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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

#101

Post by tavavex »

ndiddy wrote: post #89
tavavex wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm confused as to how or why the Yuzu team would be held liable for this. Is it their responsibility to ensure that people don't donate money to them if the timing of that donation coincides with an unrelated leak of Nintendo's IP? If emulation is allowed and the Yuzu team itself isn't engaging in the promotion of piracy, I don't see what the case is here.

At the time Zelda leaked, it didn't work correctly in the release version of Yuzu. The lawsuit claims that the Yuzu team released a patched version that fixed the issue before the game's official retail launch date, but they have some sort of exclusivity period (looks like one week as far as I can tell) where new releases are exclusive to their Patreon before they become freely available. Nintendo is arguing that the…

I think this would be a big issue for them if they specifically marketed it as "the Zelda fix" or insinuated that the only purpose of that update was to make this leaked game playable. Otherwise, they could just say that updates address the dissimilarities between the Switch hardware and the emulator. How can Nintendo prove ill intent here?

Re: Nintendo is suing the creators of Switch emulator Yuzu

#102

Post by gknoy »

realusername wrote: post #79
Springtime wrote: post #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.

There's actually multiple arguments with zero proof there. - they didn't prove that Yuzu contributed to piracy (and since the amount of piracy tools on the Switch itself that's far from obvious that Yuzu is a first choice) - they didn't prove that the leak itself lead to a loss of revenue. And that's also very hard of an argument to make considering that this game was a huge commercial success.

Does loss of revenue matter at all? It feels like it should, but I had thought that it didn't matter in courts.

Re: Nintendo is suing the creators of Switch emulator Yuzu

#103

Post by kevingadd »

tetrisgm wrote: post #96

I would love to see OSS communities like Internet Archive or founders who are pro open source support them. Emulators are legal. Defending your hobby project in court is infeasible without patrons. Nintendo has no leg to stand on legally speaking, and there's a precedent waiting to happen. As for the emulator itself, I don't see any argument that the Yuzu team used "illegal means" (internal SDKs, whatever their equiv…

The last time I tried to use Yuzu or Ryujinx it was still quite difficult. I had to get out my switch and physical game cartridges and manually dump a bunch of decryption keys and game files. It is absurd that Nintendo is trying to claim these emulators are piracy tools or intended for piracy when they don't seem to do anything to make it easy to play a pirated game copy.

Re: Nintendo is suing the creators of Switch emulator Yuzu

#104

Post by jsheard »

Lammy wrote: post #94

Speculating here but it feels like part of Nintendo's beef is the popularity of PC form factors that look like a Nintendo Switch. Most notably the Steam Deck but there are loads of them. In 2022 Nintendo starting taking down Youtube videos showing Steam Decks running Switch games: https://www.resetera.com/threads/nintendo-started-blocking-v... And last year went after Dolphin (GCN/Wii emulator) as soon as they announ…

Amusingly Valve themselves released an official trailer for the Steam Deck which showed Yuzu installed on the homescreen.

It was quickly taken down and re-posted without any references to Yuzu, probably after a panicked email from legal.

https://www.pcgamer.com/valve-edits-steam-deck-trailer-to-re...

Re: Nintendo is suing the creators of Switch emulator Yuzu

#105

Post by toast0 »

johnnyanmac wrote: post #56
rottencupcakes wrote: post #20

[flagged]

>Does Nintendo benefit that much from the sales of the Switch hardware? It just all seems so wasteful given that every computer is basically the same nowadays. Yes? They have a closed down system that they market as family friendly and can be quickly docked to a tv or taken on the go. It's a device that didn't really exist at the time; its potential competitors in 2017 were Chinese hardware charging 2-3 times the pri…

> They have a closed down system that they market as family friendly

How can it be family friendly when they sell Night Trap? [1] Night Trap was part of the content that resulted in video game ratings and was given a M rating contemperaneously, I'm not sure if the bar moved, or maybe there's some content change. Of course, in 1992, Nintendo said Night Trap would never be on a Nintendo console, so something has changed.

[1] https://www.nintendo.com/us/store/products/night-trap-25th-a...

Re: Nintendo is suing the creators of Switch emulator Yuzu

#106

Post by kevingadd »

gknoy wrote: post #102
realusername wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's actually multiple arguments with zero proof there. - they didn't prove that Yuzu contributed to piracy (and since the amount of piracy tools on the Switch itself that's far from obvious that Yuzu is a first choice) - they didn't prove that the leak itself lead to a loss of revenue. And that's also very hard of an argument to make considering that this game was a huge commercial success.

Does loss of revenue matter at all? It feels like it should, but I had thought that it didn't matter in courts.

If you want to get a lot of money from the defendant, you usually have to prove damages.

Re: Nintendo is suing the creators of Switch emulator Yuzu

#107

Post by anthk »

Feorn wrote: post #36
diggan wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 coll…

Downloading N64 roms as ZIP files was not a daunting task. PSX ISOs, OTOH... those were badly ripped.

But most of the time you would just get Tony Hawk 2/3, the Zelda's, Mario 64, Jet Force Gemini, FIFA's, Wave Race and a few more in less than a week and the fun lasted months if not years.

Re: Nintendo is suing the creators of Switch emulator Yuzu

#108

Post by rincebrain »

ndiddy wrote: post #89
tavavex wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm confused as to how or why the Yuzu team would be held liable for this. Is it their responsibility to ensure that people don't donate money to them if the timing of that donation coincides with an unrelated leak of Nintendo's IP? If emulation is allowed and the Yuzu team itself isn't engaging in the promotion of piracy, I don't see what the case is here.

At the time Zelda leaked, it didn't work correctly in the release version of Yuzu. The lawsuit claims that the Yuzu team released a patched version that fixed the issue before the game's official retail launch date, but they have some sort of exclusivity period (looks like one week as far as I can tell) where new releases are exclusive to their Patreon before they become freely available. Nintendo is arguing that the…

That's an interesting argument, but I'm not sure it'll hold water with the judge unless they can't show such arrangements are very common with donation-funded software and was in place well before this leak, e.g. yes, we made money off this leak, but not because we designed the model to profit off people wanting to pirate/cause loss of sales, it's just how this has always worked.

We'll see. I'm not really sure there's anything they could have done better in that case as a positive defense if they had this in mind, though - like, releasing it not behind a timegate paywall could be an argument for actively destroy game sales even more, by that logic, and actively waiting until post-launch to release it could be argued to be around trying to extract more money from people to focus on it more.

Re: Nintendo is suing the creators of Switch emulator Yuzu

#109

Post by skupig »

>(A)to “circumvent protection afforded by a technological measure” means avoiding, bypassing, removing, deactivating, or otherwise impairing a technological measure;

If this is what Nintendo alleges yuzu facilitates, does Nintendo have a case?

Reimplementing the security measures seems like a reaffirmation of the security measures, not an impairment.

Re: Nintendo is suing the creators of Switch emulator Yuzu

#110

Post by kelseyfrog »

teeray wrote: post #74
johnny99k wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I really wish our system had some kind of financial handicap when it came to access to the legal system. Weaponizing the legal system to bankrupt people that would be found Not Guilty shouldn't be possible.

I always wondered what would happen if litigants and defendants could contribute to a common legal fund which would equally fund their attorneys. It would at maximum make litigation twice as expensive which may be worth it alone.
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