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Nintendo is suing the creators of Switch emulator Yuzu

overkill.wtf

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Re: Nintendo is suing the creators of Switch emulator Yuzu

#12

This is a pretty big case to watch. Are there any cases of emulators being sued successfully? A user being able to provide keys and a rom from which they could own or be homebrew doesn't seem to violate copyright to me. edit: seems the consensus is once via legal fund attrition, but the case went to the emulator authors in the end.

Sony vs. Bleem! in 2001. Sony lost, but the cost still shut down the project.

Re: Nintendo is suing the creators of Switch emulator Yuzu

#13

This is a pretty big case to watch. Are there any cases of emulators being sued successfully? A user being able to provide keys and a rom from which they could own or be homebrew doesn't seem to violate copyright to me. edit: seems the consensus is once via legal fund attrition, but the case went to the emulator authors in the end.

bleem! (PlayStation emulator) was sued by Sony and was forced to close down because of legal fees, so I guess that counts as a success for Sony.

I seem to recall a bunch of ROM sites disappearing as well, but not sure if that's because they got sued or for other reasons. Some must have been sued and consequently shut down, so maybe not a bad idea (for the companies) to at least try?

Re: Nintendo is suing the creators of Switch emulator Yuzu

#14
> The legal document claims that over a million copies of last year's The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom were downloaded prior to the game's official retail release. As a result, the company is now seeking damages and is demanding that the Yuzu emulator is shut down.

Quite the leap from existing as an emulator to inexplicably being held liable for some independent leak.

Re: Nintendo is suing the creators of Switch emulator Yuzu

#15

This is a pretty big case to watch. Are there any cases of emulators being sued successfully? A user being able to provide keys and a rom from which they could own or be homebrew doesn't seem to violate copyright to me. edit: seems the consensus is once via legal fund attrition, but the case went to the emulator authors in the end.

This won't matter. The goal will be to run them out of money. It's an open source project and they most likely don't have the capital to fund any sort of lengthy lawsuit.

Re: Nintendo is suing the creators of Switch emulator Yuzu

#16

Looking over the legal document, realistically, their arguments are so damaging from a software perspective that they should lose. IANAL, but from skimming the legal document: The two major notions are that Yuzu violates Nintendo's copyright [1] by allowing people to play unauthorized copies [2]. In order to do so it allows for bypassing Nintendo's encryption (by taking in the keys, it does not embed the keys in the…

"On information and belief" - legalese for "we have no evidence".

Re: Nintendo is suing the creators of Switch emulator Yuzu

#17

> The legal document claims that over a million copies of last year's The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom were downloaded prior to the game's official retail release. As a result, the company is now seeking damages and is demanding that the Yuzu emulator is shut down. Quite the leap from existing as an emulator to inexplicably being held liable for some independent leak.

Not necessarily. It's fairly easy to prove that if the emulator did not exist, the leak would be fairly inconsequential; and considering how easy it is to show the percentage of pirating users versus legitimate users (probably 95%+), it's not a good look.

There's also the issue that, unlike prior emulators, Yuzu risks running afoul of DMCA anti-trafficking provisions for circumvention devices and software that uses circumvention devices. So, while per se emulating the Switch might be legal, decrypting the games may be illegal (as would software that is useless if it is unable to do that decryption).

Edit: Strongly recommend reading my follow up comment explaining historical precedent: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39530558

Re: Nintendo is suing the creators of Switch emulator Yuzu

#18

This is a pretty big case to watch. Are there any cases of emulators being sued successfully? A user being able to provide keys and a rom from which they could own or be homebrew doesn't seem to violate copyright to me. edit: seems the consensus is once via legal fund attrition, but the case went to the emulator authors in the end.

[deleted]

Re: Nintendo is suing the creators of Switch emulator Yuzu

#19

Looking over the legal document, realistically, their arguments are so damaging from a software perspective that they should lose. IANAL, but from skimming the legal document: The two major notions are that Yuzu violates Nintendo's copyright [1] by allowing people to play unauthorized copies [2]. In order to do so it allows for bypassing Nintendo's encryption (by taking in the keys, it does not embed the keys in the…

I'm not sure they're necessarily claiming the keys are copywritten (which honestly would be a terrible strategy), but instead that yuzu's ability to injest keys and encrypted copywritten works (decrypting them on the fly as needed like a switch would) constitutes a circumvention device banned by 17 US § 1201.

https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/1201

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