it wouldn't make sense. Emulator and CFW devs should be fine.
Besides, I'm sure they've heard of SourceForge, their anti-developer practices, and the site's ultimate fate, so I'm sure they're going to try to stay on good terms with as many users as possible.
There has never been piracy on GitHub. All projects are by definition, OpenSource.
And in any case, the final user is responsible for the way any software hosted on GitHub is being used.
Even if some projects might get used for something piracy-related, the developers are not responsible for it in any way.
AFAIK, no copyright infringement exist on any software hosted on GitHub (might be wrong, but care to prove otherwise?).
Emulators don't violate the law and a mass targeting like that would be suicide for the site. I doubt Microsoft would be that stupid as to make a such a move that would backfire like that
There's a lot of discussion over many websites about this. From Wired (
https://www.wired.com/story/microsoft-github-code-moderation):
Take as an example the
Xbox emulators hosted on GitHub. These often-homemade programs allow people to play console games on their computers. Microsoft owns Xbox, and ostensibly loses money when gamers decline to buy consoles and play on desktop instead. These emulators pose an interesting problem: Microsoft will likely anger developers if it takes them down, but not doing so would be against its own business interests. It's a simple example, but there are plenty of other conflicts that arise from Microsoft gaining control over GitHub.
GitHub also houses the code that allows people to create
deepfakes, nonconsensual porn videos that use artificial intelligence to transpose one person's face onto another's body. First reported by
Motherboard, deepfakes have since been banned by nearly every major social network. But the code used to create them still lives on GitHub, presenting a potential ethical issue for Microsoft.
And in many ways, moderating code used to createobjectionable content is thornier than simply banning the content itself. One could theoretically argue, for example, that continuing to host the deepfake code serves an educational purpose.
Taking down one piece of objectionable content is not the same as "taking down the code that could maybe generate a million pieces of content," says Sarah T. Roberts, an assistant professor of information studies at UCLA who researches content moderation. "The implications are different."
Code that helps to create objectionable content isn't itself objectionable, but Microsoft will have to think carefully about whether it wants to host tools that enable people to create things widely thought of as harmful, though not outright illegal. It's a question that other user-generated content platforms, like Facebook, don't have to consider in the same way.