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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

#31
post #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?

ROM sites are different in that they are distributing the copywrited media

The only 'emulator' cases I've seen be successful are due to the same, they didn't get in trouble for the emulator, they got in trouble for distributing ROMs. I wonder if there's some firmware code being distributed here? that's a common annoyance when it comes to using an emulator.

Re: Nintendo is suing the creators of Switch emulator Yuzu

#32

Can't say I'm shocked. Nintendo's lawyers are notoriously litigous.

I think lawyers in general are very often, yes, litigious. Perhaps you meant to say their employer and/or client, Nintendo, is notoriously litigious.

Its not the lawyers but those who pay for them to do what is asked.

Re: Nintendo is suing the creators of Switch emulator Yuzu

#33

I knew that Patreon would bite them some day. Any time money comes into a "offensive" open source project, whoever feels they are getting hurt can make a claim a lot easier. Somewhat surprised they haven't yet sued Ryujinx (the other Switch emulator project) for also having a Patreon.

[dead]

Re: Nintendo is suing the creators of Switch emulator Yuzu

#34
post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 c…

> Not necessarily. It's fairly easy to prove that if the emulator did not exist, the leak would be fairly inconsequential… Well, no. Pirated Switch games can be played on a hacked Switch or a flashcart with no emulation necessary. Common sense suggests emulation would be significantly more common, but can Nintendo prove that in court, or prove that the leak wouldn’t have happened without Yuzu’s existence?

> Common sense suggests emulation would be significantly more common, but can Nintendo prove that in court

Nintendo is making that argument on the basis that Yuzu's Patreon income skyrocketed when TOTK leaked online.

https://graphtreon.com/creator/yuzuteam

It checks out, TOTK leaked on May 1st 2023 and Yuzus monthly income rose from $19k to $45k throughout May, having never broken $25k previously.

Re: Nintendo is suing the creators of Switch emulator Yuzu

#35

[flagged]

So most console manufacturers take a loss on the console in exchange for controlling the economy of the console and creating a network effect for non cross play games.

Nintendo is actually one of the few companies that make a profit (of a few cents) on their consoles.

Every computer is also NOT the same nowadays. Modern operating systems abstract a lot of the differences away, but they’re there.

Consoles give game devs a predictable platform to develop against and make guarantees for.

Re: Nintendo is suing the creators of Switch emulator Yuzu

#36
post #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?

I think ROM sites were an artifact of the internet speeds we had access to early on. Where it wasn't practical to just download an entire library for an older console. Downloading an N64 ROM over dialup still took a little longer than an mp3, whole collections of them were out of the question. Even early broadband in many areas was limited to speeds where a single ROM was more practical to download.

Complete ROM collections were, and probably still are, available for most old systems as torrents and on usenet.

Re: Nintendo is suing the creators of Switch emulator Yuzu

#37

> 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 c…

> It's fairly easy to prove that if the emulator did not exist, the leak would be fairly inconsequential

That. Literally doesn't make any logical sense. That's like arguing that if computers didn't exist, the leak would be fairly inconsequential ... or if electricity didn't exist, the leak would be fairly inconsequential.

Re: Nintendo is suing the creators of Switch emulator Yuzu

#38

> 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 c…

I mean, the switch has been hacked to hell and back and is more than capable of playing pirated games without any emulators. It isn't necessarily easy to show stats on pirating users since they obviously work to cloak that behavior from Nintendo.

Re: Nintendo is suing the creators of Switch emulator Yuzu

#40

> 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 c…

> unlike prior emulators, Yuzu risks running afoul of DMCA anti-trafficking provisions for circumvention devices and software that uses circumvention devices

This is interesting, it'd be great to have a link to explain this matter more deeply.

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