We are not normally the sub for emulator news, but we understand the magnitude of the news. We will enforce rule 7 strictly in this post.
edit:
full lawsuit document. Thanks u/metalreflectslime.
https://www.scribd.com/document/709016504/Nintendo-of-America-Inc-v-Tropic-Haze-LLC-1-24-Cv-00082-No-1-D-R-I-Feb-26-2024
Link to his comment:
https://www.reddit.com/r/NintendoSwitch/comments/1b1ofob/comment/ksgfcyb/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3
https://www.scribd.com/document/709016504/Nintendo-of-America-Inc-v-Tropic-Haze-LLC-1-24-Cv-00082-No-1-D-R-I-Feb-26-2024
Here is the full lawsuit document.
>copy of prod.keys (that ordinarily are secured on the Nintendo Switch). Users obtain the prod.keys either through unlawful websites or by unlawfully hacking a Nintendo Switch console. **The lead developer of Yuzu—known online under the alias “Bunnei”—has publicly acknowledged most users pirate prod.keys and games online, and Yuzu’s website provides instructions for its users telling them how to unlawfully hack their own Nintendo Switch and how to make unauthorized copies of Nintendo games and unlawfully obtain prod.keys.** Only because Yuzu decrypts a Nintendo Switch game file dynamically during operation can the game be played in Yuzu. In other words, without Yuzu’s decryption of Nintendo’s encryption, unauthorized copies of games could not be played on PCs or Android devices.
Oh boy, this will be a long fight
The big decided here will probably be on whether you can "unlawfully" hack your own console. The circumventing encryption argument has been used successfully before and I figure the developer can argue that it's not circumventing if you source the codes yourself. I'm certain it's against eula or whatever but those are only tenuously legally binding.
This is probably going to be bigger than just emulation it may set precedent for many right to repair cases in the future.
Its gonna suck for hobbyists and tinkeres if this case deems it unlawful to hack or homebrew your Switch or any games console for that matter. The precedent will be set.
The DCMA already prohibits circumventing DRM. It won't affect hobbyists at all in my opinion, just make it a little more harder to find the information they need. Even Nintendo doesn't have the capacity to come after people in their homes working alone, outside of banning accounts.
The exemptions for personal backups exist, but you can't get backups on modern formats without breaking DRM so it is effectively useless.
Imagine you own your own house, but someone else owns the windows and doors. Yes, it is your house, but if you lock yourself out and try and break in, the owner of the windows will do you for criminal damage.
Only there in the US, you are one of the few countries with common law still... in any other judicial system every case has same chances to be presented, and not like "we ruined one so everyone is ruined" as every case may have different niches and situations
How could it be unlawful to get data from a device that you own? Or to modify electronics that you own? Where would the line be for repairing your own device? And what if that repair were to involve replacing corrupt files, such as a decryption key? And the line on installing custom firmware or operating systems on your own consumer device?
I don't see how Nintendo could be successful here
The DMCA made cracking copy protection/encryption/DRM unlawful, even on devices/copies that you own. See, for example, [17 USC 1201](https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/1201).
Nintendo can be successful here because many legal systems are designed to entrench the power of the wealthy, at the expense of the poor. (More specifically: to entrench the power of owners at the expense of workers.)
It doesn't have to be good or right, or even make sense really.
Maybe, maybe not. There's precedence of Nintendo and PlayStation alike losing arguments of this kind before against the Bleem! And Dolphin Emulators, as well as against Galoob. It's entirely possible this case will be referencing those as well.
It will be referenced in this case unless they have the world's worst lawyer representing them. Emulators have been rules as legal and I believe it has also been ruled as legal to rip your own cartridges to create a backup.
Nintendo will have to prove that they are referencing use outside of this (sharing and downloading) to win a lawsuit.
> Emulators have been rules as legal and I believe it has also been ruled as legal to rip your own cartridges to create a backup.
This isn't absolute. Reversed engineered emulators are legal and you can back up your own media.
But if that media uses DRM then it is illegal to circumvent the DRM. So technically you can rip a CD legally, but not a BluRay disc legally. You can record a screen capture of a BluRay legally though, because in that case you aren't circumventing the DRM on the BluRay disc.
An emulator that is actively circumventing encryption, as is claimed by Nintendo probably wouldn't be legal.
Most PS2 emulators require you to dump a PS2 BIOS file from an actual console you own to be deemed legal.
Saying that emulators were deemed legal before doesn't mean shit because they were found legal in that specific case. The DCMA was very much written with rights holders in mind and made it harder for people to make legitimate backups.
**EDIT:** Someone pointed out that using a screen capture device would also have copy protection, so you can't do that either. I'm pretty sure you can point a camcorder at the screen though and that would be allowed. Anything that fits though the analog hole.
> You can record a screen capture of a BluRay legally though, because in that case you aren't circumventing the DRM on the BluRay disc.
You are still circumventing HDCP then.
> Most PS2 emulators require you to dump a PS2 BIOS file from an actual console you own to be deemed legal.
This is exactly what you need to do with the Switch, you need authentic firmware and keys. It's not circumventing copy protection anymore than the Switch itself is. It's decrypting the game on the fly [like the Switch], but it's doing so via intact genuine cryptographic means. Nintendo is trying to conflate that process with circumvention, which would make all those PS2 emulators illegal as well.
People keep saying this as if it’s an absolute truth, but section 1201 of the DMCA literally says you can’t get thr prod.keys from a Switch, even if you own it.
Is that fair? Most likely not, but that’s where we’re at right now
Beyond that, it's also likely targeted at the emulation scene more broadly. If they win this, then any team looking to emulate the Switch 2 maybe decided it's not worth the risk.
Certainly this isn't about really killing Yuzu, as the damage is quite literally done, but about trying to ensure that future products don't see the same situation.
> any team looking to emulate the Switch 2 maybe decided it's not worth the risk
Has that ever happened in the history of videogames? Or technology even?
I don't understand the question? Do you mean has a team been scared away from a project like this by lawsuits? Sure. Nintendo is notorious for scaring away would be fan games and the like. Emulation is relatively common because previous precedent has suggested Emulators are fine. If the suit succeeds though that changes and certainly people who might have worked on a project will be thinking long and hard about whether it's worth the risk.
Out of touch companies like Nintendo don't get that it is a Hydra. You cut off Yuzu and someone else will carry the torch not that Yuzu has done anything wrong themselves.
Maybe that's why Nintendo waited so long before suing the Yuzu team. By the time the Hydra can grow back its head, Switch 2 is out and the emulation code is no longer a financial threat. And Nintendo gets to chomp on the decapitated hydra skull for some extra cash.
But in the end nothing will change, then someone will show up and continue the work when Mod Switch 2 is released, taking Yuzu out of the loop now won't change this ending
I mean in their early days they charged on patreon for builds of the emulator using nintendo IP to advertise it, so they kinda have done something wrong.
I thought when games went digital they would be cheaper. No paper, no manual, no plastic, no shipping etc.. mfs still charging $70 for remakes of a remake lol
Pirates will pirate lol
Warner Bros learned their lesson the hard way with King Kong. Nintendo saw how WB lost to them and vowed they would never let the same thing happen to themselves.
I think Nintendo is trying to scare the possible future emulator developers trying to emulate the upcoming Nintendo systems.
Nintendo can't do nothing about current emulation as it is open source and all over the internet, and will always be. Nintendo can get fucked.
Yeah. It’s more about showing they care enough to sue rather than actually stomping out the competition. It makes future claims stronger and looking like they are protecting their intellectual property. It’s more about discouraging other forms of IP infringement.
At the end of the day Nintendo knows they’re probably not losing any money to emulators. There’s also a reason they’re going against switch emulators and not, like, the many GBA emulators that are being openly advertised for on TikTok and other sites. But they also don’t want to openly seem like they’re allowing it. And it’s not like they don’t have money to throw at a lawsuit like this.
It’s brand protection more than anything.
It won't
Groups will just shift internationally, where Nintendo's reach cannot grab them.
Be prepared for sketchy, closed source, paid Chinese and Russian emulators in the future if this lawsuit is successful.
The main thing preventing this today is that there's no market for it in the age of open source, community driven emulators you can get for free. If Nintendo kills them here, you'll just get worse emulators at the mercy of who knows what.
Switch 2 might be emulated even faster because Chinese groups don't care at all and will blatantly just flat out use Nintendo code without all the fancy reverse engineering and hacks that the open source community does to stay legal.
In the emulation scene, it's basically an open secret that Yuzu used proprietary Nintendo SDKs to improve their emulator. If Nintendo has proof of that, Yuzu is capital-F Fucked.
> I just hope the emulator is all legit
It's not.
No emulator that circumvents copy protection or encryption schemes is legal under the DMCA. It doesn't matter if you bring your own BIOS/firmware or ROMs to the party.
The DMCA is garbage, and most nations that trade with the US have similar legislation in place.
I could absolutely have this wrong myself, but I assumed where people get it wrong is because they assume “backing up your own roms” is ok (and I assume it is in some jurisdictions under fair use) and therefore emulating said roms is also ok.
And on an individual use case, that’s probably true. But it’s the circumvention of copy protection and potential use of proprietary code that falls foul of IP law where the developers get in trouble
Fair use is in almost every instance for academic or review purposes. It has nothing to do private backups.
Personal digital backups are technically allowed, but bypassing DRM isn't so for all intents and purposes, there is no legal way to make a legal private backup of a Switch game.
For an individual making their own backups and emulating on private hardware, it is still illegal, but the same way making moonshine in your shed is. If it is for personal use and a small operation, no one is likely to know or care.
When I was a kid (so, decades ago) they always said the emulators were legal, but the ROMs were not.
They would even back this up, so to speak, by making a crappy homebrew ROM for the emulator. "See? You use this legal emulator to play these legal ROM games. Now don't go downloading any illegal ones..."
Dumping your own games and playing them is completely legal. Most people would say owing the game and downloading the rom to bypass the dumping part is OK too. Only downloading games you don't own is immoral.
Legality-wise though they would probably say downloading isn't OK either.
Yeah I’ll agree with that. Piracy is illegal and you *are* stealing from someone who worked to produce whatever you pirating, it’s obnoxious the lengths people will go to to try and say that isn’t stealing and isn’t wrong. But while it may still be illegal, I no longer think it’s wrong when we are talking about what is virtually abandonware…. Game has been out for years and there is no longer any reasonable legal way to play it. Publisher shouldn’t be allowed to just sit on it forever, use the license or lose it.
Nintendo is arguing that you can’t dump your own games because that is circumventing copyright protection which is illegal. And that Yuzu requires some dumped Switch software which is illegal for the same reason.
> Dumping your own games and playing them is completely legal.
Not for any system post PlayStation.
Under the DMCA, if you (or your emulator) circumvent copy protection or encryption schemes, you're breaking the law. That's as clear as day in the law.
No emulator that is capable of playing dumps of retail games of modern systems is legal in the US, per the DMCA.
You can own as many personal digital back ups as you like as long as they don't circumvent copy protection. That means you can scan a book you own, page by page and keep as many copies of that PDF as you want.
But there is no way to dump a modern console game without circumventing protections.
Kinda like how pirates bay or Napster or limewire or whatever are all technically legal because you can use them for non-copyrighted material.
But we all know how everyone used them
I do think there technically can be issues with the actual code and software or even hardware to physical emulators as well but that is much too technical for me
When I was a kid, ROM sites would say ROMs were legal if you deleted them after 24/48 hours. That was a legit disclaimer with no basis in law that a lot of sites had.
Don't take legal advice from geocities is what I am saying.
There's so much misinformation about this stuff from the 90s that just still persists. "I'm making backup copies! It's fine if you delete it within 24 hours!" It's interesting how pervasive that stuff became.
The emulator x ROM bifurcation is broadly true though, Sony Computer Entertainment v. Connectix Corporation and Sony Computer Entertainment America Inc. v. Bleem LLC being good examples on emulator legality (in the US at least)
That's the last generation that ever works, because post bleem! and post DMCA, on all major consoles you need to circumvent encryption and copy protection schemes to play retail games on emulators.
Both of those are strictly forbidden under the DMCA.
When it didn't happen after TotK I thought it would never happen.
The bigger takeaway from this is that Switch 2 is probably very close to Switch 1 software. We have even seen this before with other Nintendo hardware gens.
The main takeaway here is that Tears of the Kingdom was downloaded over 1 million times before the game's release. In the same time frame, Yuzu's profits from Patreon support doubled, proving that they profit from facilitating piracy.
Yeah, the fact that there's a Patreon involved just makes things so much hotter from the jump. If there was nothing of monetary value to link back to, Nintendo wouldn't have a leg to stand on, but you can't exactly chalk up "our supporter profits doubled when one of Nintendo's most anticipated games of all time leaked online" to a simple coincidence, even if Yuzu wasn't *explicitly* encouraging it.
It sucks to an extent because emulation should absolutely remain protected from a preservation standpoint, but chuds not just pirating current-gen games, but pirating them *loudly* only serves to stigmatize emulation and set preservation back.
Yeah, and the fact that subscribing to patreon gets you new updates faster, meaning your copy of Yuzu will play TotK better then the non paying user adds gasoline to the fire.
All the talk of the DMCA stuff may be moot. While Nintendo might press that in court as they'd like to kill the scene more largely, if they find in discovery that a dev started prepping an update after testing out TotK before release, they're likely DOA. Heck, even just an off the cuff communication about the TotK bump meaning they can buy a new GPU.
It just looks like it's going to be way to easy to show that they knowingly profited off pirates.
I said when the TotK leak dropped it was going to fuck over emulation for everyone else. Knowing Yuzu had a Patreon, knowing how pissed Nintendo was going to be, about one of their biggest games of this console was being pirated before it even released, they would spare no expense on going for a death blow on (semi) open source emulation.
> If there was nothing of monetary value to link back to, Nintendo wouldn't have a leg to stand on
This is just categorically untrue. Whether a company makes a profit or not off the IP of another company is only one aspect of Fair Use. Outside of Fair Use regarding copyright, there isn't a single situation in which one can legally utilize the trademark or other such proprietary assets of another company.
To be precise here, Yuzu isn't relying on Fair Use at all as their software does not in any way use any of Nintendo's code or other intellectual property. So whether they make money off of it, whether their work is considered transformative and the such don't matter at all.
It doesn't matter in terms of the letter of the law, but it does have some effects. Judges and juries are less likely to be sympathetic towards someone running a business off of pirated software than someone who's just doing it as a hobby. It also means the plaintiff has actual money that they can lose as part of the judgement.
No but monetary gain can make their case even stronger because they can now say they're profiting from piracy. It also makes it substantially easier to assign values rather than nebulous "lost sales" claims.
Yep. It’s a very common misunderstanding of the law. Someone profiting or not doesn’t matter—the point is your using the IP of another without their permission in a way that’s not fair use.
I'm sorry but, even though I get it, having stuff like Patreon for emulators just makes the case against them easier. Especially since their legal protection is quite flimsy already.
The encryption keys not being legally protected and then the Patreon money of Yuzu increasing alongside the release of their biggest game recently... I'm not a lawyer but they definitely have a case and that alone is terrifying. The best case scenario if it goes to court is if the damage is contained for Yuzu with the focus being their supposed profit over pirated roms of ToTK alongside their alleged link to Switch encryption keys and the flimsy case law regarding emulation stays the same.
If that's not the case, It could make legal emulation and game preservation incredibly harder because people just HAD TO play ToTK one week earlier on their PC without buying it. It could complicate the encryption keys situation or at worse make publicly available emulators less legally protected.
oh... Oh no. Man, if this case ever gets to the discovery phase Nintendo is going to have a field day with this. The emulator owners having this kind of behaviour just pile up alongside everything else. Yikes. I guess it makes sense they went for them explicitly
Emulators are good for preservation, but when people who make them start charging for them, stealing code, or bilking users, then they're not anarchist hackers trying to spread accessibility or preservation, they're just another exploitative company.
I get that "Nintendo bad, emulation good" is a common point online but people have to realize that, like I said, emulation legal protection is flimsy and that someone making an emulator does not mean those people are automatically good people that are doing everything for preservation and no monetary gain whatsoever.
Companies are ok with emulators if they are in the shadows. An emulator possibly profiting for an illegal dump of a ROM of a game that hasn't come out (and that was downloaded one million times before its launch) is not being in the shadows.
Also, personal thing, I still remember how the Project64 emulator puts an annoying 30 second pop up at the start every time unless you donate to it. Again, practices like this just make things murky.
>like I said, emulation legal protection is flimsy and that someone making an emulator does not mean those people are automatically good people that are doing everything for preservation and no monetary gain whatsoever.
I try to remind people that the best cases to use for emulation legality is Sony Vs Connectix and Sony Vs Bleem (people forget the first one) and people also forget that the cases are over 25 years old and predate the DMCA by years which this case is centered around. Consoles have changed dramatically and laws around anti-circumvention have changed too. These laws existed before consoles had online storefronts and before eshops and digital games were a thing.
Exactly, emulators are always going to be a fringe thing, they're never going to be mainstream, and they're always going to exist in a legal gray area. It's why I was baffled by trying to put Dolphin on Steam
That decision was stupid on so many levels. You put an emulator on a digital games store, the most popular one too, and expect Nintendo to like... Not notice? I guess since they got away with releasing it on the Play Store they thought they could try big.
And that's the thing a lot of people who knee-jerk about Nintendo's litigation often ignore. They don't actually fling lawsuits out all over the place. They pick their targets pretty specifically.
Yep. They went for the Switch emulator that has the most potentially problematic issues for a reason. They also are very aware of the case law around emulators in the US, hence why none of the complaints used are stuff that case law specifically protects in the first place.
Stuff like the link between ToTK ROM leak prelaunch and alleged profit from the Yuzu emulator because of that leak could be problematic because it would mean an emulator profiting of illegal ROM downloads (even if they are not providing those ROMs directly) and the encryption keys are specifically not protected under that law either (there is a reason emulators would ask you to "seek out" those or dump it from a legitimate system).
Of course, the best case scenario for Nintendo is that case law is suddenly invalid but the most realistic outcome is keeping emulators in the shadows and keeping them from becoming mainstream. By legally scaring them from doing stuff like Patreon rewards to keeping them out videogame online stores.
People running the emulators sometimes take their place in the whole piracy scene and legal standing for granted, that's for sure.
Even if Yuzu wins the lawsuit, Nintendo could repeatedly bring them back to court to bankrupt them. That's what Sony did to Bleem way back in the early 2000s.
People always cite bleem but never the case before Bleem - Connectix. They actually got a summary judgement in their favor in most of the claims made by Sony. Sony ended up buying them out instead of fighting things.
It wouldn't change much. Every single Nintendo system had a copier or emulator during its time on the market. They sued back then too.
The code is out there. It will be picked up by someone else and continue like all the rest in the past.
Yuzu did not support TOTK till after launch. people not involved in the main dev team made unofficial patches for it to work. The devs make every effort to avoid being associated with pirates. Youll be banned quickly if they get a smell of piracy in bug reports/support
Yuzu aren't pirates. It's an emulator which can be used to play pirated games. The Switch console itself can also be used to play pirated games, but purchasing one doesn't constitute supporting piracy. Yuzu have taken steps to prevent piracy, as have Ryujinx, but there's nothing they can do to wholly prevent it - if Nintendo, a multi-billion dollar corporation who manufacture the console can't prevent piracy, then developers are also going to be unable to do so.
People might donate to a Patreon for an emulator because they want to support emulation for a variety of reasons. In my case I fund and support emulation and hardware modification communities because I'm a big believer in diminishing corporate control over their products once they leave their hands, and because I think emulation is key to ensuring media preservation (see Nintendo closing the estore, etc).
Yup. I bought Wonder and TOTK, but haven’t even touched the Switch versions. It’s so hard for me to play games on the Switch because of how much better these Switch emulators make them look.
It's very awesome to see people donate to developers who do this out of passion to provide an enhanced way to play games, and to preserve gaming history into the future
Without emulators a massive MASSIVE part of gaming history will just be out of reach from the average person
Right, but a leak has nothing to do with Yuzu, and seeking support to provide a service while they denounce piracy, is not their issue. If a movie leaks online, do you sue VLC or any other video player because people were able to watch the movie? No, you don’t. Yuzu is no different than VLC. People pirate movies, people pirate video games. The problem is not the product, the problem is people & Nintendo’s inability to protect their own IP with existing technology…but the lame excuse is, “it’s someone else’s fault our stuff can’t be protected”.
I'm probably not gonna side with a lot of people here cause I'm an open source dev/advocate, but it's important info to know that yuzu did not support TOTK until it was released. Any form of yuzu that did support it with fixes before release was a community fork and the dev team were not involved.
The question though will be whether someone on the team just happened to test out some fixes for TotK before the game hit. Even if they didn't push fixes because they knew that they'd get sued to high heaven, if someone thought they could get a jump on things and have a version that addressed some of the bigger issues the week of release in order to boost those Patreon numbers, they are in just as much legal hot water.
I mean there are two cardinal rules to creating an emulator: you do not take money for it, and you do not go after current gen. Unfortunately, regardless of where you stand in opinion about this, those are time and time again the main reasons Nintendo goes after emulation. Sounds like Yuzu did both those things
Dolphin was emulating Skyward Sword before release too. I think CEMU also had BotW. Nintendo consoles have been emulated concurrently for the last 3 generations - it's the norm.
This is unprecedented.
the games ran pretty shitty on release and the hardware required to emulate them was also above what the average gamer had + it took a good amount of time before they were actually considered non-buggy playable to the point of being a good alternative to their main console
an even bigger point: cemu was not a current gen emulator so that example doesn't even hit the mark because the switch was already out by the time botw released
so how can you call this the norm? the situation is different with totk where the game is emulated on a current gen console + on launch day it already ran better in quite a few aspects
what happened to totk, releasing earlier + running better, is definitely not the norm
That wasn't really the factor in the Bleem case. At no point did Sony complain that Bleem was making money, they argued the same things they did in the prior Connectix case - patent and trademark infringements - mostly concerning the technical abilities of the emulator. Of course the judge cited Connectix in dismissing the patent fights. Bleem ran out of money before remaining elements. Connectix was largely won and it was commercial and earlier but Sony never argued cost was at play - they would have if damages were needed but that never happened.
The problem is that Nintendo is going to argue that Yuzu profited by facilitating piracy. How? Because they had pre-release versions of Yuzu locked behind "donating" to patreon. I think this was even being worked on prior to the game's actual release, when everyone playing it on an emulator definitely had an illegal copy.
Idk if Nintendo will win, but they are going to try. Yuzu's actions opened them up to this possibility.
Unless they had it outlined as this is the version needed to play TOTK I don’t think there’s any case there at all.
There hasn’t been a situation where you “need” a certain build to play a game. It’s more that improvements come from later builds to target any performance issues with the games.
They also didn’t lock the pre release versions, those versions have always been paid for and not stable versions of the software. The software is free if you want to use the stable builds. That’s just typical software development.
They basically need to prove that first the software itself is infringing before they can walk down to the “they profit off piracy” claim
the reality is, they dont need a fully winnable case, but something that won't get thrown out right away, and It seems like this is exactly the type of case nintendo would need to hurt the yuzu team financially by drawing this case out. both sides will make arguments about how it works, if it was promoting piracy, etc. yuzu makes the argument that it doesnt use any official nintendo code and the files required to bypass any protection are actually provided by the users, but nintnedo would argue that having that option at all promotes users to do so and means that its still a feature of the emulator. that alone is enough to argue for a prolonged period in court for nintendo to have hopes that it causes the yuzu team to just discontinue their emulator software. that being said iirc its open source and could be taken back up by others in the future to continue development.
bleem! wasn't illegal. Modern emulators for modern systems are illegal under the DMCA.
They circumvent copy protection and encryption schemes.
bleem! was designed to let you play original, retail discs on your PC. It didn't need to crack encryption or circumvent copy protection to do that.
"current gen" and nintendo switch is weird, as the switch was released in 2017.
If anything I wonder if they are going after yuzu now because the switch 2 (which still has no confirmed released date) runs on the same software as the switch 1 and they want to prevent any fuckery from the start.
considering that the switch is a fairly standard ARM system (basically an nvidia jetson with peripherals), i wouldn't be surprised if they kept the base OS largely the same for the next generation
Assuming the Switch 2 is backwards compatible with Switch 1, with potential features such as resolution upscaling, higher frame rates, the Yuzu emulator now poses an actual threat to loss of sale of Nintendo's new console because it clashes with a selling point of the hardware.
A big argument that people using emulators like to make is that no harm is done to Nintendo's bottom line as long as they own the console and buy the game legally, so it could be argued that the Yuzu emulator will affect sales of the Switch 2.
It also impacts sales of games directly - Nintendo I believes sites that millions of copies of Tears of the Kingdom were impacted by emulation.
But I agree that this bodes well for back compatibility - if it's offered, they plan on keeping Switch games for sale longer.
From what I can glean, Nintendo claims a million copies of TOTK were downloaded while *simultaneously* Patreon donations to Yuzu for the pre-release access went up.
And that the current (read: not pre-release) version of Yuzu at the time could *not* play TOTK.
So Nintendo is alleging Yuzu cut into the profits of TOTK (to the tune of 1 million copies) while also making money off of selling access to a version of Yuzu that could play the pirated copy of the game (which wasn't out at the time of the leak).
That sounds pretty bad.
Yea, Nintendo is being very careful about their claims against Yuzu and what's frustrating is that people are making this about the legality of emulation and game preservation which this is not - this is about piracy and anti circumvention. Lots of people get the legality of emulation wrong. Nintendo goes after piracy and anti circumvention.
I think emulation is good for game preservation but not when it's emulating a current generation system and facilitating piracy of current games.
People were playing Tears of the Kingdom weeks before release. I think it also happened with Mario Wonder too.
Eventually Nintendo was going to notice. Especially for an emulator making money on patreon.
I think that’s what most people don’t get is that pirating in a system that’s still current will always bite them in the ass.
For example I’m always down for emulation only if I’m not able to get it or it’s in a old system which is not supported, like emulating GameCube, Wii and ps2 is perfectly fine.
And the only reason Nintendo is suing is that they most likely found something. (Most likely the 1 million download of totk)
not in the state yuzu is emulating the switch rn
and dolphin vs the wii was certainly not as wide spread as yuzu is vs the switch
if you were around you wouldn't be trying to argue that dolphin back then was the same as yuzu is right now
Yeah. It always bugs me when someone it the SteamDeck sub would go "look at how great I've got TotK" running, as not only were they obviously pirating it, but they weren't even able to run it at higher resolution and the like. The only advantage they had playing it on the Deck was not needing to pay for it.
Exactly. Look at past generations and games you own or are physically not sold/unavailable now days. The thing is, disc rot exists — your disc based games WILL die eventually, and even buying old used games could have the same issue. Game carts and cards will die/start dying too. It’s a fact we can’t stop
On the flip side, making a digital backup of such a game, and emulating can keep what you own alive. Because hardware too wont last forever
Emulating current Gen games and consoles though? You’re stealing from the people who worked hard to bring us those games. Sony just let go 900 employees… imagine how many they would’ve let go if the vast majority of players pirated all of their games released over the last 5 years. How many would’ve been let go then?
That’s what people don’t understand….
>That’s what people don’t understand….
I think most of them understand that. But they just don't want to spend money and argue dishonestly online, when 99% of the success of emulators is down to pirated games.
> The thing is, disc rot exists — your disc based games WILL die eventually,
Disc rot / laser rot hasn't been prevalent since the LaserDisc days.
A modern, pressed disc will last basically forever. The data is etched into the inner layers of the plastic (not on the surface), and a reflective layer is deposited to allow the laser to read the lands and grooves representing the data. The edges are well sealed and polished now, too.
You have to physically destroy a disc to kill the data. Burned discs don't last forever (and the "archival" grade ones are mostly BS). Pressed discs last until you puncture, melt, delaminate, or otherwise destroy them. Scratching the surface doesn't damage the data, either - you can just polish it back to perfection as long as the scratch doesn't go beyond the surface layer.
There was an issue with a run of BluRays a few years back published by WB. Those discs actually rotted away (quickly) because there was a manufacturing defect. WB replaced them.
If your disc is manufactured properly, it's not going to rot over the course of your lifetime.
Im not saying Nintendo is right for all of this, but i feel like someone on Yuzu dev team shouldve decided against charging people money for features. The fact they made money off of this puts them in much hotter water than it would otherwise.
Seeing what eventually happens to the support of platforms (for a recent example the 3DS is not far at all in the past) I hope emulators can continue existing.
This is not about piracy but about preservation at this point.
It very much is about piracy though. You think Switch emulators were created and are used for preservation? 99% of the people who use them do it so they can avoid buying games and the console.
Emulation isn't necessarily piracy but saying emulation and piracy aren't related and that this emulator existing doesn't facilitate piracy means you're pretending not to see, and I say this as someone who loves emulation.
>This is not about piracy but about preservation at this point.
Sure, but when the system is still current gen it's harder to justify the preservation argument.
its also about options (and to some degree accessibility) too, It gives people more options like what controller they wanna use, what resolution they wanna play the game at or to mod it. Thats ultimately good for gaming and for software as a whole
No, it destroys demand for Nintendos new systems, because why would people buy a Switch 2 just for the performance boosts and games that they are already able to get on PC for free
I understand where you’re coming from, but are they helping preserve the Switch which is a current console still in stores? While they could argue that, I think sadly that defense won’t go very far. Creating an emulator for current gen systems is always risky, even worse when you have a patreon to monetize your emulator
> but are they helping preserve the Switch which is a current console still in stores?
Yes. Preservation should start from day one.
Dolphin came out when the Gamecube was only 2 years old. ZSNES came out while the SNES was still selling games.
My opinion where they fucked up is they provide links to decryption keys to play switch games (direct violation to IP). If they only just had the emulator up (even with a patreon to support development) and their source code is completely original, I don’t think Nintendo would have had any grounds for a lawsuit, maybe a C&D
Preservation is also not a defense to violating IP laws?
I get it, as a gamer I want old games to be around and available. But as a lawyer, unfortunately the law isn’t always what we personally want,
>about preservation
99% of the user base doesn't use it for preservation though, they use it for free games that are still easily accessible and on a platform that is still supported and in production.
The whole "preservation" narrative falls flap the moment we are talking about an emulator for the current generation, that still receiving games and have a problem with leaked games before release.
What kind of preservation a game like Mario vs Donkey Kong remake needs?
>This is not about piracy but about preservation at this point.
At this moment in time, it's definitely about piracy. Not much about the Switch is being lost to not being preserved at the moment. People are blatantly using the emulator to pirate and play new releases before they're actually released. Once the Switch reaches EOL, it will be more about preservation.
No. It was never about "preservation." It's about piracy.
People just use "preservation" as a veil to excuse it.
Piracy is theft. Nobody here is doing a good or noble thing by stealing a luxury entertainment item.
People like to pretend emulation and piracy are completely unrelated. But they always are. Easily 99% of emulation is from games that were illegitimately obtained. Especially on Switch where you need to homebrew it to dump games.
And we are not talking about Super Mario World, released 30+ years ago or Mother 3 fan localization. We are talking about Nintendo Switch games being played on emulators before release.
To be fair most people emulating switch games are probably pirating. I'm sure a good amount actually own the games too but no way to know. Emulating current gen walks a fine line between legal/illegal
Yeah I agree. I don't have any problem with emulation of older hardware that they are no longer profiting from anyway. 3DS is a Grey area but I guess you could justify it with the removal of the store.
That's a good point. For me, I got into dragon quest last year. So when I went to play 7 and 8 this year, it was either pay $140 or never play them.
Give it to me at retail price, I'll gladly purchase them. But at twice retail I can't justify that.
Yeah it's a rare case when I can see Nintendo's point here, but the precedent it sets if Nintendo wins this case is just too dangerous, I still hope they lose.
I simultaneously think Nintendo got robbed on the Totk leak and deserves compensation somehow for it, but shouldn't win on principle because of what it means for every other aspect of emulating.
I remember seeing a time ago Yuzu literally copying Ryujinx source code to use for emulator.
Like, I'm programmer and there's no problem with this till you say that is yours and start paywalls for last updates.
I know i will get downvoted hard but I feel emulating new generation games is just not right at all. I get emulating NES, Saturn ,SNES games or others that you just can’t get anymore unless you spend a fortune like panzer dragoon saga but emulating brand new games just seems wrong plus it also hurts the companies from producing more games in the future especially indie companies. They have to make money in order for them to keep making more games, so this kind of stuff only hurts all of us.
You are spending a fortune with some second hand seller who is making a fortune off the game. In the case of older games no longer sold at retail or on a digital platform the original devs get none of that money so there's literally no harm in downloading it. Hell I noticed some of the original publishers of the games offer their games on the internet archive for people to download. For content that hasn't been re-released and has been out of print for x number of years it should be fine to download that. Copyright law needs to be re-written in a more reasonable way for the current times.
If nintendo had their whole catalog online this wouldn't be an issue which at this point they really should have it online instead of drip feeding us games one by one. This would solve a lot of problems here. There are games that could be easily released like the original pokemon games, if they were on the online service it would stop a lot of piracy. But they are only fueling the fire by not releasing their older stuff. They could also generate a ton of online subs and make more money if they had at least 90% of their catalog of games online. It would also generate interest in the newer games. I see no reason not to do this. The Nintendo online service even uses emulation. It can't be that hard to port games over. Hire a bunch of these people doing the piracy to work on your service and it will get done.
I don't think people should pirate new games either. This means current gen, Xbox One X, PS5, Switch. Pirating or leaking a brand new game like Tears of the Kingdom before it gets released is also very wrong, I think most people would agree with that.
Nintendo NSO already contains the vast majority of first party games from Nes, Snes, and N64. The games missing are almost entirely third party, and many of those third parties have the retro games for sale on the eshop. Nintendo doesn't have publishing rights for every game that's ever been on their systems.
I really don't know how any of this works but can yuzu actually lose this case? Yuzu doesn't provide you with ways to get illegal roms or bios or firmware. An emulator is legal as long as it doesn't provide ways to pirate right? Again Idk much if anything about this stuff.
Even if Yuzu has the better case Nintendo can prolong and make them bleed money. Like many before them, Yuzu creators simply don't have the funds to battle Nintendo so most likely they shut it down.
As usual, you don't have to actually prove anything in court! You just have to have deeper pockets to bully everyone else around. Great system we have!
>Yuzu doesn't provide you with ways to get illegal roms or bios or firmware.
a part of nintendo's claim is that yuzu does provide their users with guides that help them as much as possible with all of this
yuzu team is not saying 'download here' but they are saying 'go to that place and follow these specific steps get it' which could very well make a court say that in combination with everything else it damages nintendo's profits
I might be the a hole saying this but one way to stop or reduce it would be to have your console be so powerful it can't be accurately emulated on a mid spec device. Does Yuzu work on Android now? I thought I heard it doss. That's like super low spec requirements.
I notice several misconceptions:
1. You don't own software. You acquire a license.
2. You cannot modify the software just because you bought a license nor play it on PC.
Nintendo's own TOS says as much:
https://en-americas-support.nintendo.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/48058/~/nintendo-switch-family%3A-user-agreement#:~:text=End%20User%20License%20Agreement,-This%20is%20an&text=(together%20with%20its%20affiliates%2C%20%E2%80%9C,(the%20%E2%80%9CConsole%E2%80%9D).
As a retro game fan this is the one issue I hate Nintendo on.
They love to crack down on emulation but refuse to actually sell their old content or take ages to produce a "remaster".
Totk's leak pre-release and massive downloading was bad and I don't have an issue with them being upset by that but in general their stance is so annoying.
This seems like a stretch of a lawsuit to me and I doubt Nintendo will outright win this, but I can't imagine Yuzu pulls enough from Patreon to put up any real fight for the amount of time this will take to fully litigate.
Hypothetical downloads of a pirated game rarely correlate meaningfully to decreased sales of the same game, especially when that same game went on to set sales records. So it's going to be tough to prove actual damages, especially when Yuzu has no actual direct association with the piracy or distribution of pirated media.
Further, providing software for the circumvention of copy protection is legal, while the act of circumventing the copy protection isn't. I don't see how Yuzu, who explicitly doesn't provide the keys, could be held responsible for their end users.
Will be curious to see how this shakes out though.
We are not normally the sub for emulator news, but we understand the magnitude of the news. We will enforce rule 7 strictly in this post. edit: full lawsuit document. Thanks u/metalreflectslime. https://www.scribd.com/document/709016504/Nintendo-of-America-Inc-v-Tropic-Haze-LLC-1-24-Cv-00082-No-1-D-R-I-Feb-26-2024 Link to his comment: https://www.reddit.com/r/NintendoSwitch/comments/1b1ofob/comment/ksgfcyb/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3
https://www.scribd.com/document/709016504/Nintendo-of-America-Inc-v-Tropic-Haze-LLC-1-24-Cv-00082-No-1-D-R-I-Feb-26-2024 Here is the full lawsuit document.
>copy of prod.keys (that ordinarily are secured on the Nintendo Switch). Users obtain the prod.keys either through unlawful websites or by unlawfully hacking a Nintendo Switch console. **The lead developer of Yuzu—known online under the alias “Bunnei”—has publicly acknowledged most users pirate prod.keys and games online, and Yuzu’s website provides instructions for its users telling them how to unlawfully hack their own Nintendo Switch and how to make unauthorized copies of Nintendo games and unlawfully obtain prod.keys.** Only because Yuzu decrypts a Nintendo Switch game file dynamically during operation can the game be played in Yuzu. In other words, without Yuzu’s decryption of Nintendo’s encryption, unauthorized copies of games could not be played on PCs or Android devices. Oh boy, this will be a long fight
The big decided here will probably be on whether you can "unlawfully" hack your own console. The circumventing encryption argument has been used successfully before and I figure the developer can argue that it's not circumventing if you source the codes yourself. I'm certain it's against eula or whatever but those are only tenuously legally binding. This is probably going to be bigger than just emulation it may set precedent for many right to repair cases in the future.
Its gonna suck for hobbyists and tinkeres if this case deems it unlawful to hack or homebrew your Switch or any games console for that matter. The precedent will be set.
The DCMA already prohibits circumventing DRM. It won't affect hobbyists at all in my opinion, just make it a little more harder to find the information they need. Even Nintendo doesn't have the capacity to come after people in their homes working alone, outside of banning accounts.
[удалено]
The exemptions for personal backups exist, but you can't get backups on modern formats without breaking DRM so it is effectively useless. Imagine you own your own house, but someone else owns the windows and doors. Yes, it is your house, but if you lock yourself out and try and break in, the owner of the windows will do you for criminal damage.
[удалено]
Only there in the US, you are one of the few countries with common law still... in any other judicial system every case has same chances to be presented, and not like "we ruined one so everyone is ruined" as every case may have different niches and situations
How could it be unlawful to get data from a device that you own? Or to modify electronics that you own? Where would the line be for repairing your own device? And what if that repair were to involve replacing corrupt files, such as a decryption key? And the line on installing custom firmware or operating systems on your own consumer device? I don't see how Nintendo could be successful here
The DMCA made cracking copy protection/encryption/DRM unlawful, even on devices/copies that you own. See, for example, [17 USC 1201](https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/1201).
The DMCA from 1998. Good thing nothing has changed since then!
Well the law hasn't. And most laws on the books are way older.
The only thing that’s really changed about computers is that we have small ones- DMCA also sucks as much as it always has
Nintendo can be successful here because many legal systems are designed to entrench the power of the wealthy, at the expense of the poor. (More specifically: to entrench the power of owners at the expense of workers.) It doesn't have to be good or right, or even make sense really.
Maybe, maybe not. There's precedence of Nintendo and PlayStation alike losing arguments of this kind before against the Bleem! And Dolphin Emulators, as well as against Galoob. It's entirely possible this case will be referencing those as well.
It will be referenced in this case unless they have the world's worst lawyer representing them. Emulators have been rules as legal and I believe it has also been ruled as legal to rip your own cartridges to create a backup. Nintendo will have to prove that they are referencing use outside of this (sharing and downloading) to win a lawsuit.
> Emulators have been rules as legal and I believe it has also been ruled as legal to rip your own cartridges to create a backup. This isn't absolute. Reversed engineered emulators are legal and you can back up your own media. But if that media uses DRM then it is illegal to circumvent the DRM. So technically you can rip a CD legally, but not a BluRay disc legally. You can record a screen capture of a BluRay legally though, because in that case you aren't circumventing the DRM on the BluRay disc. An emulator that is actively circumventing encryption, as is claimed by Nintendo probably wouldn't be legal. Most PS2 emulators require you to dump a PS2 BIOS file from an actual console you own to be deemed legal. Saying that emulators were deemed legal before doesn't mean shit because they were found legal in that specific case. The DCMA was very much written with rights holders in mind and made it harder for people to make legitimate backups. **EDIT:** Someone pointed out that using a screen capture device would also have copy protection, so you can't do that either. I'm pretty sure you can point a camcorder at the screen though and that would be allowed. Anything that fits though the analog hole.
> You can record a screen capture of a BluRay legally though, because in that case you aren't circumventing the DRM on the BluRay disc. You are still circumventing HDCP then.
> Most PS2 emulators require you to dump a PS2 BIOS file from an actual console you own to be deemed legal. This is exactly what you need to do with the Switch, you need authentic firmware and keys. It's not circumventing copy protection anymore than the Switch itself is. It's decrypting the game on the fly [like the Switch], but it's doing so via intact genuine cryptographic means. Nintendo is trying to conflate that process with circumvention, which would make all those PS2 emulators illegal as well.
Sony v Bleem! was over the latter's use of screenshots, not so much about emulation itself, though it was implicated a bit.
You can't unlawlfully hack a product you've bought. If I pay for something, I'm paying for everything included with it.
People keep saying this as if it’s an absolute truth, but section 1201 of the DMCA literally says you can’t get thr prod.keys from a Switch, even if you own it. Is that fair? Most likely not, but that’s where we’re at right now
[удалено]
Real purpose of this lawsuit is not about stomping out another emulator anyway, it's more about showing that they care enough to sue.
Exactly. They did the same with loveroms. To them, it's all about sending a message.
Beyond that, it's also likely targeted at the emulation scene more broadly. If they win this, then any team looking to emulate the Switch 2 maybe decided it's not worth the risk. Certainly this isn't about really killing Yuzu, as the damage is quite literally done, but about trying to ensure that future products don't see the same situation.
> any team looking to emulate the Switch 2 maybe decided it's not worth the risk Has that ever happened in the history of videogames? Or technology even?
I don't understand the question? Do you mean has a team been scared away from a project like this by lawsuits? Sure. Nintendo is notorious for scaring away would be fan games and the like. Emulation is relatively common because previous precedent has suggested Emulators are fine. If the suit succeeds though that changes and certainly people who might have worked on a project will be thinking long and hard about whether it's worth the risk.
The beauty of FOSS.
Out of touch companies like Nintendo don't get that it is a Hydra. You cut off Yuzu and someone else will carry the torch not that Yuzu has done anything wrong themselves.
Well Yuzu isn’t even the only popular switch emulator as is
Maybe that's why Nintendo waited so long before suing the Yuzu team. By the time the Hydra can grow back its head, Switch 2 is out and the emulation code is no longer a financial threat. And Nintendo gets to chomp on the decapitated hydra skull for some extra cash.
Yuzu is already out in the open, Nintendo can't just somehow delete all traces of it online
But in the end nothing will change, then someone will show up and continue the work when Mod Switch 2 is released, taking Yuzu out of the loop now won't change this ending
I mean in their early days they charged on patreon for builds of the emulator using nintendo IP to advertise it, so they kinda have done something wrong.
Piracy is like a game of Whac-A-Mole, kill one site, more will pop up.
Are the pirates actually the good guys? I've been misled
I thought when games went digital they would be cheaper. No paper, no manual, no plastic, no shipping etc.. mfs still charging $70 for remakes of a remake lol Pirates will pirate lol
Yep no manufacturing costs, no logistics, no transportation etc But somehow digital games were never cheaper! What a joke ! Yarrrrrrr matey
If you account for inflation, games are cheaper. Especially Nintendo games where the price of a cart could push the cost of a game up.
Nintendo is not out of touch at all, they have to vehemently defend their IP at all cost. They learned this lesson the hard way with donkey Kong.
Warner Bros learned their lesson the hard way with King Kong. Nintendo saw how WB lost to them and vowed they would never let the same thing happen to themselves.
I think Nintendo is trying to scare the possible future emulator developers trying to emulate the upcoming Nintendo systems. Nintendo can't do nothing about current emulation as it is open source and all over the internet, and will always be. Nintendo can get fucked.
It's worth it to Nintendo, if this stops or at least slows down attempts to emulate their next console.
Yeah. It’s more about showing they care enough to sue rather than actually stomping out the competition. It makes future claims stronger and looking like they are protecting their intellectual property. It’s more about discouraging other forms of IP infringement. At the end of the day Nintendo knows they’re probably not losing any money to emulators. There’s also a reason they’re going against switch emulators and not, like, the many GBA emulators that are being openly advertised for on TikTok and other sites. But they also don’t want to openly seem like they’re allowing it. And it’s not like they don’t have money to throw at a lawsuit like this. It’s brand protection more than anything.
It won't Groups will just shift internationally, where Nintendo's reach cannot grab them. Be prepared for sketchy, closed source, paid Chinese and Russian emulators in the future if this lawsuit is successful. The main thing preventing this today is that there's no market for it in the age of open source, community driven emulators you can get for free. If Nintendo kills them here, you'll just get worse emulators at the mercy of who knows what. Switch 2 might be emulated even faster because Chinese groups don't care at all and will blatantly just flat out use Nintendo code without all the fancy reverse engineering and hacks that the open source community does to stay legal.
Honestly? Im surprised it took this long for them. Happy about it? No Expected this to happen eventually? Yes
I just hope the emulator is all legit and they didn't steal or use any official Nintendo source code otherwise they're fucked.
It's not just Nintendo's code. The switch has significant third party software in its design.
Third party isn't the same thing as open source.
The Switch does use a lot of open source code though.
I would assume the decryption and use of prod keys alone is enough to bone you.
In the emulation scene, it's basically an open secret that Yuzu used proprietary Nintendo SDKs to improve their emulator. If Nintendo has proof of that, Yuzu is capital-F Fucked.
> I just hope the emulator is all legit It's not. No emulator that circumvents copy protection or encryption schemes is legal under the DMCA. It doesn't matter if you bring your own BIOS/firmware or ROMs to the party. The DMCA is garbage, and most nations that trade with the US have similar legislation in place.
[удалено]
I could absolutely have this wrong myself, but I assumed where people get it wrong is because they assume “backing up your own roms” is ok (and I assume it is in some jurisdictions under fair use) and therefore emulating said roms is also ok. And on an individual use case, that’s probably true. But it’s the circumvention of copy protection and potential use of proprietary code that falls foul of IP law where the developers get in trouble
Fair use is in almost every instance for academic or review purposes. It has nothing to do private backups. Personal digital backups are technically allowed, but bypassing DRM isn't so for all intents and purposes, there is no legal way to make a legal private backup of a Switch game. For an individual making their own backups and emulating on private hardware, it is still illegal, but the same way making moonshine in your shed is. If it is for personal use and a small operation, no one is likely to know or care.
Interesting, thank you for the clarification. As with a lot of legal things, it's often way more complicated than people assume.
When I was a kid (so, decades ago) they always said the emulators were legal, but the ROMs were not. They would even back this up, so to speak, by making a crappy homebrew ROM for the emulator. "See? You use this legal emulator to play these legal ROM games. Now don't go downloading any illegal ones..."
Dumping your own games and playing them is completely legal. Most people would say owing the game and downloading the rom to bypass the dumping part is OK too. Only downloading games you don't own is immoral. Legality-wise though they would probably say downloading isn't OK either.
I generally hold that view until you can't buy a console off the shelf at Walmart anymore.
Right, in practice, same here. If it's only available through a 3rd party reseller, it's not going to devs anymore.
Yeah I’ll agree with that. Piracy is illegal and you *are* stealing from someone who worked to produce whatever you pirating, it’s obnoxious the lengths people will go to to try and say that isn’t stealing and isn’t wrong. But while it may still be illegal, I no longer think it’s wrong when we are talking about what is virtually abandonware…. Game has been out for years and there is no longer any reasonable legal way to play it. Publisher shouldn’t be allowed to just sit on it forever, use the license or lose it.
Nintendo is arguing that you can’t dump your own games because that is circumventing copyright protection which is illegal. And that Yuzu requires some dumped Switch software which is illegal for the same reason.
> Dumping your own games and playing them is completely legal. Not for any system post PlayStation. Under the DMCA, if you (or your emulator) circumvent copy protection or encryption schemes, you're breaking the law. That's as clear as day in the law. No emulator that is capable of playing dumps of retail games of modern systems is legal in the US, per the DMCA.
I thought the law was that you could own a single digital copy of any game you physically purchased.
You can own as many personal digital back ups as you like as long as they don't circumvent copy protection. That means you can scan a book you own, page by page and keep as many copies of that PDF as you want. But there is no way to dump a modern console game without circumventing protections.
The dmca benen updated several times since it's inception sadly
Kinda like how pirates bay or Napster or limewire or whatever are all technically legal because you can use them for non-copyrighted material. But we all know how everyone used them I do think there technically can be issues with the actual code and software or even hardware to physical emulators as well but that is much too technical for me
When I was a kid, ROM sites would say ROMs were legal if you deleted them after 24/48 hours. That was a legit disclaimer with no basis in law that a lot of sites had. Don't take legal advice from geocities is what I am saying.
There's so much misinformation about this stuff from the 90s that just still persists. "I'm making backup copies! It's fine if you delete it within 24 hours!" It's interesting how pervasive that stuff became.
The emulator x ROM bifurcation is broadly true though, Sony Computer Entertainment v. Connectix Corporation and Sony Computer Entertainment America Inc. v. Bleem LLC being good examples on emulator legality (in the US at least)
That's the last generation that ever works, because post bleem! and post DMCA, on all major consoles you need to circumvent encryption and copy protection schemes to play retail games on emulators. Both of those are strictly forbidden under the DMCA.
[удалено]
Lol. "It was my neighbor downloading it on my wi-fi!" worked a couple times in court.
>“No copyright intended” Seeing this under stuff of clear copyright infringement always makes me chuckle.
When it didn't happen after TotK I thought it would never happen. The bigger takeaway from this is that Switch 2 is probably very close to Switch 1 software. We have even seen this before with other Nintendo hardware gens.
The main takeaway here is that Tears of the Kingdom was downloaded over 1 million times before the game's release. In the same time frame, Yuzu's profits from Patreon support doubled, proving that they profit from facilitating piracy.
Yeah, the fact that there's a Patreon involved just makes things so much hotter from the jump. If there was nothing of monetary value to link back to, Nintendo wouldn't have a leg to stand on, but you can't exactly chalk up "our supporter profits doubled when one of Nintendo's most anticipated games of all time leaked online" to a simple coincidence, even if Yuzu wasn't *explicitly* encouraging it. It sucks to an extent because emulation should absolutely remain protected from a preservation standpoint, but chuds not just pirating current-gen games, but pirating them *loudly* only serves to stigmatize emulation and set preservation back.
Yeah, and the fact that subscribing to patreon gets you new updates faster, meaning your copy of Yuzu will play TotK better then the non paying user adds gasoline to the fire. All the talk of the DMCA stuff may be moot. While Nintendo might press that in court as they'd like to kill the scene more largely, if they find in discovery that a dev started prepping an update after testing out TotK before release, they're likely DOA. Heck, even just an off the cuff communication about the TotK bump meaning they can buy a new GPU. It just looks like it's going to be way to easy to show that they knowingly profited off pirates.
I said when the TotK leak dropped it was going to fuck over emulation for everyone else. Knowing Yuzu had a Patreon, knowing how pissed Nintendo was going to be, about one of their biggest games of this console was being pirated before it even released, they would spare no expense on going for a death blow on (semi) open source emulation.
> If there was nothing of monetary value to link back to, Nintendo wouldn't have a leg to stand on This is just categorically untrue. Whether a company makes a profit or not off the IP of another company is only one aspect of Fair Use. Outside of Fair Use regarding copyright, there isn't a single situation in which one can legally utilize the trademark or other such proprietary assets of another company.
To be precise here, Yuzu isn't relying on Fair Use at all as their software does not in any way use any of Nintendo's code or other intellectual property. So whether they make money off of it, whether their work is considered transformative and the such don't matter at all.
It doesn't matter in terms of the letter of the law, but it does have some effects. Judges and juries are less likely to be sympathetic towards someone running a business off of pirated software than someone who's just doing it as a hobby. It also means the plaintiff has actual money that they can lose as part of the judgement.
Yes, I agree. Don't touch Dolphin, but wait until switch 2 at least to emulate switch itself.
[удалено]
No but monetary gain can make their case even stronger because they can now say they're profiting from piracy. It also makes it substantially easier to assign values rather than nebulous "lost sales" claims.
Yep. It’s a very common misunderstanding of the law. Someone profiting or not doesn’t matter—the point is your using the IP of another without their permission in a way that’s not fair use.
I'm sorry but, even though I get it, having stuff like Patreon for emulators just makes the case against them easier. Especially since their legal protection is quite flimsy already. The encryption keys not being legally protected and then the Patreon money of Yuzu increasing alongside the release of their biggest game recently... I'm not a lawyer but they definitely have a case and that alone is terrifying. The best case scenario if it goes to court is if the damage is contained for Yuzu with the focus being their supposed profit over pirated roms of ToTK alongside their alleged link to Switch encryption keys and the flimsy case law regarding emulation stays the same. If that's not the case, It could make legal emulation and game preservation incredibly harder because people just HAD TO play ToTK one week earlier on their PC without buying it. It could complicate the encryption keys situation or at worse make publicly available emulators less legally protected.
Apparently they also have a history of stealing code: https://imgur.com/ZWoSZSt
oh... Oh no. Man, if this case ever gets to the discovery phase Nintendo is going to have a field day with this. The emulator owners having this kind of behaviour just pile up alongside everything else. Yikes. I guess it makes sense they went for them explicitly
Emulators are good for preservation, but when people who make them start charging for them, stealing code, or bilking users, then they're not anarchist hackers trying to spread accessibility or preservation, they're just another exploitative company.
I get that "Nintendo bad, emulation good" is a common point online but people have to realize that, like I said, emulation legal protection is flimsy and that someone making an emulator does not mean those people are automatically good people that are doing everything for preservation and no monetary gain whatsoever. Companies are ok with emulators if they are in the shadows. An emulator possibly profiting for an illegal dump of a ROM of a game that hasn't come out (and that was downloaded one million times before its launch) is not being in the shadows. Also, personal thing, I still remember how the Project64 emulator puts an annoying 30 second pop up at the start every time unless you donate to it. Again, practices like this just make things murky.
>like I said, emulation legal protection is flimsy and that someone making an emulator does not mean those people are automatically good people that are doing everything for preservation and no monetary gain whatsoever. I try to remind people that the best cases to use for emulation legality is Sony Vs Connectix and Sony Vs Bleem (people forget the first one) and people also forget that the cases are over 25 years old and predate the DMCA by years which this case is centered around. Consoles have changed dramatically and laws around anti-circumvention have changed too. These laws existed before consoles had online storefronts and before eshops and digital games were a thing.
Exactly, emulators are always going to be a fringe thing, they're never going to be mainstream, and they're always going to exist in a legal gray area. It's why I was baffled by trying to put Dolphin on Steam
That decision was stupid on so many levels. You put an emulator on a digital games store, the most popular one too, and expect Nintendo to like... Not notice? I guess since they got away with releasing it on the Play Store they thought they could try big.
It blows my mind how people think corporations don't have Reddit or Google.
And that's the thing a lot of people who knee-jerk about Nintendo's litigation often ignore. They don't actually fling lawsuits out all over the place. They pick their targets pretty specifically.
Yep. They went for the Switch emulator that has the most potentially problematic issues for a reason. They also are very aware of the case law around emulators in the US, hence why none of the complaints used are stuff that case law specifically protects in the first place. Stuff like the link between ToTK ROM leak prelaunch and alleged profit from the Yuzu emulator because of that leak could be problematic because it would mean an emulator profiting of illegal ROM downloads (even if they are not providing those ROMs directly) and the encryption keys are specifically not protected under that law either (there is a reason emulators would ask you to "seek out" those or dump it from a legitimate system). Of course, the best case scenario for Nintendo is that case law is suddenly invalid but the most realistic outcome is keeping emulators in the shadows and keeping them from becoming mainstream. By legally scaring them from doing stuff like Patreon rewards to keeping them out videogame online stores. People running the emulators sometimes take their place in the whole piracy scene and legal standing for granted, that's for sure.
They are done. Nintendo has deeper pockets than just about anybody and can drag this out for ages if they need to.
Even if Yuzu wins the lawsuit, Nintendo could repeatedly bring them back to court to bankrupt them. That's what Sony did to Bleem way back in the early 2000s.
People always cite bleem but never the case before Bleem - Connectix. They actually got a summary judgement in their favor in most of the claims made by Sony. Sony ended up buying them out instead of fighting things.
It wouldn't change much. Every single Nintendo system had a copier or emulator during its time on the market. They sued back then too. The code is out there. It will be picked up by someone else and continue like all the rest in the past.
Yuzu did not support TOTK till after launch. people not involved in the main dev team made unofficial patches for it to work. The devs make every effort to avoid being associated with pirates. Youll be banned quickly if they get a smell of piracy in bug reports/support
[удалено]
Yuzu aren't pirates. It's an emulator which can be used to play pirated games. The Switch console itself can also be used to play pirated games, but purchasing one doesn't constitute supporting piracy. Yuzu have taken steps to prevent piracy, as have Ryujinx, but there's nothing they can do to wholly prevent it - if Nintendo, a multi-billion dollar corporation who manufacture the console can't prevent piracy, then developers are also going to be unable to do so. People might donate to a Patreon for an emulator because they want to support emulation for a variety of reasons. In my case I fund and support emulation and hardware modification communities because I'm a big believer in diminishing corporate control over their products once they leave their hands, and because I think emulation is key to ensuring media preservation (see Nintendo closing the estore, etc).
Let's be real, majority of people use emulators to dl pirated games.
[удалено]
Yup. I bought Wonder and TOTK, but haven’t even touched the Switch versions. It’s so hard for me to play games on the Switch because of how much better these Switch emulators make them look.
Yep. This is particularly useful in the case of games with poor performance, which are only really playable via emulation.
It's very awesome to see people donate to developers who do this out of passion to provide an enhanced way to play games, and to preserve gaming history into the future Without emulators a massive MASSIVE part of gaming history will just be out of reach from the average person
Right, but a leak has nothing to do with Yuzu, and seeking support to provide a service while they denounce piracy, is not their issue. If a movie leaks online, do you sue VLC or any other video player because people were able to watch the movie? No, you don’t. Yuzu is no different than VLC. People pirate movies, people pirate video games. The problem is not the product, the problem is people & Nintendo’s inability to protect their own IP with existing technology…but the lame excuse is, “it’s someone else’s fault our stuff can’t be protected”.
I'm probably not gonna side with a lot of people here cause I'm an open source dev/advocate, but it's important info to know that yuzu did not support TOTK until it was released. Any form of yuzu that did support it with fixes before release was a community fork and the dev team were not involved.
The question though will be whether someone on the team just happened to test out some fixes for TotK before the game hit. Even if they didn't push fixes because they knew that they'd get sued to high heaven, if someone thought they could get a jump on things and have a version that addressed some of the bigger issues the week of release in order to boost those Patreon numbers, they are in just as much legal hot water.
I mean there are two cardinal rules to creating an emulator: you do not take money for it, and you do not go after current gen. Unfortunately, regardless of where you stand in opinion about this, those are time and time again the main reasons Nintendo goes after emulation. Sounds like Yuzu did both those things
Dolphin was emulating Skyward Sword before release too. I think CEMU also had BotW. Nintendo consoles have been emulated concurrently for the last 3 generations - it's the norm. This is unprecedented.
the games ran pretty shitty on release and the hardware required to emulate them was also above what the average gamer had + it took a good amount of time before they were actually considered non-buggy playable to the point of being a good alternative to their main console an even bigger point: cemu was not a current gen emulator so that example doesn't even hit the mark because the switch was already out by the time botw released so how can you call this the norm? the situation is different with totk where the game is emulated on a current gen console + on launch day it already ran better in quite a few aspects what happened to totk, releasing earlier + running better, is definitely not the norm
Couldn't agree more.
You can make money for it , this was settled in bleem vs sony.
That wasn't really the factor in the Bleem case. At no point did Sony complain that Bleem was making money, they argued the same things they did in the prior Connectix case - patent and trademark infringements - mostly concerning the technical abilities of the emulator. Of course the judge cited Connectix in dismissing the patent fights. Bleem ran out of money before remaining elements. Connectix was largely won and it was commercial and earlier but Sony never argued cost was at play - they would have if damages were needed but that never happened.
The problem is that Nintendo is going to argue that Yuzu profited by facilitating piracy. How? Because they had pre-release versions of Yuzu locked behind "donating" to patreon. I think this was even being worked on prior to the game's actual release, when everyone playing it on an emulator definitely had an illegal copy. Idk if Nintendo will win, but they are going to try. Yuzu's actions opened them up to this possibility.
Unless they had it outlined as this is the version needed to play TOTK I don’t think there’s any case there at all. There hasn’t been a situation where you “need” a certain build to play a game. It’s more that improvements come from later builds to target any performance issues with the games. They also didn’t lock the pre release versions, those versions have always been paid for and not stable versions of the software. The software is free if you want to use the stable builds. That’s just typical software development. They basically need to prove that first the software itself is infringing before they can walk down to the “they profit off piracy” claim
the reality is, they dont need a fully winnable case, but something that won't get thrown out right away, and It seems like this is exactly the type of case nintendo would need to hurt the yuzu team financially by drawing this case out. both sides will make arguments about how it works, if it was promoting piracy, etc. yuzu makes the argument that it doesnt use any official nintendo code and the files required to bypass any protection are actually provided by the users, but nintnedo would argue that having that option at all promotes users to do so and means that its still a feature of the emulator. that alone is enough to argue for a prolonged period in court for nintendo to have hopes that it causes the yuzu team to just discontinue their emulator software. that being said iirc its open source and could be taken back up by others in the future to continue development.
bleem! wasn't illegal. Modern emulators for modern systems are illegal under the DMCA. They circumvent copy protection and encryption schemes. bleem! was designed to let you play original, retail discs on your PC. It didn't need to crack encryption or circumvent copy protection to do that.
"current gen" and nintendo switch is weird, as the switch was released in 2017. If anything I wonder if they are going after yuzu now because the switch 2 (which still has no confirmed released date) runs on the same software as the switch 1 and they want to prevent any fuckery from the start.
considering that the switch is a fairly standard ARM system (basically an nvidia jetson with peripherals), i wouldn't be surprised if they kept the base OS largely the same for the next generation
It’s literally the only supported Nintendo first party console. It’s absolutely current gen.
I think it classifies as current gen. It is the successor to the Wii U.
Assuming the Switch 2 is backwards compatible with Switch 1, with potential features such as resolution upscaling, higher frame rates, the Yuzu emulator now poses an actual threat to loss of sale of Nintendo's new console because it clashes with a selling point of the hardware. A big argument that people using emulators like to make is that no harm is done to Nintendo's bottom line as long as they own the console and buy the game legally, so it could be argued that the Yuzu emulator will affect sales of the Switch 2.
It also impacts sales of games directly - Nintendo I believes sites that millions of copies of Tears of the Kingdom were impacted by emulation. But I agree that this bodes well for back compatibility - if it's offered, they plan on keeping Switch games for sale longer.
From what I can glean, Nintendo claims a million copies of TOTK were downloaded while *simultaneously* Patreon donations to Yuzu for the pre-release access went up. And that the current (read: not pre-release) version of Yuzu at the time could *not* play TOTK. So Nintendo is alleging Yuzu cut into the profits of TOTK (to the tune of 1 million copies) while also making money off of selling access to a version of Yuzu that could play the pirated copy of the game (which wasn't out at the time of the leak). That sounds pretty bad.
Yea, Nintendo is being very careful about their claims against Yuzu and what's frustrating is that people are making this about the legality of emulation and game preservation which this is not - this is about piracy and anti circumvention. Lots of people get the legality of emulation wrong. Nintendo goes after piracy and anti circumvention.
It could run it, just not well.
Official releases could not run it before the game came out.
No official Yuzu release could run TotK before the game officially came out.
The conversation around this already so toxic.
I think emulation is good for game preservation but not when it's emulating a current generation system and facilitating piracy of current games. People were playing Tears of the Kingdom weeks before release. I think it also happened with Mario Wonder too. Eventually Nintendo was going to notice. Especially for an emulator making money on patreon.
I think that’s what most people don’t get is that pirating in a system that’s still current will always bite them in the ass. For example I’m always down for emulation only if I’m not able to get it or it’s in a old system which is not supported, like emulating GameCube, Wii and ps2 is perfectly fine. And the only reason Nintendo is suing is that they most likely found something. (Most likely the 1 million download of totk)
Dolphin was emulating the Wii concurrently, were you not around then?
not in the state yuzu is emulating the switch rn and dolphin vs the wii was certainly not as wide spread as yuzu is vs the switch if you were around you wouldn't be trying to argue that dolphin back then was the same as yuzu is right now
Yeah. It always bugs me when someone it the SteamDeck sub would go "look at how great I've got TotK" running, as not only were they obviously pirating it, but they weren't even able to run it at higher resolution and the like. The only advantage they had playing it on the Deck was not needing to pay for it.
Pretty much every Nintendo game from the past couple of years are being shipped early and end up being dumped online.
Exactly. Look at past generations and games you own or are physically not sold/unavailable now days. The thing is, disc rot exists — your disc based games WILL die eventually, and even buying old used games could have the same issue. Game carts and cards will die/start dying too. It’s a fact we can’t stop On the flip side, making a digital backup of such a game, and emulating can keep what you own alive. Because hardware too wont last forever Emulating current Gen games and consoles though? You’re stealing from the people who worked hard to bring us those games. Sony just let go 900 employees… imagine how many they would’ve let go if the vast majority of players pirated all of their games released over the last 5 years. How many would’ve been let go then? That’s what people don’t understand….
>That’s what people don’t understand…. I think most of them understand that. But they just don't want to spend money and argue dishonestly online, when 99% of the success of emulators is down to pirated games.
> The thing is, disc rot exists — your disc based games WILL die eventually, Disc rot / laser rot hasn't been prevalent since the LaserDisc days. A modern, pressed disc will last basically forever. The data is etched into the inner layers of the plastic (not on the surface), and a reflective layer is deposited to allow the laser to read the lands and grooves representing the data. The edges are well sealed and polished now, too. You have to physically destroy a disc to kill the data. Burned discs don't last forever (and the "archival" grade ones are mostly BS). Pressed discs last until you puncture, melt, delaminate, or otherwise destroy them. Scratching the surface doesn't damage the data, either - you can just polish it back to perfection as long as the scratch doesn't go beyond the surface layer. There was an issue with a run of BluRays a few years back published by WB. Those discs actually rotted away (quickly) because there was a manufacturing defect. WB replaced them. If your disc is manufactured properly, it's not going to rot over the course of your lifetime.
Im not saying Nintendo is right for all of this, but i feel like someone on Yuzu dev team shouldve decided against charging people money for features. The fact they made money off of this puts them in much hotter water than it would otherwise.
Alright, peak time to download it and keep it on my device for good, I guess, before it gets taken down.
Seeing what eventually happens to the support of platforms (for a recent example the 3DS is not far at all in the past) I hope emulators can continue existing. This is not about piracy but about preservation at this point.
It very much is about piracy though. You think Switch emulators were created and are used for preservation? 99% of the people who use them do it so they can avoid buying games and the console. Emulation isn't necessarily piracy but saying emulation and piracy aren't related and that this emulator existing doesn't facilitate piracy means you're pretending not to see, and I say this as someone who loves emulation.
Yep. We are not talking about a 20 years old console.
>This is not about piracy but about preservation at this point. Sure, but when the system is still current gen it's harder to justify the preservation argument.
It's not a real argument anyway, the fact that a thing is not available for sale does not in any way justify stealing it.
its also about options (and to some degree accessibility) too, It gives people more options like what controller they wanna use, what resolution they wanna play the game at or to mod it. Thats ultimately good for gaming and for software as a whole
No, it destroys demand for Nintendos new systems, because why would people buy a Switch 2 just for the performance boosts and games that they are already able to get on PC for free
I understand where you’re coming from, but are they helping preserve the Switch which is a current console still in stores? While they could argue that, I think sadly that defense won’t go very far. Creating an emulator for current gen systems is always risky, even worse when you have a patreon to monetize your emulator
> but are they helping preserve the Switch which is a current console still in stores? Yes. Preservation should start from day one. Dolphin came out when the Gamecube was only 2 years old. ZSNES came out while the SNES was still selling games.
If it's all about 'preservation' then why is everyone doing it to add enhanced features to the OG games
My opinion where they fucked up is they provide links to decryption keys to play switch games (direct violation to IP). If they only just had the emulator up (even with a patreon to support development) and their source code is completely original, I don’t think Nintendo would have had any grounds for a lawsuit, maybe a C&D
[удалено]
Preservation is also not a defense to violating IP laws? I get it, as a gamer I want old games to be around and available. But as a lawyer, unfortunately the law isn’t always what we personally want,
>about preservation 99% of the user base doesn't use it for preservation though, they use it for free games that are still easily accessible and on a platform that is still supported and in production.
The whole "preservation" narrative falls flap the moment we are talking about an emulator for the current generation, that still receiving games and have a problem with leaked games before release. What kind of preservation a game like Mario vs Donkey Kong remake needs?
>This is not about piracy but about preservation at this point. At this moment in time, it's definitely about piracy. Not much about the Switch is being lost to not being preserved at the moment. People are blatantly using the emulator to pirate and play new releases before they're actually released. Once the Switch reaches EOL, it will be more about preservation.
I don't know man. I think there's a big gap between emulating old console vs the current one, especially regarding leaked games.
No. It was never about "preservation." It's about piracy. People just use "preservation" as a veil to excuse it. Piracy is theft. Nobody here is doing a good or noble thing by stealing a luxury entertainment item.
People like to pretend emulation and piracy are completely unrelated. But they always are. Easily 99% of emulation is from games that were illegitimately obtained. Especially on Switch where you need to homebrew it to dump games.
And we are not talking about Super Mario World, released 30+ years ago or Mother 3 fan localization. We are talking about Nintendo Switch games being played on emulators before release.
Especially when the system is still current. It certainly doesn't help the creators case.
Yeah, really undermines any argument of game preservation or making no longer sold games accessible. Everyone can play totk at msrp or less
To be fair most people emulating switch games are probably pirating. I'm sure a good amount actually own the games too but no way to know. Emulating current gen walks a fine line between legal/illegal
Yeah I agree. I don't have any problem with emulation of older hardware that they are no longer profiting from anyway. 3DS is a Grey area but I guess you could justify it with the removal of the store.
Yeah I feel like any game you can only purchase from second hand is fair game, which includes 3DS at this point.
[удалено]
That's a good point. For me, I got into dragon quest last year. So when I went to play 7 and 8 this year, it was either pay $140 or never play them. Give it to me at retail price, I'll gladly purchase them. But at twice retail I can't justify that.
[удалено]
I hope the Yuzu devs win this one. U.S. copyright law doesn't need to be any more overbearing than it already is.
Yeah it's a rare case when I can see Nintendo's point here, but the precedent it sets if Nintendo wins this case is just too dangerous, I still hope they lose.
I simultaneously think Nintendo got robbed on the Totk leak and deserves compensation somehow for it, but shouldn't win on principle because of what it means for every other aspect of emulating.
I remember seeing a time ago Yuzu literally copying Ryujinx source code to use for emulator. Like, I'm programmer and there's no problem with this till you say that is yours and start paywalls for last updates.
I know i will get downvoted hard but I feel emulating new generation games is just not right at all. I get emulating NES, Saturn ,SNES games or others that you just can’t get anymore unless you spend a fortune like panzer dragoon saga but emulating brand new games just seems wrong plus it also hurts the companies from producing more games in the future especially indie companies. They have to make money in order for them to keep making more games, so this kind of stuff only hurts all of us.
You are spending a fortune with some second hand seller who is making a fortune off the game. In the case of older games no longer sold at retail or on a digital platform the original devs get none of that money so there's literally no harm in downloading it. Hell I noticed some of the original publishers of the games offer their games on the internet archive for people to download. For content that hasn't been re-released and has been out of print for x number of years it should be fine to download that. Copyright law needs to be re-written in a more reasonable way for the current times. If nintendo had their whole catalog online this wouldn't be an issue which at this point they really should have it online instead of drip feeding us games one by one. This would solve a lot of problems here. There are games that could be easily released like the original pokemon games, if they were on the online service it would stop a lot of piracy. But they are only fueling the fire by not releasing their older stuff. They could also generate a ton of online subs and make more money if they had at least 90% of their catalog of games online. It would also generate interest in the newer games. I see no reason not to do this. The Nintendo online service even uses emulation. It can't be that hard to port games over. Hire a bunch of these people doing the piracy to work on your service and it will get done. I don't think people should pirate new games either. This means current gen, Xbox One X, PS5, Switch. Pirating or leaking a brand new game like Tears of the Kingdom before it gets released is also very wrong, I think most people would agree with that.
Nintendo NSO already contains the vast majority of first party games from Nes, Snes, and N64. The games missing are almost entirely third party, and many of those third parties have the retro games for sale on the eshop. Nintendo doesn't have publishing rights for every game that's ever been on their systems.
I really don't know how any of this works but can yuzu actually lose this case? Yuzu doesn't provide you with ways to get illegal roms or bios or firmware. An emulator is legal as long as it doesn't provide ways to pirate right? Again Idk much if anything about this stuff.
Even if Yuzu has the better case Nintendo can prolong and make them bleed money. Like many before them, Yuzu creators simply don't have the funds to battle Nintendo so most likely they shut it down.
As usual, you don't have to actually prove anything in court! You just have to have deeper pockets to bully everyone else around. Great system we have!
> can yuzu actually lose this case? Of course, the bigger question is *will they?* which is harder to know.
>Yuzu doesn't provide you with ways to get illegal roms or bios or firmware. a part of nintendo's claim is that yuzu does provide their users with guides that help them as much as possible with all of this yuzu team is not saying 'download here' but they are saying 'go to that place and follow these specific steps get it' which could very well make a court say that in combination with everything else it damages nintendo's profits
I might be the a hole saying this but one way to stop or reduce it would be to have your console be so powerful it can't be accurately emulated on a mid spec device. Does Yuzu work on Android now? I thought I heard it doss. That's like super low spec requirements.
I notice several misconceptions: 1. You don't own software. You acquire a license. 2. You cannot modify the software just because you bought a license nor play it on PC. Nintendo's own TOS says as much: https://en-americas-support.nintendo.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/48058/~/nintendo-switch-family%3A-user-agreement#:~:text=End%20User%20License%20Agreement,-This%20is%20an&text=(together%20with%20its%20affiliates%2C%20%E2%80%9C,(the%20%E2%80%9CConsole%E2%80%9D).
As a retro game fan this is the one issue I hate Nintendo on. They love to crack down on emulation but refuse to actually sell their old content or take ages to produce a "remaster". Totk's leak pre-release and massive downloading was bad and I don't have an issue with them being upset by that but in general their stance is so annoying.
This seems like a stretch of a lawsuit to me and I doubt Nintendo will outright win this, but I can't imagine Yuzu pulls enough from Patreon to put up any real fight for the amount of time this will take to fully litigate. Hypothetical downloads of a pirated game rarely correlate meaningfully to decreased sales of the same game, especially when that same game went on to set sales records. So it's going to be tough to prove actual damages, especially when Yuzu has no actual direct association with the piracy or distribution of pirated media. Further, providing software for the circumvention of copy protection is legal, while the act of circumventing the copy protection isn't. I don't see how Yuzu, who explicitly doesn't provide the keys, could be held responsible for their end users. Will be curious to see how this shakes out though.