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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

#111

Post by theshackleford »

kevingadd wrote: post #103
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.

Most people just google for a dumped copy and your up and playing in minutes (as long as it takes to download.)

Switch piracy is massive. Almost everyone I know is doing it. I’m not, but I still emulate because switch performance is poo. So I buy the game, and then emulate it in 4K/60, it’s how I finally finished BOTW.

Re: Nintendo is suing the creators of Switch emulator Yuzu

#112

Post by SamuelAdams »

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…

> Nintendo has no leg to stand on legally speaking, and there's a precedent waiting to happen.

Don't be so sure. From the article:

> Emulator tools aren't inherently illegal, but the way in which Yuzu is being actively used and promoted is what Nintendo appears to be objecting to here.

So it depends on what is actually in the case. At best, Yuzu needs to simply update some of its marketing material. At worst, they need to shut down and open under a new name / LLC, while also updating marketing material.

Re: Nintendo is suing the creators of Switch emulator Yuzu

#113

Post by jsheard »

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…

> Nintendo has no leg to stand on legally speaking, and there's a precedent waiting to happen.

IANAL, but my understanding is that while emulation is unambiguously legal in the US after Bleem vs. Sony, an emulator which decrypts games is maybe not legal under the DMCA circumvention rules, and those have never really been tested in the context of an emulator. The Bleem case happened shortly after the DMCA was enacted, but PS1 games weren't encrypted or otherwise protected from being read by anything besides a PS1 so Bleem didn't have to circumvent anything. That seems to be the angle Nintendo is taking here, that Yuzu is the equivalent of something like DeCSS since it has the ability to circumvent their DRM scheme.

Re: Nintendo is suing the creators of Switch emulator Yuzu

#114

Post by theshackleford »

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…

Plenty of large rom sites are still very actively used and trafficked today.

Re: Nintendo is suing the creators of Switch emulator Yuzu

#115

Post by theultdev »

kelseyfrog wrote: post #110
teeray wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If it's twice as expensive then the defendants would run out of money sooner right?

You would have to somehow set a limit of legal expenses, which seems... difficult.

You would have to win to get the common fund, you may not get that far if you have to pay into the fund and amount a defense.

Re: Nintendo is suing the creators of Switch emulator Yuzu

#116

Post by Brainspackle »

kevingadd wrote: post #103
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.

It took me 15 minutes from downloading Yuzu to playing Mario Kart on my PC. You're doing something wrong

Re: Nintendo is suing the creators of Switch emulator Yuzu

#117

Post by russfink »

It feels like a claim against free speech. Yuzu makes an emulator and states it can play Switch games. That is a statement. If others illegally trade binaries, that’s not the emulator’s fault. By attacking them, it feels like the only thing “wrong” was making the emulator available. Caveat - IANAL.

Re: Nintendo is suing the creators of Switch emulator Yuzu

#118

Post by nightpool »

withinboredom wrote: post #51
monocasa wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

For the keys to be considered to fall under the DCMA, they'd have to be copyrighted.

I don't think that's the case. The games are copyrighted. The keys only need to constitute an effective anti-circumvention scheme (any technological measure that “effectively controls access” to a work) to be illegal to code for.

Re: Nintendo is suing the creators of Switch emulator Yuzu

#119

Post by dev1ycan »

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…

I mean Valve literally had a trailer with a nintendo emulator as an app installed... Valve doesn't need to do RND for its games because they can just use whatever is on steam that is playable on the deck plus a ton of games from nintendo consoles via emulators as a selling point.

Re: Nintendo is suing the creators of Switch emulator Yuzu

#120

Post by anthk »

monocasa wrote: post #19
fzeroracer wrote: post #6

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

That ability can be used as interoperaton in order to emulate the Switch properly for personal needs.
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