Ubisoft DMCA'd Slopsmith: What Happened, and Why It Won't Happen to Guitar Quest

June 16, 2026by OpenFret Team

Back in May we wrote a fair look at Slopsmith, the free, open-source guitar app with the scrolling note highway. It had a real following and a lot going for it. On June 15, 2026, Ubisoft filed a DMCA takedown notice with GitHub, and the project and its forks went dark.

If you had it bookmarked and the link is dead now, that's why. Here is what actually happened, why it happened, and what it means if you were counting on software like that to learn.

What Ubisoft actually took down

Slopsmith wasn't just a generic note highway. Under the hood it read the encrypted song and note-chart files from Rocksmith 2014, Ubisoft's guitar game, and converted them so its own player could scroll them. It opened the game's .psarc archives, decrypted the .sng chart files, and turned them into something its highway could draw. In plain terms, it let you play Rocksmith's custom song library outside of Rocksmith.

That is the part that drew the notice. Ubisoft's filing leaned on the anti-circumvention section of US copyright law (17 U.S.C. § 1201), arguing that Slopsmith got around the four AES-256 encryption schemes the game uses to lock its files. GitHub took down the whole network: the main repo plus its forks, 131 repositories in all, on a project that had picked up around a thousand stars. The takedown is documented in detail on the Consumer Rights Wiki if you want the paperwork.

The messy part

Here is where it gets complicated, and where I genuinely don't have a clean take. Rocksmith 2014 hasn't been for sale since October 2023, when Ubisoft pulled it over expired music licensing. So the game these files came from is one you can't even buy anymore.

GitHub also didn't fully buy Ubisoft's main argument. Its response said it “did not find sufficient information to determine a valid anti-circumvention claim,” then pulled the repos on other copyright grounds it didn't spell out. And the decryption methods Slopsmith used weren't new. Community tools have been able to read those files since 2013. None of that changed the outcome. Go looking for Slopsmith today and it's gone from where it lived.

The real lesson if you just want to learn

Set aside who is right. The practical takeaway is simpler. Slopsmith was built on top of someone else's game and someone else's encrypted song files. When you build on borrowed ground, a single legal letter can take the whole thing away overnight, and there's nothing you can do about it.

That is a real risk to weigh if your plan to learn guitar leans on software like that. The tone setup, the note highway, the custom songs: great while it lasts, gone when it doesn't.

Why Guitar Quest doesn't have this problem

This is the difference I want to be straight about, because it's the whole reason we built OpenFret the way we did. Guitar Quest doesn't decrypt anyone's game files. It doesn't ride on top of a product Ubisoft, or anyone else, can pull. It listens to your real guitar through your browser, and the curriculum, the monsters, the scales, and the theory drills are all ours. There is no third party who can send a letter and make it disappear.

It also goes after a different job than Slopsmith did, which we got into in the original write-up. Slopsmith handed you songs to play. Guitar Quest hands you a path: you start at the beginning, drill the fretboard, run scales, and level up in an order that makes sense. Here is what that looks like:

Where to go from here

If Slopsmith going dark left a hole in your practice, the quickest fix is to play something that isn't going anywhere. The Guitar Quest demo needs no download and no account: plug in, or let the mic pick up an acoustic, and you're playing in about a minute. The full game is $30 once, no subscription.

The reference side of OpenFret isn't going anywhere either. Our chord, scale, and mode libraries are free, and Studio puts a tuner, metronome, and fretboard in one tab. None of it depends on a game that might get pulled.

Still deciding between the bigger names? We wrote an honest comparison of Yousician, Rocksmith, and OpenFret.