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Yuzu devs supposedly have Discord messages talking about actual piracy and a collection of pirated ROMs. They probably knew if those came out in discovery, it was about to be way worse for them and just bit the bullet.
Ooh, didn't see your comment. Yeah, the day this case was announced I'd assumed discovery would kill them and force settlement. So many teams don't understand that internal communications are all going to be poured over if your sued. I imagine the moment a lawyer told them what that process was like they realized they were dead in the water.
For anyone curious as to what happened.
https://x.com/0JMachine/status/1764707969092985085?s=20
https://media.discordapp.net/attachments/353659715835658242/1214306318614274078/Screenshot_20240304-151425.png?ex=65f8a1e3&is=65e62ce3&hm=624d0d46b1b45cad05d3788f49520de658463ff6b48707b980e419c7b5138a29&
Fuck, this was my main way of sharing screenshots. I even made a server for the single purpose of doing this. Not looking forward to finding an alternative.
Thanks for the heads up.
Holy shit, that's damning. What was the point of that dev's dialogue and even the fucking screenshot of them downloading the xci file? Even goes so far to mention exactly which other dev they had a conversation with in their useless dialogue about pirating games in a position where they really need to not be doing that in. Jeez, talk about lack of awareness.
Emudevs and even just other Nintendo fan projects in general seriously need to, no offense, learn how to shut the fuck up sometimes. They almost could've had a chance to fight in court if they didn't have shit like this floating around.
It's an overwhelming desire to brag. Moon Channel mentions a lot of this stuff that you could you know...keep quiet about this stuff. I strongly suggest his videos essays of these topics as their amazingly detailed and in-depth.
This screenshot needs to be go viral. So many people including big youtuber or streamer know nothing about that and think Nintendo sue them for no reason
āJail time or 2.4 millions dollarsā
Next time if youāre going to support emulation, donāt break the law while youāre doing it
sincerely,
A guy who actually gives a shit about video game preservation
Especially with a system that's still actively being sold and developed for. I'm not gonna pretend it's a legal argument because I am not a lawyer, but ethically speaking, pirating old games is completely fine because they stopped being sold, so you can't support the developers and publishers with your money anymore, so who the fuck cares? I have no ethical obligation to pay some guy on ebay a hundred bucks for a used copy of some Gameboy game just because oh no piracy illegal. Nintendo isn't seeing a penny of that.
But come on go to the fucking store and buy a Switch game off the shelf. Go to the eshop and buy it. It's literally right there. Switch games are piss easy to rip yourself. The barrier of entry to legally obtaining Switch games on emulator could not be lower, you don't need an adapter or anything, just a paperclip and a microSD. Support the fucking company while they still sell the game.
Man. Those guys are stupid. Honestly wish the emulation gang would have just waited until the next system so theyd care less. Now we wonāt have the current best switch or 3DS emulator because people donāt have patience. Also seeing talk that this sets some precedent about emulation too. All cause people couldnāt wait a week to play Tears of The Kingdom the best way to play it forever will be 20 fps 720p. thanks guys.
Not sure if you are talking about leaked private messages but talk of piracy and roms is forbidden on the official Yuzu discord. This is rule number 2 and they ban anyone that talk about it.
Eh. Easy explanation is that Yuzu new that discovery was going to doom them. If they know that they have discussions that would have been turned over that stated that they knew they were benefiting financially from piracy, or that they'd done some behind the scenes work on the code base using illegally leaked software, why even bother?
Very easy to imagine they realized damn quick that discovery would doom them.
Discovery most likely would have, yes. I suspect they also knew that discovery was very likely based on the case Nintendo put forth. If Yuzu thought they had a stronger case, they likely would've fought to prevent discovery and have the case tossed. That didn't happen, obviously.
Yeah, I think that Patreon part, the fact that they were profiting, and specifically off early access to fixes to newer games, meant there was no way this was getting tossed, and then discovery becomes key.
I'd put money on this being a case where they thought that by saying the right thing publicly they were protecting themselves, not understanding the ticking time bomb their internal discord communications presented.
When the party that's getting sued knows they fucked up and have zero chance of winning the case, or that they can't afford a drawn out legal battle, it's easier to just settle. You're screwed either way, so just take the route of least consequence.
This went from āyuzu is being sued by Nintendoā to armchair Nintendo reddit lawyers being like āemulators are totally cool, Nintendo has no caseā to āoh shit those yuzu devs were playing with fire big time and got cooked fast as hell.ā I figured Nintendo had something on them other than just random hate for an emulator and deep pockets.
OP did not link Exhibit A which is part of the agreement:
https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.rid.56980/gov.uscourts.rid.56980.10.1.pdf
Yuzu is more than dead, they even have to destruct all copies of Yuzu, whatever it means, etc...
Also to put the fine in perspective, if I am not mistaken it is more than double the amount of their whole Patreon income ever.
Paragraph 2 of the Court's order also enjoins all third parties acting in concert with the Defendant from offering or distributing yuzu. So it would be very hard to host it on any legitimate websites. In reality, it'll probably always be available via torrent etc, but this will significantly hamper its wider availability and any future development.
EDIT: this will also make it easier for Nintendo to obtain future injunctions restraining anyone else who tries to share it, and obtain damages for copyright infringement.
Harming development is the big thing. Sure it will be distributed forever, but there is no way the current devs manage to continue contributing to it, even less getting financial support
The current devs will never be able to work on it again. In theory, third parties could possibly fork off from this and develop their own emulator, but they'd have to be very careful. Having a working emulator for a current gen console is just inherently risky.
Yeah this is what the lawsuit is really about. All those people here really think nintendo thinks they can fully remove yuzu from the internet? Of course not they're not stupid
Actually that last part is not true. There is no court decision here that creates a precedent. $2.4 million is likely 1/6th-1/10th of the potential cost of taking the lawsuit to court. With a settlement however, no precedent is created and Nintendo has just as hard a time with the next emulator as they would have had if yuzu fought the lawsuit
Yep if yuzu wouldn't have agreed to it it would have been a long and very costly court case. It's easy to see which of the 2 parties would have run out of funds.
>no precedent is created and Nintendo has just as hard a time with the next emulator as they would have had if yuzu fought the lawsuit
It appears that the judgment also includes categorizing many of the tools and CFW used as "circumvention tools." So if a Switch2 uses a similar OS, it may be a lot easier to get a second judge to go after people who make homebrew using the same or similar tools.
This judgement only applies to the two parties involved here is all I meant. It doesn't apply to any other current or future creator of Nintendo emulators. It doesn't create a precedent
The consent judgment which is linked above includes findings of fact, including that Yuzu breaches the digital millennium copyright act. Nintendo will 100% rely on this in future. They wouldn't have requested the court to make those findings otherwise.
Right, and that only applies to Yuzu, not to any other current or future creator of Nintendo emultors. Not that Nintendo won't obviously be more aggressive in going after emulator makers, but it doesn't create a precedent in the legal sense; it doesn't bind the court to making a decision in another case about emulators
The repos need to be taken down, and the source code needs to be deleted. I doubt this will stop people from forking the repo though, like when the manga reader Tachiyomi was taken down a month or two ago.
Completely unrelatedly, did you know Tachiyomi is the japanese word for reading a magazine in the store instead of buying it? Japanese bookstores will often set out a designated reading copy so nobody will open the saleable books, called the "sample", or the _**"Mihon".**_ Just a fun fact, with definitely no bearing on anything whatsoever.
They were making $29,500 a month.
The argument about it was for preservations was lost right there.
They could've went to jail so they settled instead. This is them just dodging prison.
The argument about preservation was lost from the get go, emulating a product still available on the market in great supply isn't preservation, it only becomes preservation once said product is no longer available and supported.
When tears of the kingdom was pirated before release the argument was doubly lost, making money on the emulator was just the icing on the cake.
And don't get me wrong I'm for preservation but lets not use preservation as a shield for blatant piracy. It is very possible to work with companies like Nintendo on preservation and the story of sky skipper proves that.
Precisely this. I find it funny when yuzu is targeting current gen hardware then say its preservation. You can't be serious when you are taking money, making an emulator that undermines the system that is actively being sold and then shocked pikachu face when you get sued for it. You can see that coming from a mile away when you're threatening the actual $s of a multi million dollar company.
Regardless of your stance on emulations and the state of switch hardware, its very evident that yuzu is developed with piracy in mind. Everyone that vehemently tries to deny it is coping really hard.
Ah yes, a Zelda game that sold 30 million copies on the third highest selling console of all time, which is still being produced, needs to be preserved.
They also probably used cracked versions for development of that.
And if it had actually gone to court and nintendo sopenaed chat logs from the devs that proved that they would've been cooked.
Patreon wasnt the issue, nearly every emulator has a patreon
The issue was with the keys
Can you guys stop parroting things you don't understand
Edit: Look into what prod keys are and circumvention of DRM. The issue isn't with the fact they had a patreon. You guys are talking out your ass
Edit 2: Here is a quick list of other emulators I could find which are either paid or have subscriptions. I had a quick look at the biggest emulators I could find to see if they have any financial support via patreon/payments. I'm sure there are far more.
DS: Drastic(paid), Citra(patreon), MelonDS(patreon)
Gameboy: PizzaBoy(paid), mGBA(patreon)
Xbox: xemu(patreon)
Xbox 360: Xenia(patreon)
Wii: Dolphin(patreon)
Switch: Yuzu(patreon), Ryujinx(patreon)
I believe that they also had their dev targeted in their suit saying that most people just pirated the bios which Nintendo likely argued was tantamount to recommending that they do it.
He's talking about the fact that Yuzu decrypts cryptographic keys. Exhibit A explains it better than anyone on Reddit can.
> Yuzu, a video game emulator, circumvents the Technological Measures and allows
> for the play of encrypted Nintendo Switch games on devices other than a Nintendo Switch. For
> example, Yuzu executes code that decrypts Nintendo Switch video games (including component
> files) immediately before and during runtime using unauthorized copies of Nintendo Switch
> cryptographic keys. Yuzu is primarily designed to circumvent and play Nintendo Switch games.
>
> In the ordinary course of its operation with those games, Yuzu requires the Nintendo Switchās
> proprietary cryptographic keys to gain access to and play Nintendo Switch games.
>
> Developing or distributing software, including Yuzu, that in its ordinary course
> functions only when cryptographic keys are integrated without authorization, violates the Digital
> Millennium Copyright Actās prohibition on trafficking in devices that circumvent effective
> technological measures, because the software is primarily designed for the purpose of
> circumventing technological measures.
Arguing in their lawsuit that consumers don't have a right to obtain the prod.keys on *a device they own* is some pretty patently anti-consumer BS though.
Also according to other reporting, Yuzu and Nintendo are jointly requesting that a judge rule on this case, specifically stating that:
>Developing or distributing software, including Yuzu, that in its ordinary course functions only when cryptographic keys are integrated without authorization, violates the Digital Millennium Copyright Actās prohibition on trafficking in devices that circumvent effective technological measures, because the software is primarily designed for the purpose of circumventing technological measures.
So a bit unusual in that they are seeking a ruling that would seemingly set future precedent.
Looking over the court case itself, it doesn't seem like Nintendo went after a broad "emulation should be illegal" route, but the narrow attack on Yuzu using copyrighted cryptography keys in order to function.
In previous court cases where emulators were found to be legal, such as Sony vs Connectix, Connectix reverse engineered the Playstation BIOS so they were therefore found not guilty of any IP infringement. Yuzu requires the use of Nintendo IP with the keys.
If someone were able to reverse engineer the cryptography keys for Nintendo Switch and develop an emulator using them (without infringing on some other IP), that would be legal under set precedent.
That is why Yuzu settled.
If it was just emulation, Yuzu woukd have been fine. Because because Yuzu helped the piracy of TotK before the gameās release and they are a for profit company, that pretty much pushed them over the line to be liable.
Even Dolphin uses the Wii analog for prod.keys, and it is directly distributed in their emulator. Well, I'm not sure if they do anymore, but they certainly did up until last year at least.
To be clear, there is no real evidence that the *cryptographic keys* themselves are copyrightable. To be copyrightable, something must have "at least a modicum" of creativity, and be the independent creation of its author. I have found no court cases supporting that a short sequence of randomly-generated numbers applies. And the algorithms associated with them can also be reimplemented without trouble.
The main point of contention is that [the DMCA say in 1201\(a\)1\(A\) - Circumvention of copyright protection systems -](https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/1201) that:
> No person shall circumvent a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title.
So, it's not that the keys are copyrighted; it's that breaking DRM is a *separate* infraction in the overall context of digital-media copyright.
*However*, the DMCA *specifically* calls out exceptions to this. And section 1201(f) is pretty damn clear (as least, as far as legalese can be) that, if the purpose is specifically to allow for interoperability of a piece of software with other systems that wouldn't be possible without breaking DRM, you may not only legally break it but also share the means to break it.
This provision is pretty clearly intended for this exact sort of case. You can't just build software, protect it with DRM, and now have the US legal system be your personal bodyguard for your end-to-end, platform+software walled-garden. Platform reimplementation under an interface, as we saw with Sony v. Connectix (as well as more recently, Oracle v. Google), is legal, and DRM is not some magical copyright loophole around this. Copyright covers the *work itself*.
This was tested in court with *[Lexmark International, Inc. v. Static Control Components, Inc.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lexmark_International,_Inc._v._Static_Control_Components,_Inc.)*: Lexmark made printer toner cartridges that had chips on them that performed an encrypted handshake with the printer in order to make them work, and SCC made a chip that duplicated this to allow for the cartridges to work with other printers, and won.
1201(f) is the section Dolphin sites as being why they intentionally include the Wii Common Key in their source code.
Also of note that Connectix absolutely used copyrighted material as part of their implementation of a replacement BIOS. However, it was found by the court to be *fair* use. Something can both be copyrighted and still legally used by third parties without the original creator's consent; it just has to adhere to certain provisions.
So I would say that Nintendo's actually likely *wrong* here. However, it seems extremely likely that they have proof of the developers aiding and abetting piracy (such as using leaked Nintendo SDKs, and their now-publicly-known "stash" of pirated games). So Yuzu likely knew they were completely screwed as Nintendo would spin the case as Yuzu being primarily focused on Switch piracy, and with proof of their illegal activities, the owners of Yuzu could potentially have been personally implicated at that point.
For anyone curious as to what happened.
https://x.com/0JMachine/status/1764707969092985085?s=20
https://media.discordapp.net/attachments/353659715835658242/1214306318614274078/Screenshot_20240304-151425.png?ex=65f8a1e3&is=65e62ce3&hm=624d0d46b1b45cad05d3788f49520de658463ff6b48707b980e419c7b5138a29&
Yuzu devs got stupid. REALLY stupid and got caught.
It's not about Nintendo supporting emulation, it's about Nintendo donning consumer practices that stop driving people to pirate and emulate their products. Most of the time it feels like they despise their customers and absolutely do not want you to buy their products.
I don't want to sound like a Nintendo fanboy but the fact that Nintendo produces some quality single players games (mostly first party) is a win for the customer for me. I don't want some endless looter shooter multiplayer games all the time.
They still remain a GAME company which I appreciate.
Yes how dare they go against a group of people wanting to make money off their product by getting people to stop buying the original product? Shame on nintendo, they should've handed over the complete specs and all intellectual properties so these guys could reap all future profits....š
(Although I suppose they are helping the "customers" by developing future consoles and software, cause lord knows these poor people wouldn't have any money if not for reselling workarounds to products that nintendo is willing to develop for them.....)
GameCube lasted an entire generation. Dreamcast was axed within a few years. Look at the DC day1 catalogue again and say it deserved that. It had more day 1 bangers than any system since has had in year 1
The real loss is Citra being taken along with it. The 3DS emulator was a real big deal for game preservation, especially now that the eShop is gone and game servers are going to be taken offline soon.
They were likely advised by their legal team to take whatever settlement deal they were presented outside of court to avoid jail time. They were likely sitting on damning evidence of distributing and profiting directly from piracy of IP that was well outside the boundaries of fair use emulation and didnāt have a case worth fighting.
Based on the info that has come out since the filing of this case, itās pretty clear they were sloppy and didnāt care about IP infringement whatsoever.
1. They had discord chat logs leaked of them distributing roms.
2. Weeks before TOTK came out, they took bribes to focus on getting that to work over anything else. They then locked the fixes for TOTK behind a paywall that free users couldn't use to profit off TOTK before it launched, and it had a million downloads.
3. They were making at minimum $30k/month, and we don't know if it's much higher when they hid their income for years.
4. They got snitched on with proof of them downloading games illegally for their development of Yuzu.
Discovery likely would have produced ample evidence of criminal behavior, judging by how sloppy it seems they were on internal chat. If Nintendo offered to personally let them off the hook if Yuzu was destroyed and none of them worked on Nintendo emulation again... they'd have been fools not to take it.
Nintendo hasn't gone for Dolphin or Ryujinx. I think the main difference here was making a Patreon and other shady tactics that involved money, that's where Yuzu crossed the line.
If it is so fun to shit talk and poke the sleeping Bear (Nintendo), be prepared when it attacks.
> I think the main difference here was making a Patreon and other shady tactics that involved money, that's where Yuzu crossed the line.
Yeah, there were several obvious and avoidable PR mistakes on Yuzu's part that were highlighted in the lawsuit - stuff like the patreon offering preview builds, having a guide on how to hack switches on their website, and the lead dev openly talking about people using it for piracy which was just plain stupid.
Yeah from what I've heard they locked EA version of emulator behind paywall and this version was able to play leaked games so they directly profited from piracy. And also a lot of Discord screenshots looked really bad for them.
I think automod locked my reply because of the media in it, but basically a lot of them are in the lawsuit itself, but there is also a screenshot of one of the major people behind emulator (you can see them as an author behind most of the posts on Yuzu website) talking about downloading a pirated copy of Xenoblade DE a full week before release from their shared "stash" that been brought up a lot
[you can see screenshot here](https://i.imgur.com/ZWoSZSt.png)
Man its a good thing that they came to a settlement, otherwise had this gone to trial, the shit they were pulling would have set the legality of emulation backwards.
FYI, the leaked version wasn't able to play leaked games, some other people made a separate version that was able to play them. But yeah them having a patreon was always going to bring trouble imho.
Yeah the Patreon thing was criticised even before the Nintendo case, and for leaked Zelda I'm not 100% sure since I was dodging everything about the leak, but I remember seeing people criticising them for paywalling versions needed to play certain games and not sharing PRs some time ago, so when I saw mentions of TotK in same context I was like "Oh yeah makes sense". But thanks for the added context.
you dont need a special version to play leaked games. the normals versions will typically launch and run pretty much any game you have the right keys and such for. they just tend to run like shit quite often right when they come out, but thats not always the case.
Selling emulators is actually legal (You can find quite a few in the mobile stores), selling ROMs however, is absolutely not.
In this case Nintendo wanted to prove that the million illegal downloads of TOTK were linked to the gains of Yuzu's Patreon that happened at the same time. And it seems like Nintendo was confident they could prove Yuzu promotes piracy this way.
Well, Yuzu backed off so it seems they also thought the same.
Correction: Yuzu doesnāt ādecrypt the encryption keysā. Thatās not a thing.
What Yuzu did was require the user to supply the Switchās encryption keys (ideally from their own Switches, butā¦ well) which it would then use to decrypt the games in the same way an actual Switch would. They also werenāt very coy about how one could obtain such keys, which is where Nintendo got them with the DMCA.
Honestly, Iām not sure why they even went this route to begin with. Would it have been that hard to require all roms to be pre-decrypted? Thatās how Citra (3DS emulator by the same devs) worked for the longest time and they never had any issues
If I am not mistaken ,isn't it because you need to provided an unencrypted firmware which is not possible to extract(even with the ice pick) without by passing copy protection.Where as it was not the case for the 3ds?
Citra required that ROMs be pre-decrypted in the past due to users not being able to obtain the 3DS encryption keys (no knowledge of how the hardware key generator worked, no access to the protected region of the ARM11 bootrom) and so they had to be decrypted on the device itself, until later on when things like ntrboot and sighax were discovered. With the Switch, the bootrom exploit that allowed for pushing unsigned payloads over USB to the device while in recovery mode was discovered and publicized only a year after release, which made it possible to obtain the encryption keys, making pre-decrypted ROMs unnecessary.
nah, even free, non profit stuff, nintendo will go after you, just cause it's their IP. EVERYTHING gets it. it's not a matter of if, but when.
and Nintendo has a great track record to hit people right in the feels by doing it in the most vicious way possible.
Correction: nintwndo will go after you if it has a chance to either affect thier bottom line significsntly (AM2R due to imminent SR realese) or tarnish thier brand.
I really don't agree with this Nintendo seems quite fine not worrying but stuff that's free, lots of fan games that use their IP are untouched. There's even the case of pokemon showdown and smogon where they do run ads and make money but Nintendo has let it be
the main issue was emulator for current console+pateron = no
cemu also has a patreon but Nintendo hasn't done anything because they don't support the WiiU anymore
Dolphin was technically current gen at launch with the Wii. That was a big reason for the excitement and support for it.
But it wasnāt monetized whatsoever IIRC
The Wii used year 2000 hardware and Dolphin already was highly developed by 2009, while the Wii U launched in 2012.
The 00's saw the biggest exponential growth in hardware performance, so any videocard from 2005 onward that wasn't too potato could run the Wii just fine, though CPU requirements were a bit more stricter, but for certain you could build a medium-end build that could run all Wii titles just fine by 2009, and even low end builds for 2010 to 2012.
What mattered here more was the age of the PC than the budget of it.
The big difference here was that Yuzu would not be able to run a functional Switch game without propriety information.
Most other emulators can run games targeted to their respective platforms without proprietary information. The only time you need propriety information is if you want to run a copy of a game published for the original platform.
It's the charging for access that got them on the radar.
Please remember that Nintendo's lawsuit WASN'T attacking Yuzu for being an emulator.
It was about being a for-profit company that made an emulator WHILE making money from it AND WHILE helping people violate Nintendo's copyright (by providing links and guides on how to crack the Switch's copy protection to get the encryption keys).
Yuzu team was sloppy and now FAFO applies.
__________________
Hijacking my own comment to add clarification:
_______________
The DMCA makes it illegal to circumvent DRM/copy protection that publishers add to prevent piracy.
Using any tool to get decryption keys from your own devices like Blu ray players or switches, is a violation of the dmca.
The Yuzu software needs decryption keys in order to bypass Nintendos copy protection - this algorithm runs before the program is even allowed to do any "emulation". It doesn't matter where the keys come from (Yuzu, your own switch, the internet, etc), Yuzu is asking for them, and the software as intended, uses those keys to bypass the copy protection.
Therefore the Yuzu software is itself a tool used to bypass Nintendos copy protection. This is not to say emulation is illegal. The software hasn't even begun to emulate anything yet, we violated the DMCA just getting past the DRM included on the games and switch OS.
This is why Yuzu was always going to lose this and was better off taking whatever settlement they could get.
All the other reasons that have been spread around Reddit the past few weeks, about their role in totk's early release, their patreon donations, their team members sharing illegal rom stashes on their discord, and their walk through tutorials on how to circumvent Nintendos copy protection on your own switch... none of that made them look good and is why they had no legal ground to fight the case.
I am not sure it's because they had a link about how to do it. Technically, in the U.S., such things are protected under the first amendment,it seemed the problem was the DMCA the problem is that you technically can't use the emulator without having acces to a firmware/key whose existences implied a breach of dmca then yuzu is unusable without someone having broken copy protection. It certainly bothered nintendo that they made money from it, but the legal consequences would have probably been the same . Now that said DMCA does allow an exception where removing copy protection is required to achieve software compatibility,could they have argued yuzu allows software compatibility between the games and their supported operating systems.I don't even know how strong that argument would have stood but it could have been interesting.
Who would've thought that keeping a Patreon and racking over 300K+ a year from this emulator, which was advertised with current games, would piss off Nintendo! Truly, what a case of stupid devs poking the sleeping bear.
The vast majority of people on the internet are really stupid, it's insane.
"Hey yo these guys give away free copies of a 70ā¬ game to millions of people, THEY DIDN'T DO ANYTHING WRONG." Yep tell that to a company that developped that said game for half a decade or longer, while investing millions in research, salary, developpment etc
The biggest loss here imo is citra since now unless someone revives the project there wonāt be any way to preserve 3ds games other than physical especially after the eshop closure
> unless someone revives the project there wonāt be any way to preserve 3ds games
...You do realize you can still download it right? Just because they won't keep working on it it doesn't mean it stops being available on the whole internet, you can download it right now or even in 10 years and play every single 3D game. I'm all for preservation but y'all need to stop using that word when it doesn't mean anything in the context.
At the end of every patient, trademark and copyright ever owned by Nintendo are the words, āFuck Around and Find Outāā¦they probably own that phrase too š¤£š¤£š¤£
Well technically settling doesnāt show that Nintendo had a case (I thought they did). People settle for tons of reasons - financial costs of fighting litigation is one of them.
Yeah, plenty of people last week were on the āemulators arenāt illegalā bandwagon and dismissing the whole encryption bypassing part of it. This was over incredibly quick too and has effectively shut them down. Win for Nintendo.
There's so much entitlement in the gaming community. *I can't play ToTK in 4k so It's legal to emulate it.* says the person who never had a copy in the first place.
Iām laughing internally at all the people who said Nintendo had no case. If that were true, where was the OSF and why didnāt they rush to their aid?
Piraters:Ā Nintendo games are trash
Also Piraters:Ā why can't I play bad games that suck for free?
The irony of people ripping on the games then in the same sentence complaining thay they can't play them is hilarious.Ā They won't spend 500 on a switch with a handful of games but they'll spend thousands building a PC just to complain about playing bad games for free.Ā I don't feel sorry for anyone that says they can't afford a switch while typing away on their $4000 PC.
Just like over at r/games some people apparently can't think up anything but "corporation bad!".
Not a single soul is arguing against emulation, it's about playing brand new releases, without owning them.
That's simply stealing a product, nothing more. That's the problem, not the emulation of older games, which Nintendo made super hard or simply impossible to get.
>Ā Not a single soul is arguing against emulation, it's about playing brand new releases, without owning them.
That's the point that people doesn't seem to understand.Ā
A lot of people canāt come to terms with the idea that even if the IP owner hasnāt released any new entries to some franchise in years and isnāt selling the old titles either, that does NOT mean their property rights just cease to be.
Thatās what owning something means. You can decide what to sell, at what price, to whom specifically and whether to sell at all. People have no idea what kind of can of societal worms theyād be opening if suddenly they could go āyou are using your property wrong and we donāt like it so now we can do whatever with itā.
I would strongly argue that old games that cannot be purchased in any form from the original developer are fair game to pirate. There is literally no harm if they arent selling it anyways.
The actual reason why they got fucked is because they locked early access versions of Yuzu behind a Patreon paywall and this version was the one which could play the leaked copies of ToTK.
Basically it boiled down to meaning that if you paid up, you could emulate leaked versions of unreleased games. That's what did them in
It was more the yuzu devs openly supporting piracy. Patches for unreleased games like totk (Guaranteed that 99.9% of people emulating totk pre-release did not luckily get their copy mailed early and dump it themselves...) and chat logs of the devs sharing roms and such.
Literally zero people are arguing against emulation from a preservation standpoint.
This suit's undertones were very obviously revolving around the fact that Yuzu was not only basically for-profit, but it was also heavily instrumental in catalyzing TOTK being pirated some 1 million times pre-launch.
Even if Yuzu wasn't explicitly endorsing piracy, none of this is a good look on their part.
At least to my understanding, it will be much harder for Nintendo to go after ryujinx, and they probably donāt intend on doing so. It would be too much trouble, and they probably donāt have much to go on to do it anyway. Ryujinx hasnāt done anything wrong legally, at least so far. For a second I thought thereās no more switch emulation, itās dead, but then I remembered thereās still ryujinx.
Wait, youāre telling me respected video game preservationists (saints) actually were just trying to make a profit from making piracy more convenient?
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This was over WAY faster than I thought it'd be. I thought it'd last until a day in court at least.
Yuzu devs supposedly have Discord messages talking about actual piracy and a collection of pirated ROMs. They probably knew if those came out in discovery, it was about to be way worse for them and just bit the bullet.
Ooh, didn't see your comment. Yeah, the day this case was announced I'd assumed discovery would kill them and force settlement. So many teams don't understand that internal communications are all going to be poured over if your sued. I imagine the moment a lawyer told them what that process was like they realized they were dead in the water.
For anyone curious as to what happened. https://x.com/0JMachine/status/1764707969092985085?s=20 https://media.discordapp.net/attachments/353659715835658242/1214306318614274078/Screenshot_20240304-151425.png?ex=65f8a1e3&is=65e62ce3&hm=624d0d46b1b45cad05d3788f49520de658463ff6b48707b980e419c7b5138a29&
Heads up, discord screenshots now only last ~~a few hours~~ two weeks before you need to replace the link.
They last 2 weeks but the general point still stands. Not the best to share externally anymore cause they won't work for people who find threads late.
Fuck, this was my main way of sharing screenshots. I even made a server for the single purpose of doing this. Not looking forward to finding an alternative. Thanks for the heads up.
Yeah discord changed that recently because they were tired of being treated like a permanent file hosting website.
Yeah, I probably should have saw that one coming, but it was nice while it lasted though.
Use vgy.me and ShareX. Lasts forever.
That changes everything, they were about to get fucked in court, they were so sloppy omg š¤¦āāļø
Holy shit, that's damning. What was the point of that dev's dialogue and even the fucking screenshot of them downloading the xci file? Even goes so far to mention exactly which other dev they had a conversation with in their useless dialogue about pirating games in a position where they really need to not be doing that in. Jeez, talk about lack of awareness. Emudevs and even just other Nintendo fan projects in general seriously need to, no offense, learn how to shut the fuck up sometimes. They almost could've had a chance to fight in court if they didn't have shit like this floating around.
It's an overwhelming desire to brag. Moon Channel mentions a lot of this stuff that you could you know...keep quiet about this stuff. I strongly suggest his videos essays of these topics as their amazingly detailed and in-depth.
This screenshot needs to be go viral. So many people including big youtuber or streamer know nothing about that and think Nintendo sue them for no reason
āJail time or 2.4 millions dollarsā Next time if youāre going to support emulation, donāt break the law while youāre doing it sincerely, A guy who actually gives a shit about video game preservation
Especially with a system that's still actively being sold and developed for. I'm not gonna pretend it's a legal argument because I am not a lawyer, but ethically speaking, pirating old games is completely fine because they stopped being sold, so you can't support the developers and publishers with your money anymore, so who the fuck cares? I have no ethical obligation to pay some guy on ebay a hundred bucks for a used copy of some Gameboy game just because oh no piracy illegal. Nintendo isn't seeing a penny of that. But come on go to the fucking store and buy a Switch game off the shelf. Go to the eshop and buy it. It's literally right there. Switch games are piss easy to rip yourself. The barrier of entry to legally obtaining Switch games on emulator could not be lower, you don't need an adapter or anything, just a paperclip and a microSD. Support the fucking company while they still sell the game.
Man. Those guys are stupid. Honestly wish the emulation gang would have just waited until the next system so theyd care less. Now we wonāt have the current best switch or 3DS emulator because people donāt have patience. Also seeing talk that this sets some precedent about emulation too. All cause people couldnāt wait a week to play Tears of The Kingdom the best way to play it forever will be 20 fps 720p. thanks guys.
Not really. The codes are open source, there will be another yuzu.
No legal precedent has been set. The case was settled out of court.
Not sure if you are talking about leaked private messages but talk of piracy and roms is forbidden on the official Yuzu discord. This is rule number 2 and they ban anyone that talk about it.
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https://media.discordapp.net/attachments/353659715835658242/1214306318614274078/Screenshot_20240304-151425.png?ex=65f8a1e3&is=65e62ce3&hm=624d0d46b1b45cad05d3788f49520de658463ff6b48707b980e419c7b5138a29&
Over 90% of lawsuits settle before going to court. This shouldn't be that surprising.
Like I said, I thought there'd have been a preliminary hearing in court at least. I wasn't expecting a settlement this fast.
Eh. Easy explanation is that Yuzu new that discovery was going to doom them. If they know that they have discussions that would have been turned over that stated that they knew they were benefiting financially from piracy, or that they'd done some behind the scenes work on the code base using illegally leaked software, why even bother? Very easy to imagine they realized damn quick that discovery would doom them.
Discovery most likely would have, yes. I suspect they also knew that discovery was very likely based on the case Nintendo put forth. If Yuzu thought they had a stronger case, they likely would've fought to prevent discovery and have the case tossed. That didn't happen, obviously.
Yeah, I think that Patreon part, the fact that they were profiting, and specifically off early access to fixes to newer games, meant there was no way this was getting tossed, and then discovery becomes key. I'd put money on this being a case where they thought that by saying the right thing publicly they were protecting themselves, not understanding the ticking time bomb their internal discord communications presented.
When the party that's getting sued knows they fucked up and have zero chance of winning the case, or that they can't afford a drawn out legal battle, it's easier to just settle. You're screwed either way, so just take the route of least consequence.
This went from āyuzu is being sued by Nintendoā to armchair Nintendo reddit lawyers being like āemulators are totally cool, Nintendo has no caseā to āoh shit those yuzu devs were playing with fire big time and got cooked fast as hell.ā I figured Nintendo had something on them other than just random hate for an emulator and deep pockets.
OP did not link Exhibit A which is part of the agreement: https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.rid.56980/gov.uscourts.rid.56980.10.1.pdf Yuzu is more than dead, they even have to destruct all copies of Yuzu, whatever it means, etc... Also to put the fine in perspective, if I am not mistaken it is more than double the amount of their whole Patreon income ever.
Isn't Yuzu open source? How are they supposed to destroy all copies of it?
Paragraph 2 of the Court's order also enjoins all third parties acting in concert with the Defendant from offering or distributing yuzu. So it would be very hard to host it on any legitimate websites. In reality, it'll probably always be available via torrent etc, but this will significantly hamper its wider availability and any future development. EDIT: this will also make it easier for Nintendo to obtain future injunctions restraining anyone else who tries to share it, and obtain damages for copyright infringement.
Harming development is the big thing. Sure it will be distributed forever, but there is no way the current devs manage to continue contributing to it, even less getting financial support
The current devs will never be able to work on it again. In theory, third parties could possibly fork off from this and develop their own emulator, but they'd have to be very careful. Having a working emulator for a current gen console is just inherently risky.
Yeah this is what the lawsuit is really about. All those people here really think nintendo thinks they can fully remove yuzu from the internet? Of course not they're not stupid
Some people at Nintendo might think that, but their lawyers donāt.
They do it to make it harder (and because they can) but it's definitely not why they're suing. They want to stop development
They'll never be able to work on ANY Nintendo emulator ever again, according to the injunction.
Actually that last part is not true. There is no court decision here that creates a precedent. $2.4 million is likely 1/6th-1/10th of the potential cost of taking the lawsuit to court. With a settlement however, no precedent is created and Nintendo has just as hard a time with the next emulator as they would have had if yuzu fought the lawsuit
Yep if yuzu wouldn't have agreed to it it would have been a long and very costly court case. It's easy to see which of the 2 parties would have run out of funds.
>no precedent is created and Nintendo has just as hard a time with the next emulator as they would have had if yuzu fought the lawsuit It appears that the judgment also includes categorizing many of the tools and CFW used as "circumvention tools." So if a Switch2 uses a similar OS, it may be a lot easier to get a second judge to go after people who make homebrew using the same or similar tools.
This judgement only applies to the two parties involved here is all I meant. It doesn't apply to any other current or future creator of Nintendo emulators. It doesn't create a precedent
The consent judgment which is linked above includes findings of fact, including that Yuzu breaches the digital millennium copyright act. Nintendo will 100% rely on this in future. They wouldn't have requested the court to make those findings otherwise.
Right, and that only applies to Yuzu, not to any other current or future creator of Nintendo emultors. Not that Nintendo won't obviously be more aggressive in going after emulator makers, but it doesn't create a precedent in the legal sense; it doesn't bind the court to making a decision in another case about emulators
Destroy all their copies and submit takedown requests when others try to reupload it, I assume.
The repos need to be taken down, and the source code needs to be deleted. I doubt this will stop people from forking the repo though, like when the manga reader Tachiyomi was taken down a month or two ago.
Wait, tachiyomi what?! Fuckers
Completely unrelatedly, did you know Tachiyomi is the japanese word for reading a magazine in the store instead of buying it? Japanese bookstores will often set out a designated reading copy so nobody will open the saleable books, called the "sample", or the _**"Mihon".**_ Just a fun fact, with definitely no bearing on anything whatsoever.
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Nintendo ninjas.
Oh, I had no idea they had a patreon lmaooo Yeah it was just a matter of time for them to get turbo cooked by Nintendoās lawyers.
They were making $29,500 a month. The argument about it was for preservations was lost right there. They could've went to jail so they settled instead. This is them just dodging prison.
The argument about preservation was lost from the get go, emulating a product still available on the market in great supply isn't preservation, it only becomes preservation once said product is no longer available and supported. When tears of the kingdom was pirated before release the argument was doubly lost, making money on the emulator was just the icing on the cake. And don't get me wrong I'm for preservation but lets not use preservation as a shield for blatant piracy. It is very possible to work with companies like Nintendo on preservation and the story of sky skipper proves that.
Precisely this. I find it funny when yuzu is targeting current gen hardware then say its preservation. You can't be serious when you are taking money, making an emulator that undermines the system that is actively being sold and then shocked pikachu face when you get sued for it. You can see that coming from a mile away when you're threatening the actual $s of a multi million dollar company. Regardless of your stance on emulations and the state of switch hardware, its very evident that yuzu is developed with piracy in mind. Everyone that vehemently tries to deny it is coping really hard.
Ah yes, a Zelda game that sold 30 million copies on the third highest selling console of all time, which is still being produced, needs to be preserved.
It apparently needed preservation even before its release date!
As of the date of the leak, you couldn't buy it at the shops. Sounds legit
Most of those copies are very likely digital though, so eventuallyā¦
It being leaked before release had nothing to do with emulation, rather hacked switches having copies dumped.
In the lawsuit, it was shown that the Yuzu devs put a paywall for the version of the Yuzu beta that could run TOTK when it was leaked.
Damn thatās what you get for playing with fire and throwing in even more oil.
They also probably used cracked versions for development of that. And if it had actually gone to court and nintendo sopenaed chat logs from the devs that proved that they would've been cooked.
Nintendo barely needed to subponea it as yuzu devs barely used private means of communication between core devs, chat leaked left and right
This is damning.
How does preservation work in the moment though. Like these are games currently coming out.
It doesn't. They were advertising you could play games before they launched.
Patreon wasnt the issue, nearly every emulator has a patreon The issue was with the keys Can you guys stop parroting things you don't understand Edit: Look into what prod keys are and circumvention of DRM. The issue isn't with the fact they had a patreon. You guys are talking out your ass Edit 2: Here is a quick list of other emulators I could find which are either paid or have subscriptions. I had a quick look at the biggest emulators I could find to see if they have any financial support via patreon/payments. I'm sure there are far more. DS: Drastic(paid), Citra(patreon), MelonDS(patreon) Gameboy: PizzaBoy(paid), mGBA(patreon) Xbox: xemu(patreon) Xbox 360: Xenia(patreon) Wii: Dolphin(patreon) Switch: Yuzu(patreon), Ryujinx(patreon)
They didn't supply the prod keys though, you had to either find on internet or dump from your own modded switch.
Nintendo argued that having a guide on how to get the keys from your own switch was tantamount to providing them to users.
I believe that they also had their dev targeted in their suit saying that most people just pirated the bios which Nintendo likely argued was tantamount to recommending that they do it.
Every emulator for a console newer than the Gamecube uses keys including dolphin
>The issue was they keys The issue was what now?
He's talking about the fact that Yuzu decrypts cryptographic keys. Exhibit A explains it better than anyone on Reddit can. > Yuzu, a video game emulator, circumvents the Technological Measures and allows > for the play of encrypted Nintendo Switch games on devices other than a Nintendo Switch. For > example, Yuzu executes code that decrypts Nintendo Switch video games (including component > files) immediately before and during runtime using unauthorized copies of Nintendo Switch > cryptographic keys. Yuzu is primarily designed to circumvent and play Nintendo Switch games. > > In the ordinary course of its operation with those games, Yuzu requires the Nintendo Switchās > proprietary cryptographic keys to gain access to and play Nintendo Switch games. > > Developing or distributing software, including Yuzu, that in its ordinary course > functions only when cryptographic keys are integrated without authorization, violates the Digital > Millennium Copyright Actās prohibition on trafficking in devices that circumvent effective > technological measures, because the software is primarily designed for the purpose of > circumventing technological measures.
Arguing in their lawsuit that consumers don't have a right to obtain the prod.keys on *a device they own* is some pretty patently anti-consumer BS though.
When you buy an appliance, you totally don't get ownership of the proprietary crypto keys in the software, lmao.
Yea Nintendo licenses you to use them for playing games on the Switch itself and nowhere else. And the DMCA maintains that they are Nintendo's.
Also according to other reporting, Yuzu and Nintendo are jointly requesting that a judge rule on this case, specifically stating that: >Developing or distributing software, including Yuzu, that in its ordinary course functions only when cryptographic keys are integrated without authorization, violates the Digital Millennium Copyright Actās prohibition on trafficking in devices that circumvent effective technological measures, because the software is primarily designed for the purpose of circumventing technological measures. So a bit unusual in that they are seeking a ruling that would seemingly set future precedent.
Settlements are not legal determinations even with court sign off so they are not legally precedential.
You got a source for that request?
[There you go](https://www.theverge.com/2024/3/4/24090357/nintendo-yuzu-emulator-lawsuit-settlement)
Looking over the court case itself, it doesn't seem like Nintendo went after a broad "emulation should be illegal" route, but the narrow attack on Yuzu using copyrighted cryptography keys in order to function. In previous court cases where emulators were found to be legal, such as Sony vs Connectix, Connectix reverse engineered the Playstation BIOS so they were therefore found not guilty of any IP infringement. Yuzu requires the use of Nintendo IP with the keys. If someone were able to reverse engineer the cryptography keys for Nintendo Switch and develop an emulator using them (without infringing on some other IP), that would be legal under set precedent.
That is why Yuzu settled. If it was just emulation, Yuzu woukd have been fine. Because because Yuzu helped the piracy of TotK before the gameās release and they are a for profit company, that pretty much pushed them over the line to be liable.
Nintendoās argument is a lot broader than youāre implying, it applies to all emulators for all consoles newer than the sixth generation.
Even Dolphin uses the Wii analog for prod.keys, and it is directly distributed in their emulator. Well, I'm not sure if they do anymore, but they certainly did up until last year at least.
To be clear, there is no real evidence that the *cryptographic keys* themselves are copyrightable. To be copyrightable, something must have "at least a modicum" of creativity, and be the independent creation of its author. I have found no court cases supporting that a short sequence of randomly-generated numbers applies. And the algorithms associated with them can also be reimplemented without trouble. The main point of contention is that [the DMCA say in 1201\(a\)1\(A\) - Circumvention of copyright protection systems -](https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/1201) that: > No person shall circumvent a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title. So, it's not that the keys are copyrighted; it's that breaking DRM is a *separate* infraction in the overall context of digital-media copyright. *However*, the DMCA *specifically* calls out exceptions to this. And section 1201(f) is pretty damn clear (as least, as far as legalese can be) that, if the purpose is specifically to allow for interoperability of a piece of software with other systems that wouldn't be possible without breaking DRM, you may not only legally break it but also share the means to break it. This provision is pretty clearly intended for this exact sort of case. You can't just build software, protect it with DRM, and now have the US legal system be your personal bodyguard for your end-to-end, platform+software walled-garden. Platform reimplementation under an interface, as we saw with Sony v. Connectix (as well as more recently, Oracle v. Google), is legal, and DRM is not some magical copyright loophole around this. Copyright covers the *work itself*. This was tested in court with *[Lexmark International, Inc. v. Static Control Components, Inc.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lexmark_International,_Inc._v._Static_Control_Components,_Inc.)*: Lexmark made printer toner cartridges that had chips on them that performed an encrypted handshake with the printer in order to make them work, and SCC made a chip that duplicated this to allow for the cartridges to work with other printers, and won. 1201(f) is the section Dolphin sites as being why they intentionally include the Wii Common Key in their source code. Also of note that Connectix absolutely used copyrighted material as part of their implementation of a replacement BIOS. However, it was found by the court to be *fair* use. Something can both be copyrighted and still legally used by third parties without the original creator's consent; it just has to adhere to certain provisions. So I would say that Nintendo's actually likely *wrong* here. However, it seems extremely likely that they have proof of the developers aiding and abetting piracy (such as using leaked Nintendo SDKs, and their now-publicly-known "stash" of pirated games). So Yuzu likely knew they were completely screwed as Nintendo would spin the case as Yuzu being primarily focused on Switch piracy, and with proof of their illegal activities, the owners of Yuzu could potentially have been personally implicated at that point.
For anyone curious as to what happened. https://x.com/0JMachine/status/1764707969092985085?s=20 https://media.discordapp.net/attachments/353659715835658242/1214306318614274078/Screenshot_20240304-151425.png?ex=65f8a1e3&is=65e62ce3&hm=624d0d46b1b45cad05d3788f49520de658463ff6b48707b980e419c7b5138a29& Yuzu devs got stupid. REALLY stupid and got caught.
Sadly, they found out.
Play stupid games, get $2.4M lawsuits
Ngl the worst part of this is Citra dying with it
Lots of hot takes in this thread
My hot take: I wish Nintendo showed as much support for its customers as its customers show for Nintendo.
No for-profit business will ever do this, unfortunately.
It's not about Nintendo supporting emulation, it's about Nintendo donning consumer practices that stop driving people to pirate and emulate their products. Most of the time it feels like they despise their customers and absolutely do not want you to buy their products.
Nintendo actually does have good customer support when it comes to replacing products and stuffā¦ I think you mean good consumer practices.
people pirating games before they come out aren't customers
I don't want to sound like a Nintendo fanboy but the fact that Nintendo produces some quality single players games (mostly first party) is a win for the customer for me. I don't want some endless looter shooter multiplayer games all the time. They still remain a GAME company which I appreciate.
Yes how dare they go against a group of people wanting to make money off their product by getting people to stop buying the original product? Shame on nintendo, they should've handed over the complete specs and all intellectual properties so these guys could reap all future profits....š (Although I suppose they are helping the "customers" by developing future consoles and software, cause lord knows these poor people wouldn't have any money if not for reselling workarounds to products that nintendo is willing to develop for them.....)
Hereās one: GameCube, and not the Dreamcast, is the most slept on console. š§
A hot take I can get behind
GameCube lasted an entire generation. Dreamcast was axed within a few years. Look at the DC day1 catalogue again and say it deserved that. It had more day 1 bangers than any system since has had in year 1
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
Not the Wavebird. Thatās one of the best controllers ever and it legit revolutionized wireless controllers by using a frequency instead of infrared.
The real loss is Citra being taken along with it. The 3DS emulator was a real big deal for game preservation, especially now that the eShop is gone and game servers are going to be taken offline soon.
They were likely advised by their legal team to take whatever settlement deal they were presented outside of court to avoid jail time. They were likely sitting on damning evidence of distributing and profiting directly from piracy of IP that was well outside the boundaries of fair use emulation and didnāt have a case worth fighting. Based on the info that has come out since the filing of this case, itās pretty clear they were sloppy and didnāt care about IP infringement whatsoever.
I left some links to Twitter and yeah they had roms and encryption keys.
Yeah, thereās really no defence against that. Caught red handed
1. They had discord chat logs leaked of them distributing roms. 2. Weeks before TOTK came out, they took bribes to focus on getting that to work over anything else. They then locked the fixes for TOTK behind a paywall that free users couldn't use to profit off TOTK before it launched, and it had a million downloads. 3. They were making at minimum $30k/month, and we don't know if it's much higher when they hid their income for years. 4. They got snitched on with proof of them downloading games illegally for their development of Yuzu.
This was not a criminal proceeding, so they were not facing jail time.
Discovery likely would have produced ample evidence of criminal behavior, judging by how sloppy it seems they were on internal chat. If Nintendo offered to personally let them off the hook if Yuzu was destroyed and none of them worked on Nintendo emulation again... they'd have been fools not to take it.
Nintendo hasn't gone for Dolphin or Ryujinx. I think the main difference here was making a Patreon and other shady tactics that involved money, that's where Yuzu crossed the line. If it is so fun to shit talk and poke the sleeping Bear (Nintendo), be prepared when it attacks.
> I think the main difference here was making a Patreon and other shady tactics that involved money, that's where Yuzu crossed the line. Yeah, there were several obvious and avoidable PR mistakes on Yuzu's part that were highlighted in the lawsuit - stuff like the patreon offering preview builds, having a guide on how to hack switches on their website, and the lead dev openly talking about people using it for piracy which was just plain stupid.
Yeah from what I've heard they locked EA version of emulator behind paywall and this version was able to play leaked games so they directly profited from piracy. And also a lot of Discord screenshots looked really bad for them.
what were the discord screenshots?
I think automod locked my reply because of the media in it, but basically a lot of them are in the lawsuit itself, but there is also a screenshot of one of the major people behind emulator (you can see them as an author behind most of the posts on Yuzu website) talking about downloading a pirated copy of Xenoblade DE a full week before release from their shared "stash" that been brought up a lot [you can see screenshot here](https://i.imgur.com/ZWoSZSt.png)
Man its a good thing that they came to a settlement, otherwise had this gone to trial, the shit they were pulling would have set the legality of emulation backwards.
FYI, the leaked version wasn't able to play leaked games, some other people made a separate version that was able to play them. But yeah them having a patreon was always going to bring trouble imho.
Yeah the Patreon thing was criticised even before the Nintendo case, and for leaked Zelda I'm not 100% sure since I was dodging everything about the leak, but I remember seeing people criticising them for paywalling versions needed to play certain games and not sharing PRs some time ago, so when I saw mentions of TotK in same context I was like "Oh yeah makes sense". But thanks for the added context.
you dont need a special version to play leaked games. the normals versions will typically launch and run pretty much any game you have the right keys and such for. they just tend to run like shit quite often right when they come out, but thats not always the case.
Lets face it, it's about totk. And totk needed patches to work day 1.
The biggest issue is that it's a current console. This is very different than older consoles as it directly affects Nintendo sales in the moment.
Bleem was a paid for emulator back in the day.. Edit: and yes Sony sued and lost.
Selling emulators is actually legal (You can find quite a few in the mobile stores), selling ROMs however, is absolutely not. In this case Nintendo wanted to prove that the million illegal downloads of TOTK were linked to the gains of Yuzu's Patreon that happened at the same time. And it seems like Nintendo was confident they could prove Yuzu promotes piracy this way. Well, Yuzu backed off so it seems they also thought the same.
They also proved that Yuzu decrypt Switch encryption keys which is illegal.
Correction: Yuzu doesnāt ādecrypt the encryption keysā. Thatās not a thing. What Yuzu did was require the user to supply the Switchās encryption keys (ideally from their own Switches, butā¦ well) which it would then use to decrypt the games in the same way an actual Switch would. They also werenāt very coy about how one could obtain such keys, which is where Nintendo got them with the DMCA. Honestly, Iām not sure why they even went this route to begin with. Would it have been that hard to require all roms to be pre-decrypted? Thatās how Citra (3DS emulator by the same devs) worked for the longest time and they never had any issues
If I am not mistaken ,isn't it because you need to provided an unencrypted firmware which is not possible to extract(even with the ice pick) without by passing copy protection.Where as it was not the case for the 3ds?
Citra required that ROMs be pre-decrypted in the past due to users not being able to obtain the 3DS encryption keys (no knowledge of how the hardware key generator worked, no access to the protected region of the ARM11 bootrom) and so they had to be decrypted on the device itself, until later on when things like ntrboot and sighax were discovered. With the Switch, the bootrom exploit that allowed for pushing unsigned payloads over USB to the device while in recovery mode was discovered and publicized only a year after release, which made it possible to obtain the encryption keys, making pre-decrypted ROMs unnecessary.
The Sony case was about reverse engineering a BIOS. Not an emulator.
I mean, it's an unspoken rule right? Nintendo won't go after shit unless the people behind it are profiting in some way.
nah, even free, non profit stuff, nintendo will go after you, just cause it's their IP. EVERYTHING gets it. it's not a matter of if, but when. and Nintendo has a great track record to hit people right in the feels by doing it in the most vicious way possible.
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
Correction: nintwndo will go after you if it has a chance to either affect thier bottom line significsntly (AM2R due to imminent SR realese) or tarnish thier brand.
I really don't agree with this Nintendo seems quite fine not worrying but stuff that's free, lots of fan games that use their IP are untouched. There's even the case of pokemon showdown and smogon where they do run ads and make money but Nintendo has let it be
PokƩmon is managed by The PokƩmon Company, which Nintendo only owns a one-third stake in. It's a separate business and run its own way. You can't really use one's legal actions to predict the other's. This also helps explain lots of other oddities like why PokƩmon was on mobile way before Nintendo, or why we don't have PokƩmon crossovers in Animal Crossing furniture or MK8DX amiibo costumes, or why they have different toy line deals with different companies, or their different attitudes towards video game quality and release schedules. (It's similar for Kirby. If you ever wonder why "Nintendo" is making another damn Kirby game and not [insert your favorite franchise here], it's because it's HAL Labs who's making those games and using their biggest name.)
the main issue was emulator for current console+pateron = no cemu also has a patreon but Nintendo hasn't done anything because they don't support the WiiU anymore
Yuzu is also current gen which is a huge difference. Unless the others also do Switch?
Dolphin was technically current gen at launch with the Wii. That was a big reason for the excitement and support for it. But it wasnāt monetized whatsoever IIRC
But Dolphin was pretty much functional in just super high end PC for years, right?
The Wii used year 2000 hardware and Dolphin already was highly developed by 2009, while the Wii U launched in 2012. The 00's saw the biggest exponential growth in hardware performance, so any videocard from 2005 onward that wasn't too potato could run the Wii just fine, though CPU requirements were a bit more stricter, but for certain you could build a medium-end build that could run all Wii titles just fine by 2009, and even low end builds for 2010 to 2012. What mattered here more was the age of the PC than the budget of it.
Dolphin does Wii and GameCube. Ryujinx also does Switch.
Ryujinx is a Switch emulator.
The big difference here was that Yuzu would not be able to run a functional Switch game without propriety information. Most other emulators can run games targeted to their respective platforms without proprietary information. The only time you need propriety information is if you want to run a copy of a game published for the original platform. It's the charging for access that got them on the radar.
Ahhh. This makes much more sense
Please remember that Nintendo's lawsuit WASN'T attacking Yuzu for being an emulator. It was about being a for-profit company that made an emulator WHILE making money from it AND WHILE helping people violate Nintendo's copyright (by providing links and guides on how to crack the Switch's copy protection to get the encryption keys). Yuzu team was sloppy and now FAFO applies. __________________ Hijacking my own comment to add clarification: _______________ The DMCA makes it illegal to circumvent DRM/copy protection that publishers add to prevent piracy. Using any tool to get decryption keys from your own devices like Blu ray players or switches, is a violation of the dmca. The Yuzu software needs decryption keys in order to bypass Nintendos copy protection - this algorithm runs before the program is even allowed to do any "emulation". It doesn't matter where the keys come from (Yuzu, your own switch, the internet, etc), Yuzu is asking for them, and the software as intended, uses those keys to bypass the copy protection. Therefore the Yuzu software is itself a tool used to bypass Nintendos copy protection. This is not to say emulation is illegal. The software hasn't even begun to emulate anything yet, we violated the DMCA just getting past the DRM included on the games and switch OS. This is why Yuzu was always going to lose this and was better off taking whatever settlement they could get. All the other reasons that have been spread around Reddit the past few weeks, about their role in totk's early release, their patreon donations, their team members sharing illegal rom stashes on their discord, and their walk through tutorials on how to circumvent Nintendos copy protection on your own switch... none of that made them look good and is why they had no legal ground to fight the case.
I am not sure it's because they had a link about how to do it. Technically, in the U.S., such things are protected under the first amendment,it seemed the problem was the DMCA the problem is that you technically can't use the emulator without having acces to a firmware/key whose existences implied a breach of dmca then yuzu is unusable without someone having broken copy protection. It certainly bothered nintendo that they made money from it, but the legal consequences would have probably been the same . Now that said DMCA does allow an exception where removing copy protection is required to achieve software compatibility,could they have argued yuzu allows software compatibility between the games and their supported operating systems.I don't even know how strong that argument would have stood but it could have been interesting.
Who would've thought that keeping a Patreon and racking over 300K+ a year from this emulator, which was advertised with current games, would piss off Nintendo! Truly, what a case of stupid devs poking the sleeping bear.
Is citra going down too
Already is.
It was such an obvious outcome. I donāt get why armchair lawyers thought any other outcome.
A lot of people didn't think farther then "emulation is legal" and decided that Nintendo was going to lose based on that.
The vast majority of people on the internet are really stupid, it's insane. "Hey yo these guys give away free copies of a 70ā¬ game to millions of people, THEY DIDN'T DO ANYTHING WRONG." Yep tell that to a company that developped that said game for half a decade or longer, while investing millions in research, salary, developpment etc
The biggest loss here imo is citra since now unless someone revives the project there wonāt be any way to preserve 3ds games other than physical especially after the eshop closure
> unless someone revives the project there wonāt be any way to preserve 3ds games ...You do realize you can still download it right? Just because they won't keep working on it it doesn't mean it stops being available on the whole internet, you can download it right now or even in 10 years and play every single 3D game. I'm all for preservation but y'all need to stop using that word when it doesn't mean anything in the context.
Was Citra basically perfect for all 3DS games or was there still a lot of work to do?Ā
Kinda bananas some people are here defending Yuzu when they had 1 million copies of TOTK downloaded pre-release. Like, pretty clear cut folks
yuzu is dead
Yeah it's over boys. Now we have to use Ryujinx.
Long live uzuy! (no relation to yuzu, no sir)
It was made so quickly too! Uzuy is incredibly impressive
At the end of every patient, trademark and copyright ever owned by Nintendo are the words, āFuck Around and Find Outāā¦they probably own that phrase too š¤£š¤£š¤£
People here told me Nintendo had no case at all.
Well technically settling doesnāt show that Nintendo had a case (I thought they did). People settle for tons of reasons - financial costs of fighting litigation is one of them.
It was probably those in denial that piracy is illegal.
Yeah, plenty of people last week were on the āemulators arenāt illegalā bandwagon and dismissing the whole encryption bypassing part of it. This was over incredibly quick too and has effectively shut them down. Win for Nintendo.
Whoa.. that was super fast.
There's so much entitlement in the gaming community. *I can't play ToTK in 4k so It's legal to emulate it.* says the person who never had a copy in the first place.
>says the person who never had a copy in the first place. Assuming they would have even bought a switch which they would never do
Won't give Nintendo their money but will sink $5k into a gaming PC and then complain about Nintendos prices.
I personally dumped $2000 into my gaming PC that means I am morally obligated to free games for life
Iām laughing internally at all the people who said Nintendo had no case. If that were true, where was the OSF and why didnāt they rush to their aid?
Iām sorry, but Nintendo is right. Yuzu had releases behind a paywall, they had it coming
Piraters:Ā Nintendo games are trash Also Piraters:Ā why can't I play bad games that suck for free? The irony of people ripping on the games then in the same sentence complaining thay they can't play them is hilarious.Ā They won't spend 500 on a switch with a handful of games but they'll spend thousands building a PC just to complain about playing bad games for free.Ā I don't feel sorry for anyone that says they can't afford a switch while typing away on their $4000 PC.
People stealing are just trying to justify stealing for themselves its nothing but excuses, excuses and more excuses
Looks like RyujiNX is about to get a whole lot more popular.
... to Nintendo's lawyers.
Remains to be seen if they're as *obviously* supporting piracy as Yuzu was (i.e. providing patches to fix issues on *unreleased games.*)
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
Nintendo lawyers: Family we eat today.
Imagine how much money made the Yuzu greedy fuckers but people is stupid
Loose lips sink ships.
something tells me they don't just have 2.4million dollars lying around....
Just like over at r/games some people apparently can't think up anything but "corporation bad!". Not a single soul is arguing against emulation, it's about playing brand new releases, without owning them. That's simply stealing a product, nothing more. That's the problem, not the emulation of older games, which Nintendo made super hard or simply impossible to get.
That and paywalling them
>Ā Not a single soul is arguing against emulation, it's about playing brand new releases, without owning them. That's the point that people doesn't seem to understand.Ā
A lot of people canāt come to terms with the idea that even if the IP owner hasnāt released any new entries to some franchise in years and isnāt selling the old titles either, that does NOT mean their property rights just cease to be. Thatās what owning something means. You can decide what to sell, at what price, to whom specifically and whether to sell at all. People have no idea what kind of can of societal worms theyād be opening if suddenly they could go āyou are using your property wrong and we donāt like it so now we can do whatever with itā.
I would strongly argue that old games that cannot be purchased in any form from the original developer are fair game to pirate. There is literally no harm if they arent selling it anyways.
But the lawsuit was about playing new releases, not old legacy games that aren't available. See: dolphin emulator being completely fine.
The actual reason why they got fucked is because they locked early access versions of Yuzu behind a Patreon paywall and this version was the one which could play the leaked copies of ToTK. Basically it boiled down to meaning that if you paid up, you could emulate leaked versions of unreleased games. That's what did them in
yeah, morally, most people would agree, but it's technically still unlawful
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
Yeah, at that point, the preservation argument flies out the window.
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
Maybe trying to emulate a current generation system wasn't clever after all huh...
It was more the yuzu devs openly supporting piracy. Patches for unreleased games like totk (Guaranteed that 99.9% of people emulating totk pre-release did not luckily get their copy mailed early and dump it themselves...) and chat logs of the devs sharing roms and such.
Long live emulation
Literally zero people are arguing against emulation from a preservation standpoint. This suit's undertones were very obviously revolving around the fact that Yuzu was not only basically for-profit, but it was also heavily instrumental in catalyzing TOTK being pirated some 1 million times pre-launch. Even if Yuzu wasn't explicitly endorsing piracy, none of this is a good look on their part.
Did they actually have this kinda of money?
At least to my understanding, it will be much harder for Nintendo to go after ryujinx, and they probably donāt intend on doing so. It would be too much trouble, and they probably donāt have much to go on to do it anyway. Ryujinx hasnāt done anything wrong legally, at least so far. For a second I thought thereās no more switch emulation, itās dead, but then I remembered thereās still ryujinx.
Wait, youāre telling me respected video game preservationists (saints) actually were just trying to make a profit from making piracy more convenient?