Nintendo is suing the creators of Switch emulator Yuzu
overkill.wtf
overkill.wtf
In 2022 Nintendo starting taking down Youtube videos showing Steam Decks running Switch games: https://www.resetera.com/threads/nintendo-started-blocking-v...
And last year went after Dolphin (GCN/Wii emulator) as soon as they announced plans to be listed on Steam: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36090755 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36100732
It was quickly taken down and re-posted without any references to Yuzu, probably after a panicked email from legal.
https://www.pcgamer.com/valve-edits-steam-deck-trailer-to-re...
(now I'm awaiting legal action from Nintendo)
The detachable joycon with accelerometer control are a mechanic in some games (eg. Zelda crossbow aim). I would imagine this would be worse experience on steam deck.
Pretty much all the games I have played allowed to disable the motion controls. I think it counts towards accessibility. Personally I really dislike the whole motion control aspect so always turn them off. Zelda included.
I'm sure there are other tradeoffs as well. But would love it see what it's like on an emulator. Or maybe not, it might make running games on the original hardware feel terrible :)
I think motion control is the only option for Pokemon Let's Go.
I still prefer the switch for switch games myself.
Edit: Awesome - great to know!
I think I still have most of the key memorized from back then.
In the EU, reverse engineering is allowed by law if the reason for doing so is interoperability by the one who owns a license to the product in question.
"The authorisation of the rightholder shall not be required where reproduction of the code and translation of its form within the meaning of points (a) and (b) of Article 4(1) are indispensable to obtain the information necessary to achieve the interoperability of an independently created computer program with other programs, provided that the following conditions are met:
(a) those acts are performed by the licensee or by another person having a right to use a copy of a program, or on their behalf by a person authorised to do so;
(b) the information necessary to achieve interoperability has not previously been readily available to the persons referred to in point (a); and
(c) those acts are confined to the parts of the original program which are necessary in order to achieve interoperability."
More information: https://www.vidstromlabs.com/blog/the-legal-boundaries-of-re...
Same with ripping DVDs/Blu-rays, it's illegal to rip them anyway, so might as well just download them.
Especially now that they're suing emulator developers, it's almost unethical to buy Switch games anymore.
Now there should be some ground rule. When you buy something, it's supposed to be yours, and you should be allowed to do what you want with it, especially studying it and sharing the results of your study. Any rule that allows some big corporation to retain power over something that's supposed to be yours is serious overreach and should be shut down.
Now Nintendo does have a big problem here: without the exclusivity of their form factor (which is arguably difficult to improve upon[1]), all they have left is the exclusivity of their game library.
Wrong :)
You have a right to a private copy, but you don't have a right to circumvent copy protections to get that private copy.
So ripping a DVD is still illegal, despite the tax.
We're getting screwed :)
Since when? Do you remember which law? I don't recall anything like the DMCA being ported to French law.
> So ripping a DVD is still illegal, despite the tax.
I'm pretty sure it used to be legal.
Only if it doesn't have the CSS thing, which most commercial ones have.
Even though it's a silly protection, it still counts as a "protection" legally.
It's like that in Italy so I suppose it's the same in france https://www.gianluigibonanomi.com/diritto-copiare/
TL;DR: it's more complicated than I thought. First, the law was introduced in 2006, so before it, circumventing DRM and publishing how to do it was not a crime. (Of course, publishing copyrighted works with no proper authorisation was already a crime, regardless of DRM.)
Then for a brief time, circumventing DRM was outlawed. But fear of foreign monopolies (most notably Microsoft) and free software lobbying eventually had those articles amended, effectively exempting research and free software from any sanction. The exact limits of the current law are still fuzzy, but it seems pretty clear that using VLC to make copy of a DVD I own is 100% legal in France.
So you can dump the cartridges and digital games you own, and the keys to run them.
Cause we all like Github.
Truly a problem of Nintendo's own petty making if even switch owners with a legitimate copy prefer to not run on their hardware.
You can also copy the saves off the console (or the emulated NAND you're supposed to create when hacking it) by running a different app (TegraExplorer) right from the bootloader. I had to do this when I messed up an update and my system wouldn't boot, but I hadn't backed up my saves in months.
I do wonder if anyone's attempted to get nintendo to respond to a subject access request in the EU to get their saves from their cloud service.
Not all games are stable/playable/without glitches.
Mario Galaxy Wii + HD texture packs look like its from 2025 compared to the re-release on the Switch.
That simply isn’t true.
Downvotes don't make the statement magically more true.
So I went through the tribulations of setting it up on the Deck (pro tip: use EmuDeck, I didn't know about it back then).
I don't know about better, but for me it felt the same as the Switch! The only slight confusion thing was button labeling, but it's quick to get used to.
I'd also say the slightly bigger screen is nicer.
But yes, you can (and should!) run the popular titles such as Mario Odyssey and BotW/TotK.
But I'm not sure why this is so surprising, the steam deck is a Linux PC.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rW4y8juFkOI
Of course not as easy as just buying the game outright and putting in the cartridge.
Reading comments like this I can almost understand Nintendos stance on emulation. Suing the emulator team is certainly not the right thing to do, but come on.
At least pay for the game if you are not paying for the console.
Obviously a lot has changed since then. Now they do it to protect their own IP and investments.
The lockout chip is what made the "seal of quality" scheme feasible in the first place. If alternative games were widely available, Nintendo wouldn't have had nearly as much leverage to strongarm with.
Also, look at the timeline and the history behind Tengen which was essentially a company created by Atari specifically with the purpose of publishing their games on Nintendo and used essentially corporate espionage to get the underlying MPU used for the CIC logic that was a corporate secret. The actual lawsuits get filed a few years once Nintendo had enough evidence, but it was going on from the start of the lifespan of the console.
The NES was released in North America in late 1985. By 1987 there were commercially available games (from Tengen) that were playable without the permission of Nintendo. Tengen was not the only one or even the only method being used to break that console at that time.
And then there is Game Genie, which effectively can work around all of these problems. Sure, they included some logic to play nice and let the NES check the CIC again, but you can work around that with a game genie code itself! In the early days Game Genie and GameShark devices were well known for being vectors for piracy and they leaned into that.
*EDIT* This doesn't even get into the VAST array of devices that existed to clone cartridges or adapt floppy drives similar to how the Famicom did. At worst those required a stupid dummy cart to sit in them that never gets removed or the manufacturer did that for you and put a CIC in the device. Some used various attacks mentioned earlier to work around even having to do that.
Microsoft only has (de facto) control of the Microsoft Store.
Microsoft doesn't seem to care (or it's legally dangerous to care). Nintendo does.
nintendo doesnt have to make the switch open source to make it open, they just have to allow people to make whatever the hell they want for it, but their business model depends on it being locked down (closed)
Given all that this doesn't feel like a plea to let people publish their games. Just a thinly veiled port begging.
Even if they could, it wouldn't let them play switch games better. It doesn't solve the clear problem here that is the super technically minded people wanting to play Mario and Zelda in 4k/60.
"Open" doesn't mean "open source" although in the case of the Steam Deck, it is both (not including the Steam application, but as I mentioned you can use the Steam Deck for whatever you want including removing the Steam application, so it's not a requirement or a blocker. I know someone who installed their own Bazzite flavor that has Steam removed and only uses Lutris to install GOG games).
Also Steam Store's requirements are only for games listed in their store. As has been mentioned, this is not a requirement for running on the Steam Deck. This is in sharp contrast to Nintendo.
It course I would love to see this. I think Nintendo makes some very good games but have no interest in having specific physical hardware do end up not playing them.
There current lineup of mobile games are Mario Kart Tour, Animal Crossing Pocket Camp, Fire Emblem Heroes, Super Mario Run, and Pikmin Bloom. These have brought in over $1B in revenue, mostly from Fire Emblem.
Additionally, Nintendo is heavily involved in The Pokémon Company, so they saw the closed doors numbers of Pokemon Go.
I don't think it's crazy to think Nintendo will have a major presence outside of its own hardware in the future. Nintendo as a company always feels about two bad console cycles away from ruin. This feels doubly true with them putting handheld and console gaming into the same basket with Switch.
I also don't think it's crazy for Nintendo to decide that they can sell more games if they sell them on other platforms. In many ways the whole concept of a console exclusive is legacy thinking when the consoles had major architectural differences and porting was a major process.
Wine is not an emulator, and has nothing to do with projects as Yuzu, Dolphin, PCSX2 and others.
(if running out on ARM, there is still ARM to x86 emulation but that is just generic ARM to x86 emulation which has not that much to do with Yuzo per se)
Wine/Proton is a community implementation of the Windows APIs for Linux, it uses no Microsoft code nor needs any. It runs binaries that Valve already has permission to distribute (the games).
Lolol
other games are only as much of interest as it might be games which could end up on steam or games which show some issue with the emulation which could be used to improve proton
there is also the thing that proton or wine just barely count as emulation, they are a bit of emulation but mostly just providing compatible OS interfaces adaption (through Yuzu might but be that much different given how "mainstream" (but old) the switch hardware is)
What are they supposed to do? Leave videos about piracy of their own IP untouched?
It baffles me how people believe they have a fundamental right to pirate Nintendo software without consequences.
Nintendo bring this in themselves with their own policies.
There are so many hardware platforms I can support, and one that hardly ever does sales and refuses to bring their games to other platforms is not that appealing.
I buy games on PC, I buy games on XB, I've even rebought some games between the platforms to play couch co-op with my kid.
Steam and XB have enough sales to make this an option, Nintendo on the other hand is adamant about wringing every last penny from you.
These days I don't have time for Nintendo's nonsense. They want to live in their walled garden, they can have it.
But you have time to play their games, apparently?
Is that piracy?
I hope this doesn't spell the end of Yuzu, because I use it to play switch games that I own on my steam deck.
But they can be legally blamed for not taking any steps to prevent it.
Which means there are two avenues for Nintendo to attack this situation.
Similar to the approach that have been used in various jurisdictions against torrent sites.
Jennifer Crumbley was found guilty of manslaughter for doing nothing to prevent her son from shooting up his school.
That was criminal court with a much higher standard than a civil case.
Nintendo has consistently been one of the strongest protectors of their IP, and a defense that says “We tell users not to commit piracy” is about as effective as a sex workers disclaimer that “money is exchanged for time.”
Software developers should not be held liable for what their users do with the software unless the software itself does something illegal (such as malware that gains unauthorized access to secure systems). If developers were responsible for their users then you would have all kinds of bizarre lawsuits. You would be able to sue Microsoft for things written by users in Word. It wouldn't be a stretch to sue Linux contributers because someone used the OS to perform a DOS attack or to host a scam site.
I think Nintendo would be banking that the Yuzu team likely had lax (if at anything) policies and processes for compliance to their public stance on piracy.
The whole point of emulation is that you want to play content for which the original hardware no longer exists. And so there is no harm being done to anyone.
This situation is obviously quite different because Nintendo is being harmed.
It's not piracy to play a game that you've backed up on different hardware than the original developers intended.
But there is also the DMCA, and the anti-circumvention provision, which can be attributed a lot more to the user backing up their game than it can be to the developers of the emulator. But that wouldn't be the same thing as copyright infringement.
That said, if the"interoperability exception" applies to anything at all, I feel like it should apply here. You are circumventing copy protection mechanisms for the explicit purpose of interoperability with other software.
On moral grounds, I also have absolutely no qualms whatsoever with someone circumventing copy protection mechanisms to make a copy of a thing they bought to use for personal use. The fact that that could be potentially illegal at all is disgusting.
If only we had a universal way to easily distribute data, without need to heavily license it, instead opting for easily accessible licenses from reputable sources at market prices...
(we do, but torrents got a bad name)
Netflix was a success not because it was a streaming service with a license fee, but because it provided unfettered access to data for a small fee.
Of course, now there are AIs which can or will shortly be able to trivially reproduce most data formats, so that's a separate issue as far as that goes (and that's bad too, if AI spells the complete death of DMCA), but it really didn't need to be this complicated.
Make your brand well recognized, make your products easy to obtain, go after the pirates not the users. I own a switch and TBH a lot of my enthusiasm is pretty chilled by Nintendo's dickery - I'm less likely to purchase their products (and I'll elsewhere with non-Nintendo stuff - and Nintendo's stuff is honestly becoming a lot of locked down crap these days).
https://wiki.videolan.org/Frequently_Asked_Questions/#Is_lib...
And the weak chipset on the switch is a big reason to want to use emulators without piracy.
And there's modding too.
Your "whole point" is very far from whole.
Your OS emulates. The companies that made the chips you run them on emulate their own hardware. The company in the headline emulate their own video game hardware and sell it to their customers.
I would've paid full price to play the game on my deck natively, but Nintendo doesn't consider the PC market worth entering it seems
Seems like it’d be more productive to reduce attrition of this sort by releasing a Switch with less-anemic hardware. There’s clearly a market for a “Switch Pro” or similar that can run TotK, etc at 60FPS without frame drops.
Truly, but you are preaching to the choir. I am a big fan of SMTV series, and since it was a Switch exclusive, I bought it on the release day. I wasn't happy about 30fps (which I knew about beforehand), but it wouldn't be a barrier for me to enjoy a great game, so I went into it despite knowing that.
Long story short, I dropped the game just a few hours into it, and decided to wait until it gets a release on absolutely any other platform (and luckily enough, it was announced just last week). Turns out, 30fps was an aspirational goal, as literally in the first non-tutorial area of the game (the desert, I forgot the name), 30fps would rarely even hit, and the game would hover between 15-25fps the entire time. I just couldn't do it, no matter how good the game is.
Nintendo straight up ruined a game for me that I was already liking, all due to the Switch hardware. I am not even asking for much, even 30fps would be fine. But I cannot stomach FPS oscillating between 15-25fps in multiple major areas where you spend a lot of time in a game.
That is difficult for Nintendo, the GPU architecture used on the switch is long dead, so Nintendo has no easy way of releasing a better switch. Because of that they will probably wait as much as possible and then release a completely new console with only limited backwards compatibility.
>> I played it on Yuzu (on PC) because it was a much better experience than on the switch.
I blame you, actually, (somewhat jokingly) because I own TotK for Switch, and ended up putting it away really quickly because the resolution in handheld mode looked awful. I actually couldn't stand playing the game in handheld mode while my wife took over the TV for her shows.
It's Nintendo. They sue everybody.
Also, there are other git hosting providers out there.
Easy.
Just like it was for Ross Ulbricht!
THAT was the point but thanks for being the thread police and a conversation killer. Next time if I want to digress a little I'll run it past you first.
For other tools/plugins that you can't be certain about you would have to run things in a VM that prevents non-Tor connections - e.g. this is how Qubes/Whonix does things.
Replace Tor with VPN as desired.
Whether the use is for-profit is not a factor either. It's part of a factor. The first factor of the fair use test [1] is:
> the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes;
"including" is not "limited to", so something as simple as whether the use brings in any revenue, whether through donations or sales, could be one consideration within the first factor. Whether the use is for-profit is another consideration.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_use#U.S._fair_use_factors
>yuzu is a Nintendo Switch emulator capable of running many games! With yuzu, you can play such games as Pokémon Sword & Shield, Xenoblade Chronicles 3, Super Mario Odyssey, Mario Kart 8 Deluxe, Pokémon Legends: Arceus, Fire Emblem:Three Houses, and Super Smash Bros. Ultimate — on your PC.
Regardless of the legal status of an emulator, I wouldn't list game titles if I were writing that copy.
Zelda BoTW being released 7 days BEFORE being on Switch, and 60FPS, and better gameplay on a real computer is what caught Nintendo's attention.
And with Yuzu and joycons, you can have EVERY game, including their online only stuff. And if you pay for those online only, piracy is the only way to guarantee that you'll keep them.
They've destroyed the: NDS, Gamecube, Wii, WiiU stores/online content. They never needed to. They *chose* to.
It's illegal to pirate games. Being able to emulate things you purchased is a convenient scapegoat for people to pirate games.
Why should I not be able to emulate them?
Well, there's a bunch of places where that's not true. Then it's a question of morality, although that usually gets unfairly asked of the individual but never asked of giant mega corporations.
/s
Thinking further on it I wouldn't write "Nintendo" either: "yuzu is a Switch emulator that runs your games on PC/Mac/Android - often with better resolution, framerates, ..." is fine - people already know about the games they want to play.
titles are mainly protected by trade markes so you can freely mention and speak about them anywhere as long as you are not creating a situation where s judge might find that Nintendo customers might thing Yuzo made by Nintendo or any of the listed games are made by Yuzu or shipped by Yuzo or similar
Justice costs money.
A lot of Chinese sff pc/handheld producers (GPD/Minisforum/Ayaneo/Beelink etc)[1] are now creating device with the explicit understanding that these devices will be used for emulation, and are creating devices as such.
even if Yuzu is banned...Chinese will take over, and nothing any american/japanese game manufacturers can do to stop it.
----
[1] AyaNeo literally created a DS clone called the Flip DS... doesn't get more explicit then that: https://www.ayaneo.com/product/AYANEO-FLIP-DS.html
Each cart has a unique key though, so I imagine Nintendo will go on a big banning spree.
But if they are spending money on creating and selling the hardware, there is no way they won't continue with the software, even if they have to do it secretly.
Not that they will have to, some enterprising Chinese software geek will take up the mantle, the genie is out of the box and Chinese gamers are NOT going to pony up to pay the Nintendo tax, and good luck trying to enforce foreign copyright in China.
Because they know what their devices are used for, here is the video on GPD's own YouTube channel showing off yuzu, mentions it by name in the title:
Are there any cases of emulators being sued successfully?
A user being able to provide keys and a rom from which they could own or be homebrew doesn't seem to violate copyright to me.
edit: seems the consensus is once via legal fund attrition, but the case went to the emulator authors in the end.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lenz_v._Universal_Music_Corp.#...
Bleem was a big deal, too. It let you just pop a Playstation game into a PC's CD-ROM drive and play it. When Sony finally nailed the coffin on them, they were working on a followup called "bleemcast" that would've let Playstation games be played on the Sega Dreamcast.
I seem to recall a bunch of ROM sites disappearing as well, but not sure if that's because they got sued or for other reasons. Some must have been sued and consequently shut down, so maybe not a bad idea (for the companies) to at least try?
Emulators are usually not stolen and are just reverse engineered.
The only 'emulator' cases I've seen be successful are due to the same, they didn't get in trouble for the emulator, they got in trouble for distributing ROMs. I wonder if there's some firmware code being distributed here? that's a common annoyance when it comes to using an emulator.
its just yuzus docs thats written in such a way, most likely to avoid nintendo suing them…
By affiliation I mean something like hosted on the same server but officially unlinked, not obvious affiliations. If a core maintainer redistributing them on their personal website.
Complete ROM collections were, and probably still are, available for most old systems as torrents and on usenet.
Oh, and they're available on Archive.org :)
https://archive.org/search?query=Sony+PlayStation+-+%28NTSC-...
It's just work, like anything else.
But most of the time you would just get Tony Hawk 2/3, the Zelda's, Mario 64, Jet Force Gemini, FIFA's, Wave Race and a few more in less than a week and the fun lasted months if not years.
This move by Nintendo is typical and there is no intent for it to ever actually go to court. It is legal bullying/posturing. The ironic/hopeful part is that team behind Yuzu does have some financial backing and this is going to create goodwill for them and they might actually be able to put up a defense (perhaps with the EFF getting involved maybe?)
It can be used to win cases against other emulators and even shut them down with limited legal action.
If Nintendo loses, the next defendant would have even more precedence.
If Nintendo wins, it's easier to go after future emulator projects.
You would have to somehow set a limit of legal expenses, which seems... difficult.
You would have to win to get the common fund, you may not get that far if you have to pay into the fund and amount a defense.
The litigants and defendants would not be compelled to contribute equal amounts. Just the disbursement would be equal.
If nothing compels them to, they won't, so effectively the status quo.
And Yuzu spends $25,000 and maybe wins the first case but runs out of money during the appeal and defaults judgment.
Nintendo gets the pot because they won right?
As I pointed out to another user, this reverses the damage if they win, but does not solve the problem of preventing them from being able to win.
Now if you make it where if you want to spend $5 on lawyer fees, you have to loan $5 to the other side and if the other side wins they don't have to pay it back, that may work.
That's essentially what I was suggesting with having to loan the opposing team the same amount of money you spend.
But all of that money goes into a prize pot, which gets distributed based on who wins the case.
This would ensure either Nintendo doesn't try to financially grind out a poor small company because the loss would not be worth it to them.
The problem is not the end payout, it's the base cost can't be afforded along the way.
One side can keep appealing and escalating, the other can't pay for the cases themselves.
They may not get far enough to win the pool.
You would have to have the lawyers work pro bono or some common legal fund pay for it until the case is won to get the pool.
As I pitched to another user, how about:
> for lawsuits, if you want to spend $5 on lawyer fees, you have to loan $5 to the other side.
> if the other side wins they don't have to pay back the loan.
Which is great news... for Nintendo.
The problem that Nintendo is citing in their lawsuit is the fact that Yuzu ships Switch common keys. For the purpose of DMCA 1201, this is a smoking gun[0]. There isn't really a good legal argument for why emulators should be allowed to ship decryption keys, or at least, the EFF refused to come up with one when Dolphin asked for legal advice on this point a while ago. So if you go to court and provide a completely legally baseless argument, Nintendo wins, and then they move for fee shifting, which means they get to prosecute the case for free[1].
[0] While it is true that the scope of DMCA 1201 is far wider than just encryption keys, in this case, Nintendo has only cited the keys being in the emulator and the fact that Yuzu is really useful for running pirated software, which is "good enough".
[1] In practice, it's more "for cheap" than "for free", because there's specific rules about how much you're allowed to fee shift, a whole bunch of stuff about 'lodestar amounts', etc.
That being said, I don't think two layers of indirection help Yuzu. It's one thing to say "this requires decryption keys and you have to rip your own games", and another to say "and here's where and how you get those things".
Put it this way: You know how emulator developers are very strict about not providing ROMs for obvious reasons? The decryption keys work the same way. If Yuzu had, say, linked to a ROM site and said "here's where you can get games for our emulator, wink wink nudge nudge", that'd be an open-and-shut case[0].
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MGM_Studios,_Inc._v._Grokster,....
DMCA 1201 comes in two parts: a law that prohibits breaking DRM, and a law that prohibits telling people how to break DRM. If someone just had a Switch and somehow managed to figure out how to get the keys and games out of it, then ran them on an emulator, it'd probably be legal[0]. This is because the part of 1201 that makes it illegal to break DRM has shittons of escape valves that are designed to ensure that previously legal behavior doesn't suddenly become illegal just because you put a digital lock on it.
However, the part that prohibits trafficking in circumvention devices lacks any of these escape valves. I believe this to be by design. Congress wasn't willing to, say, reverse the Sony Betamax decision[1] and criminalize home video recording, but they were willing to allow Hollywood to slowly shut it down. A escape valve for circumvention would render the whole law ineffective: so long as someone has a legal right to break the DRM, you can sell it to anyone, not just people who can demonstrate they need it.
The legal standard for what constitutes a circumvention device is very broad. Specifically, something is a circumvention device if either:
- It's only function is to break DRM, or
- It's only commercially significant function is to break DRM (read: courts, ignore Betamax), or
- It's advertised to break DRM
That last one is the tricky bit. Let's say I took an ordinary HDMI-to-composite video adapter and put a sticker on it that said "Copy Netflix Originals Quick And Easy"[2]. Streaming boxes and Blu-Ray players support unencrypted output at legacy resolutions, so the video adapter breaks no DRM, it's just a DAC. But because I've advertised it as a way to strip DRM, I've broken the law by selling it.
So let's go back to our key dumping tool. Even if it's literally just a shell script for whatever the Switch equivalent of GodMode9 is, because it's being advertised as a way to copy games, it's just as illegal as putting the production Switch keys directly into Yuzu's source code. As an emulator developer, the only way to avoid liability under DMCA 1201 is to provide zero assistance to people who want to rip their games.
[0] This isn't court-tested, and probably never will, but prior attempts to argue against format-shifting in US courts haven't fared well.
[1] SCOTUS would do that later on with MGM v. Grokster. Remember: the reason why Sony was in hot water was specifically because they advertised Betamax as being good for pirating movies, not just that you could do so.
[2] In the world where Congress did include safety valves for 1201(a)(2), this sticker would probably say "Make Fair Use Commentaries On Netflix Originals Quick And Easy".
They could open source and distribute the code in a decentralized manner. People could download, use and work on the software freely. The Pirate Bay is still going, based on these principles.
But if you're going to run a commercial enterprise based on what can at least be construed as enabling piracy, you're playing with fire and companies have the right to protect their IP in court.
They're already making $30k/month on patreon and you can easily foresee that this legal action will cause a call to arms for even greater funding, if that was indeed their goal they could have targeted the much smaller ryujinx and set a precedent.
Sony lost all their cases in the past. They claimed they infringed copyright when copying PS1 BIOS for reverse engineering purposes, court ruled that was fair use as it was necessary to gain access to the unprotected elements of the console. The other case was some bullshit about advertising, they had the audacity to claim screenshots violated their copyrights. They lost in court but won in the market by bankrupting their competitors.
Who knows what's gonna happen in 2024 though? Felony contempt of business model seems quite well entrenched at this point. Company puts "IP" into their product and suddenly they get to control what you do with it and it's illegal for you to resist in any way.
Common sense says emulators are alternative compatible implementations of the original hardware which increases consumer choice. People should have every right to make an emulator, doesn't matter if it's an old console or one that's just been released. Emulators are competitors to Nintendo. If they don't like it then they should drop their "exclusives" nonsense and start releasing games on PC where they belong with better graphics and performance and all the bells and whistles that emulators provide.
Who knows what these courts are gonna decide though. The copyright industry basically buys these laws anyway, there's no reason to believe they will rule favorably to the consumer.
Nintendo has the right to protect their IP and they have the right to make money.
Furthermore, I disagree in general that it's morally and legally correct to emulate something you purchased.
Now, the real question is: did Yuzu's creator have illegal access to Nintendo's IP to write Yuzu ?
You wouldn't steal a car, would you?
Can you elaborate? I see no reason why that wouldn't be the case.
Sure, you may not have taken away money from Nintendo’s bank account by coercion/force/whatever, but the company and its employees have partaken into an effort to produce something of obvious value to you, for which they are asking for compensation for you to be able to enjoy, and you’re choosing to skirt this understanding so that you can enjoy their work without compensating them for it.
Yeah, you didn’t steal money - you stole their work.
Understand that you’re not entitled to other people’s work, regardless of what they’re asking for it. If you don’t enjoy their stipulations for it, like the hardware they limit their software to run, you’re free to not transact, not steal the work.
You still may consider this legal/not legal/moral/immoral and it's ok, each can have their own opinion on this topic and there are different laws in different countries but using word 'stealing' is not correct
But the switch emulation for at least 2 years now has been more than good enough to run games of a current gen system, and you're absolutely kidding yourself if you think any meaningful percentage own the game.
The emulator also requires Nintendo data they're not actually allowed to ship (there's a number of resources to download it though), but they specifically coded to support it.
Imo switch 2 is coming and it'll likely be almost the same system just beefier, so going after the emulators makes sense for them.
To be fair that's impressive but nothing new. I 'member running N64 games with my Voodoo card in 1999 when GameCube wouldn't be out for two more years: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UltraHLE
respectfully disagree. nintendo has fought hard to capture the casual/normie demographic and they have consistently sold more switches than M$ has sold xbox ones every month since launch.
switch emulation is alive and well but doesn't jeopardize their position as the non-techie's console of choice. therefore they have taken to only pursuing legal action when an emulator is being packaged up for the masses to one-click install on steam
>they have taken to only pursuing legal action when an emulator is being packaged up for the masses to one-click install on steam
Well, this breaks that trend. AFAIK Yuzu has none of that. Their general argument is that it made too much patreon money over Tears of the Kingdom.
Emulation makes sense since day one. Frankly, good emulation is straight up better than the console. Accuracy is high and you get a lot more features. Truth is they should have released the games in this format to begin with but they insist on creating little digital fiefdoms with "exclusives" and DRM instead.
If anything doesn't make sense it's all this copyright nonsense which should be abolished.
> you're absolutely kidding yourself if you think any meaningful percentage own the game
Not really their problem. It's the players who are infringing copyright, not them.
> The emulator also requires Nintendo data they're not actually allowed to ship
That's called adversarial interoperability and it's required for the system to function.
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/10/adversarial-interopera...
If anyone is to blame it's Nintendo for coming up with a system where it's impossible to not infringe on their precious "IP" while interoperating.
Just like Sega was blamed when it tried to work their trademarks into their "security systems" in order to deny their competitors their rights:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sega_v._Accolade
> The court's written opinion followed on October 20 and noted that the use of the software was non-exploitative, despite being commercial
> and that the trademark infringement, being required by the TMSS for a Genesis game to run on the system, was inadvertently triggered by a fair use act and the fault of Sega for causing false labeling
I wonder what the Venn diagram of people who think all IP rights should be abolished, and people who say "ideas are nothing, execution is everything" looks like?
It seems a bit grey as that would mean it's really the users who broke the law, but at the same time, the piece of software is quite literally useless without it. Even if they had their own absolutely terrible firmware with bad compatibility it'd be an easier defense to me. As is, their code is useless without an illegal-to-add addition.
The two major notions are that Yuzu violates Nintendo's copyright [1] by allowing people to play unauthorized copies [2]. In order to do so it allows for bypassing Nintendo's encryption (by taking in the keys, it does not embed the keys in the software) it falls under a violation of the DMCA [3]. Essentially, trying to argue that the keys are copyrighted. Additionally, they claim that every user that has either dumped Nintendo games they lawfully owned and play in Yuzu, or have pirated the roms and played in Yuzu have violated copyright and thus Yuzu should pay up [4].
[1] "In effect, Yuzu turns general computing devices into tools for massive intellectual property infringement of Nintendo and others’ copyrighted work"
[2] "In other words, without Yuzu’s decryption of Nintendo’s encryption, unauthorized copies of games could not be played on PCs or Android devices. "
[3] "Recognizing the threats faced by copyright owners like Nintendo in the age of digital piracy, Congress enacted the Anti-Circumvention and Anti-Trafficking provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (“DMCA”), making it illegal to circumvent or traffic in devices that circumvent technological measures put into place by copyright owners to protect against unlawful access to and copying of copyrighted works."
[4] "On information and belief, Yuzu users have (1) dumped Nintendo games they have lawfully purchased and copied the game ROMs into Yuzu; and (2) obtained Nintendo games online from pirate websites and copied those game ROMs into Yuzu. Each such reproduction constitutes a violation of 17 U.S.C. § 501(a) for which Plaintiff is entitled to damages under 17 U.S.C. § 504 and injunctive relief under § 502"
But regardless, if they "distribute" (ie, can be freely read off the device without special tools) the keys in the clear, it isn't used to protect anything.
A browser does not have the code to decrypt a switch ROM.
At the end of the day it's what can be proven to a jury.
In this case for instance, I don't think there's a decent legal strategy for Yuzu wrt "we didn't know the encryption on switch ROMs was a 1201 protected device".
I didn't know that, and I'm a software engineer. Good luck convincing a jury :)
So with Yuzu's patreon funds, it's very grey at the moment, which is probably why Nintendo decided to take aim.
The law doesn't say 'it's illegal to break a lock until it's been broken'.
But picking a crappy lock on a door you're not supposed to open is still a crime, regardless of how crappy the lock is.
> Further, you can buy a switch and never agree to any EULA or other contracts.
1201 doesn't require you to sign any conracts or agree to any EULAs. It's treated more like trespass.
>>...technological measure "effectively controls access to a work" if the measure, in the ordinary course of its operation, requires the application of information, or a process or a treatment, with the authority of the copyright owner, to gain access to the work.
What DRM is a browser bypassing? As if you control some that is being bypassed by a browser, you're free to sue.
Every browser pretends to be all the browsers before it to get around restrictions on who can see/render content.
It's not copy protection. It may change the structure and content of the page that is sent but that is not copy protection.
It is though!
Often news websites use the user agent to detect e.g. the google crawler, and allow google to index the contents of news articles; but then throw up a paywall when anyone with a normal browser shows up.
I recall some news websites tried to threaten people making browser extensions with the DMCA/CFAA as they considered it working around their copy protection to illegally gain access to their content.
Source? I spent two minutes looking and failed to find anything like that, hardly an exhaustive search though.
Hard to argue a user agent could be DRM though, considering it's a string I the user send to the website.
How on earth can they claim that the developers of Yuzu are responsible for copying done by their users?
That's the whole point of court.
More significant is that the Betamax case is from the 80s and precedes the DMCA. The DMCA's anti-circumvention provisions are broad and have been interpreted broadly. The result is that the decryption is a problem all on its own, regardless of things like fair use that were a major factor in Sony's victory.
It's worth noting that Nintendo's first three claims are DMCA section 1201 anti-circumvention claims, with the other claims of personal infringement by the developers and contributory infringement (where the part you quoted is from) being kind of tacked on at the end.
Of course, applying that to the real world would obviously fall apart quickly. It's not hard to think through loopholes.
It just seems to easy to crush a small company/group who are just doing something you don't like.
I think it has some similar bugs to ZSNES, but that's just because they're both crappy low-accuracy emulators.
See: https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2018/11/sony-using-open-sourc...
There's a popular myth floating around that Nintendo downloaded Super Mario Bros. off the internet only to sell it back to players via the Wii virtual console, but I'm only comfortable with calling it a myth because it's based on the fact that the embedded iNES file in the VC release is identical to iNES files you can find online. There's only one standalone version of Super Mario Bros. on the NES, and you can trivially recreate an exact file on your very own if you have the cartridge and a ROM dumping utility. It's a pretty good possibility that Nintendo created their virtual ROM in exactly the same fashion. The iNES format itself is very simple, and Nintendo hired the iNES developer to work on their in-house software; he could have easily just brought that same format into their official projects. (EDIT: This last sentence appears to have been another myth I bought into, see the reply to this comment.)
The person referenced who Nintendo hired is Kawase Tomohiro.
The basis for calling him "The iNES Developer" is that, in a changelog for 0.7 of iNES, Marat Fayzullin - the developer of iNES - wrote: "Sound support completely rewritten, thanks to Kawase Tomohiro"
That is the entirety of the association. That single line in a changelog. Based on similar "thanks" lines it was probably because they reported some emulation issues and not because they personally rewrote the sound support for the emulator, but resulted in Marat doing so. It's actually interesting how these stories seem to change over time. The last time I heard this, the story was that Nintendo had hired somebody who contributed to iNES, which was at least technically true if a bit misleading, but it seems that now the story is that they hired *the* iNES Developer. Which seems particularly silly when we consider the basis is that 8 word changelog line.
At the very least, this indicates that Nintendo definitely relied on resources and documentation from the NES emulation community. But it also raises questions as to why they used the INES format as opposed to some internal format of their own: was it just because they wanted to use a spec they found online instead of writing their own, or did they pirate their own games to test (or even ship)?
The answer to that that I've seen is simply they hired a man who previously worked on INES: https://web.archive.org/web/20061228071701/http://www.n-side... . This man is then top credited in Animal Crossing for "NES Emulator Program".
Majesco Entertainment published some switch games made by Mistic Software, which used an open source emulator without credit and in violation of its license (and therefore were infringing copyright). Atari was somehow involved as well. Nintendo had no involvement, unless you consider them responsible for not doing a thorough enough license audit of every company that publishes Switch games or something.
That's the thing with closed platform, you can't have your cake and it too.
> In December 2008, the ScummVM team learned that the recently released Wii ports of three Humongous Entertainment Junior Adventure titles, Freddi Fish and the Case of the Missing Kelp Seeds, Pajama Sam: No Need to Hide When It's Dark Outside, and Spy Fox: Dry Cereal, have all used the ScummVM engine without proper attribution. The games were published on request of Atari through Majesco Entertainment, who turned to Mistic Software to port the games. Mistic had used ScummVM for these, but failed to credit the developers. While the ScummVM team contacted gpl-violations.org for legal advice, Atari instead threatened to sue the ScummVM team, as the terms of Nintendo Wii development kit heavily restricted the use of open source software, including the GPL. A settlement was made in 2009, in which ScummVM would drop the investigation of the GPL violation, on the condition that Mistic would sell or destroy all GPL-violating copies of the games, make a donation to the Free Software Foundation, and pay the legal fees. As a result, this legal dispute significantly limited the availability of the Wii ports of these three titles.[1]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ScummVM#Mistic's_GPL_violation...
https://www.eurogamer.net/did-nintendo-download-a-mario-rom-...
This does make it less likely that i'll be buying any Nintendo products in the future.
Hardware companies see games as a means to sell consoles.
Game developers see platforms as a means to sell games.
If you're coming at things from the perspective of a hardware maker it makes sense to be as restrictive as possible, since that provides the differentiation that sells your (overpriced) hardware. In addition, if your hardware becomes common then you can charge game developers for access (more broadly, this is what Apple does, mostly)
From the game developer side, it makes sense to be on as many platforms as physically possible, since that's just more places to make sales and money.
The other part being that they decided years ago not to try and compete with MS/Sony and instead make great games. Switch is not an entertainment center it's a gaming console.
And the strategy is absolutely working and has been since the Wii days.
That said, I don't think you can draw a nice and neat trendline specifically from the Wii. I think the strategy has worked out well for them since its inception but a trend line from the Wii to the Switch only looks really good if you don't include the Wii U.
I also wouldn't call the Wii U a failure. Not being as successful as previous consoles from Nintendo is not the same thing as being a failure. Nintendo profited from every sale.
The Wii was a breakout success in a demographic the market had never previously reached. It is def unrealistic to expect the Wii U to have recaptured that market but it was done about as poorly as possible.
I’m not saying the Wii U was a failure in totality but it did not live up to expectations for both Nintendo as a corporation or for many consumers. It’s okay to recognize this, Nintendo themselves did.
This doesn't stop being true because you want to label the Wii U as a failure. Many will tell you the Wii itself was a failure. Many don't consider the Wii U a failure.
Who cares, my point stands.
The WiiU doesn’t reflect that trend. It was sold at a loss. It was initially sold as a machine that would have strong third-party support, unlike the Wii. Ubisoft and EA were presented front-and-center as supporting it. That only lasted for a year because the WiiU was able to compete with 360/PS3 on power, but the investment was no longer worth it for third parties to do multi-platform releases once new consoles were out. Nintendo did incorporate Xbox One-like TV control mechanisms into the WiiU.
Ultimately the issue of whether or not it was a failure is again something you can take a personal feeling about but statements made by Nintendos leadership in their official capacity are hardly shy about how much it did not meet their own expectations in the marketplace. They wanted to sell at least as many units as the Wii and sold more like 1/8th as many units.
I agree Nintendo has done well by not competing to be the third horse in a two horse race. I don’t agree that the Wii U reflected a good execution of that strategy.
There's no sense in continuing this conversation.
I wouldn’t argue the WiiU doesn’t have a unique approach to system design and I never did.
you've been backed into a corner, you don't have a leg to stand on here.
if you're curious about my response, just re-read my comment that caused you to try and dress up the word failure in different clothing. Here, I'll link it to you and let you loop.
https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=PH95VuimJjqBqy&next=...
you can break out of said loop by having something different to say.
Have a nice day, genuinely.
You can look at it this way: Nintendo makes the most consistent high quality first party games and have the lowest hardware spec. So they are most prone to piracy and unauthorized emulation and thus get the most attention when lawsuits come up.
MS has 99% of its games on PC and Playstation specs are so hard (or maybe lack of interest. Probably many things) that gen 7 tech is still difficult to emulate in Gen 9. So Nintendo has the biggest target.
>but everyone is realizing that the future is an open platform.
If "release a port 2-3 years later on Windows OS to double dip" is "open platform", I kinda get why Nintendo defends their platform so rigidly. They are all closed down source games on closed down source OS's hosted on closed down source storefronts. There's no legal distinction there, just technical preferences of the minority who take the time to figure out how to setup emulation.
And despite all that, Nintendo sells more on one system than both competitors on all platforms combined. I don't think they are worried about sales. Especially since they aren't chasing 300m dollar productions with 10 hours of cinematics.
Awful for the gaming community at large? Eh, Nintendo products are not as dominating as you think. It is only available in select countries and has a hundred million users at best. Compare that to PC and mobile gaming, it is almost negligible.
Though it would indeed be problematic if American courts manage to establish a precedent criminalizing emulators. That is indeed a real threat; American courts are not known for robustness or integrity.
That's exactly why it's awful for the gaming community and honestly for human culture at large. Video game preservation isn't a thing without emulators. If Nintendo wins this, it means open season on every (major) contributor to an emulator and every emulation project. It means the end of the thriving emulation community and anybody interested in contributing except for a handful who are willing to risk being sued and/or live in a place where the US justice system has no reach.
And it's not like Western Europe is particularly friendly to anything or anybody that circumvents DRM.
The Switches system1-6 crypto schemes weren't terribly good. system5 even weakend it drammatically and trapdoored them into being permenently weaker. Problem is what constitutes an "effective" anti-circumvention according to the DMCA is not defined.
This might HN readers a skewed perspective on how much Yuzu is used for piracy.
I have many acquaintances/friends in different circles, with the means to pay, who use Yuzu for piracy.
There are dedicated forums of people who coordinate on how to do this.
Emulation is great as a means to study or play backups, but its also fair that Nintendo has legitimate business interest in curtailing this.
IANAL, and have no idea how their case against Yuzu developers will go.
What do you have to do to legally play Switch games on Yuzu? Oh, idk...
* Jailbreak your Switch.
* Dump your decryption keys.
* Dump your games.
* Never update your Switch ever again.
* Pray Nintendo doesn't shove an update down your throat.
* Void your warranty.
* Hope Nintendo won't brick your Switch.
How many people would use Yuzu legally if it weren't for Nintendo's anti-consumer practices? Nintendo can't just argue that Yuzu is made for piracy when Nintendo pushes people to piracy who legally own the Switch and Switch games in my opinion.
Currently we have this weird mealy-mouthed roundabout discussions where people act ever so outraged at the idea that a tool or site is primarily used for piracy when anyone who's not hopelessly naïve recognizes that that's in fact what they're used for.
At best we get comments like yours that are anti-DRM...but still dance around the fact that being anti-DRM is being pro-piracy.
This isn't even about whether I support piracy. I just think it's oddly disingenuous to both treat piracy as a moral/legal wrong (else why the need to defend/excuse Yuzu's clear involvement?) and be shocked and outraged when an entity whose works have been pirated does something about it.
I don't think Yuzu advocates are actually advocating piracy.
I think they think an illegal use of a tool should not mean the tool is banned.
"Emulators don't pirate games, pirates do."
I think our echo chamber will surface views amenable to this viewpoint. Emulation news is quite literally hacker news.
But we deceive ourselves with such a bubble, when the outside world doesn't lean our way. Downplaying piracy usage doesn't do us any favours when trying to build an accurate model.
To illustrate what I mean...if credible stats were somehow collected and showed that 99% of Yuzu users were using it to run games they didn't pay for, I think plenty of judiciaries at that point would consider it a de facto pirating tool versus a tool that is incidentally used for piracy. If you think that this still doesn't mean that the project should be shut down or fined, then I think it's a lot more productive to advocate for such software to exist even if it's a pirating tool than to try to sell everyone on the idea that it's totally a minority that are using it as such. And I think that would require going back to the drawing board re: digital IP rights.
I think this is disingenuous, there's difference between being pro-piracy and against whatever inane terms publisher wants. There's argument that when you buy a game you can use it in any way you want, including playing it on different devices. Somewhat like first-sale doctrine.
It's not as if anyone ever says or suggests anything to them when their works get pirated other than "it happens, sucks to be you" or even "have you tried pandering to the pirates so maybe a tiny percent of them will buy your work?" - so what then exactly is the point of piracy being illegal?
The vast majority of games on PC at this point do not have any DRM, or I guess I should say any meaningful DRM. Denuvo games being the most notable exception. But most games on Steam have literally nothing other than a paperthin basic license check for Steam which is circumventable in a dozen incredibly trivial and automated/generic ways.
PC seems to be doing pretty great as a platform, better than ever, even. Honestly I think it might be worth reframing/clarifying what you are defining as piracy. If I own a Switch (and I do.) And I own games on that platform that I purchased from the e-shop. (And I do.) and I play those games on my PC with Yuzu/Ryujinx is that piracy? I don't even mean in the legal sense, I just mean what you do you personally think?
The need to defend/excuse Yuzus clear involvement is makes for an incredibly leading question, but the simplest answer is that I don't think people are surprised that Nintendo is doing it, just that it is shitty and not only does it not actually address the issue, it has potentially hugely chilling effects on legitimate software development.
I understand why some people are rubbed a little wrong by very mature and well-developed emulation of a current-gen (technically) platform. 100% it is used in piracy. Does that mean it shouldn't exist though? I sure don't think so. And that opinion isn't because I'm pro-piracy.
For what it is worth, on its merits, Yuzu actually did take steps to prevent casual users from playing TOTK pre-release. But also I don't think it is Yuzu's fault because Nintendo had its game leak.
Companies want money. Nintendo wants money. Nintendo is entitled to think this any anything else is a threat to their bottom line and I'm not surprised by it. Nintendo is also failing to serve the market in a way that meets its needs and that is legitimate driver of switch emulation usage, legally or otherwise. I can't feel bad about that.
I don't know why people would have piled on to the Yuzu Patreon during the TOTK leak, given what they did to prevent its usage for that purpose on a base level. There is no strong reason to give the Yuzu team money on Patreon. Daily builds are cool but hardly critical. It is impressive how much they're making on Patreon but that isn't money that Nintendo is going to get back if Yuzu was struck from the platform either.
Being anti-DRM isn't being pro-piracy and that is a false equivalence that I really hate to see. The least protected platform is now increasingly supported by the two other hardware manufacturers (Neither MS first-party or the Sony published stuff is laden with any non-trivial DRM) and the never-ending doomsaying about the PC as a hotbed for piracy really doesn't seem to have panned out the way many have predicted.
DRM sucks. Can't play netflix above 720p outside of their app/edge on Windows. Capcom added DRM to many games that were several years old breaking mods and proton/steam deck compatibility. In a world where DRM didn't get in the way, fine. We don't live in that world and wanting to not be punished as a consumer because DRM overwhelmingly sucks doesn't seem like a hot take. My steam library is over 1,000 games deep. I pay for shit. I don't want to deal with bullshit.
I don't believe piracy should be legal. I believe that copyright and trademarks are important for the creation of many types of interesting new works in society.
Nonetheless, I also think archiving history and having those archives (in their original format, to the closest degree possible, which is what many emulators try to achieve) widely accessible to the public is also important.
Flash memory in game cartridges degrade over time, and discs rot as well. In contrast to some here, I do not think DRM is inherently bad — preventing piracy can be important — but I do believe that DRM should be time limited. After about 10 to 15 years, I think one should be able to have a DRM-free version of whatever piece of media they purchased, be it a game, movie, TV show, etc. At that point, the console (or other device) should allow you to rip it and transfer those DRM-free files to other devices.
I don't think those files should be legally redistributable online (at least not after only one decade), but many users' consoles will break before the 10 year mark, and many consoles are not sold for more than 10 years at a time. I think requiring much more than roughly that amount of time before allowing DRM-free rips will just result in a lot of consumers not being able to play the games they purchased. I think legalizing piracy would destroy the gaming industry, but I think legally prohibiting the consumer from experiencing the media they purchased on future devices encroaches on their consumer rights and results in history being forgotten.
That said, I've never been a fan of Yuzu and Ryujinx releasing as early as they did. Approximately no new game sales have been lost due to RPCS3: by the time it became a useable enough emulator, no new PS3 games were being sold and a huge number of PS3 consoles had already stopped working. The same is true Xenia and the Xbox 360, PCSX2 and the PS2, and many other emulators. That's clearly not the case for Yuzu and Ryujinx though.
Still, while my feelings on Yuzu are somewhat negative due to when they released it, I do hope they ultimately win this lawsuit — if Yuzu isn't legal, it's very well possible that no home console emulator after the PS2 and GameCube era is legal, as they all arguably bypass DRM. Clearly, the existence of Yuzu has not harmed Nintendo all that much — they're currently the richest (though obviously not most valuable) company in Japan, with $11.44 billion in cash. The Switch has sold 139 million units and Tears of the Kingdom has sold over 20 million units. Yuzu clearly does not constitute a legitimate threat to the continuance of Nintendo making games, but Yuzu being shut down would pose a legitimate threat to the preservation of any video game released on consoles after around 2006.
Technically illegal, technically "piracy"? Probably! But morally, who cares.
[1] which is not necessarily true
For some people, if a tool has a single legitimate user, and otherwise haa illegitimate users, then the tool should be allowed.
For others, if the tool is mostly used for illegitimate means, then the tool should be banned.
Where the law lands in this case will be partly based on these values, and the benefits/harms to all parties.
I don't know enough about the case, but I don't think it's as clear cut as a hammer.
The same can be said for gun use (not ownership).
How much something is used for illegal activities should have no baring on whether it is allowed in a free country.
Nobody is dumping their own games. Very few buy the switch games they emulate.
The following usual claim is "it's Nintendo's own fault for not releasing their games on PC and Android". What kind of asinine argument is that?
Then there's the "emulation isn't illegal", which is probably the only sound argument.
But that isn't the issue here. The issue is the authors are now making over 500k/yr from their emulator, whose only purpose is to pirate games that are still commercially available.
I understand if you disagree with this argument (I don't know if I'd endorse it wholeheartedly), but I don't see how it is asinine. The wider context here is that there are people who believe in "general computing", i.e. the idea that users should retain full control over computing devices and software they buy.
The philosophy of companies of companies like Nintendo is that when you buy a game from them, you are buying the right to play the game in exactly the way they want. If they could make modding illegal, they would (it is in Japan, to my understanding). This runs counter to the idea of general computing, where you should be to play a game you buy in any way you want, including modding, or playing on a different device, etc.
So to return to the point, the argument is that by refusing to sell their games to users of other platforms (as well as their other actions), Nintendo is working against the goal of general computing, and therefore it's not worth feeling sorry for them when people pirate the game. Phrased differently, people who don't own a Switch have no way to play the game besides pirating, and people should be able to buy games separately from devices.
Another fundamental argument here is that hardware/software walled gardens which are enforced by anti-circumvention and copyright laws are basically anti-competitive monopolies.
Quite the leap from existing as an emulator to inexplicably being held liable for some independent leak.
There's also the issue that, unlike prior emulators, Yuzu risks running afoul of DMCA anti-trafficking provisions for circumvention devices and software that uses circumvention devices. So, while per se emulating the Switch might be legal, decrypting the games may be illegal (as would software that is useless if it is unable to do that decryption).
Edit: Strongly recommend reading my follow up comment explaining historical precedent: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39530558
Well, no. Pirated Switch games can be played on a hacked Switch or a flashcart with no emulation necessary. Common sense suggests emulation would be significantly more common, but can Nintendo prove that in court, or prove that the leak wouldn’t have happened without Yuzu’s existence?
And maybe for developing homebrew games?
I don't know of any similar cases where an emulator or say, a video player (for example Kodi) was held liable for increasing demand?
Nintendo is making that argument on the basis that Yuzu's Patreon income skyrocketed when TOTK leaked online.
https://graphtreon.com/creator/yuzuteam
It checks out, TOTK leaked on May 1st 2023 and Yuzus monthly income rose from $19k to $45k throughout May, having never broken $25k previously.
Prescient comment marked as off-topic: https://github.com/yuzu-emu/yuzu/pull/10234#issuecomment-154...
We'll see. I'm not really sure there's anything they could have done better in that case as a positive defense if they had this in mind, though - like, releasing it not behind a timegate paywall could be an argument for actively destroy game sales even more, by that logic, and actively waiting until post-launch to release it could be argued to be around trying to extract more money from people to focus on it more.
I don't know if there were any other issues, but at least on that one, it doesn't seem like they needed deep knowledge of the game to try reworking it.
I mean, yes, they presumably turned a larger profit correlated to people going and buying it for something illegal, but it's not solely or even primarily used for that, people would be doing this without it, and they didn't have any involvement or encouragement that people do anything criminal with it.
Downloading yuzu and watching a YouTube video to get roms going is easier than obtaining a modded switch, that one is certain.
That. Literally doesn't make any logical sense. That's like arguing that if computers didn't exist, the leak would be fairly inconsequential ... or if electricity didn't exist, the leak would be fairly inconsequential.
This is interesting, it'd be great to have a link to explain this matter more deeply.
This provision in the DMCA has been most often used against developers of unauthorized DVD copying software, Blu-ray copying software, etc; and the force of the legal argument has been well proven previously. It nearly killed RealPlayer when they made unauthorized software for DVD playback.
You can also see this law invoked in Apple v Psystar; when Apple sued Psystar for circumventing protections in macOS to allow running macOS on non-Apple hardware. That lawsuit was dragged all the way to the final appeal to SCOTUS - and Psystar was shredded the whole way. Expect Apple v Psystar to come up in a Nintendo vs Yuzu lawsuit; because running macOS on unapproved hardware sounds awfully similar to running games on unapproved hardware.
If Nintendo were to succeed invoking it here - emulation would be legal. Decrypting games would be illegal. Consoles before, say, the Wii (IIRC) would be free to emulate due to not being encrypted - but newer games, being encrypted, would be off-limits just like DVDs.
I would love for some clear indication that we have some digital rights left, but I am not certain the same reaction would not be possible to be replicated today.
However, Yuzu requires that you bring your own decryption keys obtained from your own Switch device; it cannot circumvent copy protections without that. The only circumvention code included in Yuzu is basically just standard 128-bit XTS-AES decryption code; it seems like a ruling that makes that code illegal to distribute would be a bad idea.
Psystar order granting permanent injunction: http://www.groklaw.net/pdf2/Psystar-242.pdf
DMCA 1201(a): https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/1201
Yuzu's crypto code: https://github.com/yuzu-emu/yuzu/tree/master/src/core/crypto
- they didn't prove that Yuzu contributed to piracy (and since the amount of piracy tools on the Switch itself that's far from obvious that Yuzu is a first choice)
- they didn't prove that the leak itself lead to a loss of revenue. And that's also very hard of an argument to make considering that this game was a huge commercial success.
Not in copyright cases. You have to show harm for actual damages, but copyright has statutory damages: you only need to demonstrate a violation of the law (the copyright statutes) for damages [1]:
> In all countries where the Berne Convention standards apply, copyright is automatic, and need not be obtained through official registration with any government office. Once an idea has been reduced to tangible form, for example by securing it in a fixed medium (such as a drawing, sheet music, photograph, a videotape, or a computer file), the copyright holder is entitled to enforce their exclusive rights.[35] However, while registration is not needed to exercise copyright, in jurisdictions where the laws provide for registration, it serves as prima facie evidence of a valid copyright and enables the copyright holder to seek statutory damages and attorney's fees.[48] (In the US, registering after an infringement only enables one to receive actual damages and lost profits.)
Statutory damages do not need to correspond to actual damages [2]:
> The charges allow copyright holders, who succeed with claims of infringement, to receive an amount of compensation per work (as opposed to compensation for losses, an account of profits or damages per infringing copy). Statutory damages can in some cases be significantly more than the actual damages suffered by the rightsholder or the profits of the infringer.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright#Registration
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statutory_damages_for_copyrigh...
Copyright obviously protects against the retransmittal of the copyrighted work. If Yuzu hasn't done that, it isn't guilty of copyright infringement. Instead, Nintendo is arguing that if Yuzu didn't exist, fewer people would have committed copyright infringement. That in itself is not a copyright claim.
Short answer, I'm not aware of precedent prohibiting emulation on the grounds of "enabling" copyright infringement the way an emulator does. But even in the US with fair use, I don't think emulation is always legal, and regardless Nintendo doesn't really need to demonstrate copyright infringement because simply suing would be enough to burden emulator developers with legal fees. See the UltraHLE emulator situation [5]. (Tangent: In Japan, there is no fair use, so I think the harm of emulation to Nintendo's sales would be enough to violate some kind of copyright law in Japan.)
The rest of this comment (the long answer-but-not-really-an-answer) is mostly spitballing on my part.
> Copyright obviously protects against the retransmittal of the copyrighted work. If Yuzu hasn't done that, it isn't guilty of copyright infringement. Instead, Nintendo is arguing that if Yuzu didn't exist, fewer people would have committed copyright infringement. That in itself is not a copyright claim.
Here is the closest situation I'm aware of. In the US, there were criminal and civil cases against Team Xecutor, who made devices and software capable of circumventing the Nintendo Switch's measures against running unauthorized copies of games [1]:
> In September 2020, Canadian national Gary Bowser and French national Max "MAXiMiLiEN" Louarn were arrested for designing and selling "circumvention devices", specifically products to circumvent Nintendo Switch copy protection, and were named, along with Chinese citizen Yuanning Chen, in a federal indictment filed in U.S. District Court in Seattle, WA on August 20, 2020.[3] Each of the three men named in the indictment faced 11 felony counts, including conspiracy to commit wire fraud, conspiracy to circumvent technological measures and to traffic in circumvention devices, trafficking in circumvention devices, and conspiracy to commit money laundering.[4] Bowser handled public relations for the group, which has been in operation since "at least" 2013.[1][5]
The legal basis of the anti-circumvention criminal cases seemed to have been based on DMCA 1201 [2] (a statute prohibiting circumvention of technical protection measures [3] against access to copyrighted digital data/works/software), even if the purpose of the circumvention is not for actual copyright infringement), but the judge and the US Department of Justice took the estimated financial damages very seriously [4]:
> The public face of a notorious video game piracy group was sentenced today to 40 months in prison for two federal felonies, announced U.S. Attorney Nick Brown. Gary Bowser, 52, a Canadian national of Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, pleaded guilty in October 2021 to Conspiracy to Circumvent Technological Measures and to Traffic in Circumvention Devices, and Trafficking in Circumvention Devices. At the sentencing hearing U.S. District Judge Robert S. Lasnik said, “These are serious criminal offenses with real victims and harm to the community.”
> “This piracy scheme is estimated to have caused more than $65 million in losses to video game companies,” said U.S. Attorney Nick Brown. “But the damage goes beyond these businesses, harming video game developers and the small, creative studios whose products and hard work is essentially stolen when games are pirated.”
What if there's no circumvention involved, like in the case of an emulator? Then DMCA 1201 doesn't apply. However, what about the effect of emulation on Nintendo's sales? If you can't mod a Nintendo Switch you bought to play unauthorized copies of Switch games regardless of whether you bought authorized copies, then why should you be able to use an emulator, which might as well be a modded Nintendo Switch in terms of harm to Nintendo's revenue? is something I think Nintendo could convince courts about.
Nintendo definitely believes that emulation which affects Nintendo's revenue should be treated as copyright infringement. Nintendo threatened a lawsuit against UltraHLE, a Nintendo 64 emulator [5]:
> Nintendo's response and UltraHLE's discontinuation
> Also notable for its time, UltraHLE was capable of playing commercial games while the console was still commercially viable, a feat which was ultimately noticed by Nintendo. In February 1999, Nintendo began the process of filing a lawsuit against the emulator's authors, along with the website hosting the emulator.[6] Speaking to PC Zone, Nintendo representative Beth Llewellwyn commented: "Nintendo is very disturbed that RealityMan and Epsilon have widely distributed a product designed solely to play infringing copies of copyrighted works developed by Nintendo and its third-party licensees. We are taking measures to further protect and enforce our intellectual property rights which, of course, includes the bringing of legal action."[7] Despite this, UltraHLE had grown beyond either its authors' or Nintendo's control. Subsequently, Epsilon and RealityMan abandoned their pseudonyms and went silent.[8]
I don't think copyright lawsuits in the US give a defendant an early dismissal opportunity for demonstrating that the defendant's emulator doesn't actually facilitate copying in anyway, so all Nintendo needs to do is sue to bankrupt the defendant with legal fees or to incentivize the defendant to agree to a settlement.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Team_Xecuter
[2] https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/1201
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copy_protection
[4] https://www.justice.gov/usao-wdwa/pr/public-voice-and-princi...
[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UltraHLE#Nintendo's_response_a...
Since getting actual Switch game data necessarily involves violating the DMCA, Nintendo's lawyers will have an easy time showing that the only way yuzu can be useful is if the user violates copyright law, thus making the emulator itself illegal.
That is if this even makes it to court.
The Copyright Office has become increasingly friendly to these types of arguments as well, though they have imposed some limitations on games hardware. The next set of rules/guidance they put out won't be until october (They do it every 3 years).
Yuzu isn't sold* as a product and unless Nintendo can convince the court that the mere act of emulation (or obtaining the console keys required to make Yuzu function in the first place) violate their copyright, then I don't see it personally. You can run code that isn't owned by Nintendo on a Switch. Maybe there is a reasonableness argument that people aren't using Yuzu to play Switch homebrew, but there is a homebrew scene around the Switch.
None of that is related to Yuzu though, Yuzu can only play what you give it.
And no I disagree, the fastest way for me to deplop a switch game is to use an emulator such as Yuzu, it's a much faster feedback loop than a devkit and I'm sure there's a lot of indie games developped or tested this way. So there's also other purposes to this software.
But if it's only useful when you illegally infringe copyright, its creators could be found civilly liable for such violation.
I did some looking into this case. Nintendo's lawyers appear to be attempting a novel legal argument: they are composing the DMCA with the doctrine of contributory copyright infringement. Under the latter doctrine, purveyors of a device (or software) can be found liable for copyright infringement even if they didn't commit the infringement themselves, if it can be found that the device is only useful for such infringement. Where the DMCA comes in is, Nintendo is arguing that despite not being a copyright circumvention tool in its own right, Yuzu is only useful for playing games whose DRM has been circumvented; therefore distributing it is an offense of trafficking in circumvention technology under the DMCA. It's not really clear whether the courts will accept this interpretation, but if circumvention is "copyright infringement", then the doctrine of contributory infringement could well apply.
It tends not to matter in courts if using an emulator is better than using a devkit (personally I concede that it may well be, especially early in the development cycle). Because the devkit option is available to you provided you pay for a license, and because not paying for such a license is not a legitimate option for Switch development, the courts are not likely to look at Yuzu as legitimate software for non-infringing Switch development. There was that court case involving illegal DVD decryption where the judge, upon hearing the defendant argue that they just wanted to play DVDs on Linux, stated that that was not a legitimate reason for circumventing DVD encryption because they could have played those DVDs on a Windows machine.
Nintendo's case is a lot more airtight. To play anything on yuzu, you have to defeat the encryption on Switch games, itself a felony DMCA violation (irrespective of how good or bad the encryption is). Therefore, yuzu can only be used to play pirated material, therefore it contributes to copyright infringement.
"But muh homebrew" -- people who want to develop for Switch can get a development license from Nintendo. The fact that this is an option would weaken developing for Switch as a legitimate use for yuzu.
Just because you can get a license from Nintendo doesn't mean the emulator isn't useful for development.
That 1984 Supreme Court decision was a 5–4 ruling. Can you imagine the deleterious effect on the home electronics industry if, in 1984, a single justice had voted the other way, and the VCR had been ruled an inherently infringing device?
Licensed development only allows publishing Nintendo-approved games through Nintendo-licensed publishers who sell into Nintendo-approved channels, which the vast majority of stuff in the homebrew scene wouldn't qualify for.
“Why Are Emulators Legal? Dolphin vs. Nintendo, and the Fate of Dolphin Emulator”
I /really/ really like the Switch hardware. I think the Switch is arguably one of the best consoles ever made, especially for it's ergonomics and UX. The detachable joycons, the subtle integration of motion control, and it's light weight with good battery life made it an exceptionally good gaming product. I truly love my Switch(es), but they are very long in the tooth in 2024, running off what is basically a 2017 smartphone hardware. If Nintendo releases a Switch 2 with full games backwards compatibility, I'd prefer to play on first-party hardware vs using an emulator, but from my perspective I just want the best gaming experience, I don't care about their greedy interpretation of the law. Software is software and hardware is hardware, it makes no sense to restrict emulation in any way as long as you legally own the games.
If this is what Nintendo alleges yuzu facilitates, does Nintendo have a case?
Reimplementing the security measures seems like a reaffirmation of the security measures, not an impairment.
And what’s Nintendo supposed to do here? Most here would do the same thing if they were in Nintendo’s shoes. They have employees to pay.
Don’t hate the player, hate the game.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Piracy/comments/b6rpzx/here_are_som...
Of course if they started selling their games for PC that may be a sign of enough change for me to reset my asshole status for them.
Edit: that said, I did pay 5 dollars (or something like that) for redream, which is a Dreamcast emulator. But in my mind at least, this doesn't deny the developers of the games I play on it the money they would get from a sale. Because it is a dead platform.
I know for a fact that when I pirated Dreamcast games back in the day, I would have paid for at for some of them at least. I don't feel great about that. It was one of my favourite consoles and I probably aided in it's untimely demise.
A huge chunk of the population can't afford Nintendo Switch or its expensively priced licenses. They turn to a zero-cost grey-market online. Nintendo wants to turn those people into paying customers?
Somebody who owns a Switch and buys games aren't going to stop paying so who is Nintendo really trying to deny?
How do we decide who gets to listen to a song and who doesn't on the internet where information constantly tries to reach homeostasis by becoming free and widely available? Capital?
But as often happens, a competitor came along - by producing an interoperable emulator which allows people to buy the game, but play it on different hardware.
I can understand why Nintendo would prefer not to have competitors, and how they might like to use their market power in the games space to crush competitors (FLOSS or not) in the hardware / emulation space, but they should expect to have to compete - that hardly seems like 'having a point'.
Apparently, under US law, an owner of a copy of software is allowed to make a copy if it is an essential step to running it on particular hardware, and that copy is not used for any other purpose: https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/117. So someone who purchases a copy of the game is allowed to copy it again for the purpose of emulating it.
And apparently, while the US has laws against manufacturing and making available circumvention technology, decrypting for the purpose of interoperability is explicitly exempted: https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/1201 17 USC s1201 (f)(3).
So using that law as a cudgel to prevent competitors from producing a compatible product is not really what the law was intended for, and I'd say this is bullying and abuse of process against a competitor.
> The Virtual Game Station is a legitimate competitor in the market for platforms on which Sony and Sony-licensed games can be played. See Sega, 977 F.2d at 1522-23. For this reason, some economic loss by Sony as a result of this competition does not compel a finding of no fair use. Sony understandably seeks control over the market for devices that play games Sony produces or licenses. The copyright law, however, does not confer such a monopoly. See id. at 1523-24 ("[A]n attempt to monopolize the market by making it impossible for others to compete runs counter to the statutory purpose of promoting creative expression and cannot constitute a strong equitable basis for resisting the invocation of the fair use doctrine.").
- 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, ruling in Sony Computer Entertainment v. Connectix Corp.
It's unfortunate, but remember that corps don't play fair, and they will turn "grey area" against you by having more money than you. They can find the right jurisdiction to get what they want.
That said, Nintendo is going to have to point to a specific DRM bypass. If they can't, yuzu should win.
Apparently they released the game in some limited version they don't sell anymore.
It makes zero sense, it's like they are asking people to pirate their games.
I got a Nintendo switch last year from Walmart. The f*ing came used (apparently someone in the store played some Zelda in it, put it back in the box and sold to me as new). Walmart said they couldn't do anything when I emailed them about the issue. Anyways, the switch came with no games. Nothing. Zero. So, naively I subscribed to the Nintendo online service, which I believed would be like Xbox game pass. Not at all. The service only let you play online. The only thing i got out of it was some SNES emulation.
Moves like that and the ones this news cover pushes fans away.
As for your other comment, you can buy a Switch bundled with games or without games. Looks like you either bought the standalone console or the person you claimed sold you the used Switch took the game.
Until Nintendo walks that back, I will pirate all future nintendo games and donate the cover price to Bowser's gofundme.
https://www.dekudeals.com/games?filter%5Bprice_range%5D%5Bmi...
Assassin's Creed - not free, must own the full price game collection.
Animal Crossing: New Horizons Island Transfer Tool - not a game.
BLAZBLUE CROSS TAG BATTLE SPECIAL TRIAL - a demo.
Capcom Arcade - free to download but you need to buy the games within.
Control - time limited demo of a fullprice single-player game. requires internet access.
Coloring Book titles - arguably not games.
Crunchyroll - not a game.
Cyber Protocol Prologue - appears to be a demo.
F-Zero 99 - great game, requires a paid Nintendo subscription.
...and a load of free-to-play titles that manipulate people to spend money.
Here are 16 games that are free to play on Switch: https://www.ign.com/articles/best-free-nintendo-switch-games
Here are 500+ games that have playable demos: https://www.dekudeals.com/games?filter[demo]=available&sort=...
It's not like you can't buy games online through the Switch store, and I'm sure Walmart would have sold you games. It's also not as if all Nintendo consoles used to come with free games and they stopped doing that. Maybe for a special edition version, but not as a default.
I assume the price difference is similar in the USA; the two products -- at least to me -- seem quite clearly different.
good stuff champ.
Right here ?
> https://en.btdig.com/search?order=2&q=%22Complete+Play+Ninte...
Better avoid it then.
https://www.scribd.com/document/709016504/Nintendo-of-Americ...
Nintendo can’t be completely incompetent here; if they get Yuzu shut down someone will inevitably fork it, and they have to know this.
Presumably this is a play to try and establish precedent. They know that this lawsuit means nothing in itself, even if they win, but it can then be used to go after Retroarch or Higan or Mupen64 or Dolphin. This is bad.
Like, if I write a piece of software that does something innocuous, such as indexing files or something, then I probably wouldn't bother getting any kind of LLC, but I'm very unlikely to get sued over that. Nintendo, however, is famously litigious, has made their stance on emulation very clear, and has no problem going after individuals who dare to defy them. I think doing all the development through an LLC can limit Nintendo going after the individuals.
Of course it's to establish precedent. They can't file a case against "Yuzu and any future Switch emulators that don't exist yet". But that doesn't mean that it means nothing in itself. A victory against an emulator would be somewhat of a deterrent and would likely reduce piracy somewhat, at least for a little while.
There's so many second and third order consequences from a legal precedent for that it boggles the mind, and I'd hope that any judge that understood that should dismiss this lawsuit with prejudice. My fear is that it goes the other way and an injunction is successfully put in place against Yuzu.
http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache%3Ahttps...
Afaik, in Japan you do have absurd copyright law to the point where Nintendo can sue anything and anyone doing emulator or hobby project.
It's funny to me how every time the topic of piracy comes up, the world suddenly becomes so full of people who totally like giving companies money out of the sheer goodness of their hearts. And then by next week when it's time for another post about how open source maintainers get burnt out from a lack of material support, we all suddenly remember how human nature actually works.
"This game was so great that I would consider paying next time, but I'm definitely not going to pay this time" doesn't seem, to me, like a credulous position.
Also historically emulation has been teaser because they tend to trail console release by years and only gain good support by the time present generation is passe. Probably the biggest issue here is emulation is unusually good because nintendo released gamecube 1 2 and 3 and their latest effort is weak enough that PC actually plays at a higher res.
Attacking an open source passion project with no money while they themselves don't care about supporting their own hardware fully in any way.
Nintendo is clearly relying on the fact that the average person would assume emulators are illegal.
Also a Patreon account is a poor argument.
This whole industry exists because society has made guarantees that you can in fact license your game for sale and be rewarded for all your hard work. I'm glad that piracy has been far enough on the edges that people still find it worth their time to invest years into dreaming, crafting, and delivering wonderful new games every day.
Where does this leave console emulators? I agree with everyone here that there is nothing inherently wrong with building them. But practically speaking, they do in fact significantly lower the barrier to "I'm going to play this game without paying the creators for it."
If you, like me, love video games and want there to be a healthy and thriving market for them, then what is the right and correct set of rules that we can agree on as a society? I don't think banning emulators makes sense, but it bothers me how much the hacker community completely lacks any sense of nuance for how their "fun hacker project" can have a detrimental effect on the very thing they love.
If the creators of these emulators are doing it out of a love and passion for video games, should they not also encourage users to pay for them? I know Nintendo isn't popular around here, and this particular action of theirs seems overreaching even to me, but if I have to pick a side I'm choosing the one that has some semblance of a future for video games.
Again, not saying they are morally or legally obligated to do anything beyond "not endorse", but I assume the creators like video games and want there to be a market for them, and that they are aware of how the tool they create erodes said market.
- Incredibly easy to get around
- Extremely cumbersome for legitimate users (especially given I would bet it would get workarounds that are way more convenient for pirates within hours of the measures being put in place)
- Require laughably massive amounts of resources to put in place
End result should be: emulator being legal as it is now, with ROMs being easy to purchase and download via official sources. This sounds like a dream; but given GOG’s success I guess it could actually happen.
Search for Gary Bowser and Nintendo ninjas (leaked documents) if you are unfamiliar
Devs who don't want to deal with Nintendo's nonsensical delusions should start their emulation projects on tor. When the law doesn't protect people from those who have a long history of abusing it to punish legal operations, perhaps people should take basic precautions to protect themselves from both the nutjobs and the law.
Maybe what law abiding developers need is a deepweb Github.
> A video game emulator is a piece of software that allows users to unlawfully play pirated video games that were published only for a specific console on a general-purpose computing device
[1] https://www.scribd.com/document/709016504/Nintendo-of-Americ...
> A video emulator is piece of software that allows a user to run a video game on a platform different from that for which is was written. Many people use emulators to play unlawfully obtained pirated games.
Wording something as definition implies that the statement both contains no falsehoods and is complete.
Saying that the purpose of an emulator is to play pirated games is not true. I use an emulator to play Super Smash Bros Melee on my computer, with the ROM obtained from the disk I own. People have modded the Super Smash Bros Melee game to allow for online play, something that would be impossible without an emulator. People used emulators to find a bug in Ocarina of Time that would allow them to beat the game (played on original hardware) faster.
But the statement is written to confuse a non-technical fact finder into thinking that the only purpose of an emulator is to play a video game without paying for it, or to help others to do so. And it's done so because that Nintendo doesn't believe that you own the game you buy from it.
When corporations like Uber violate multiple laws, do they get shut down? When Amazon treats its employees poorly, does it get shut down? When Google forbids manufacturers to pre-install competitor apps, does it get shut down? Well, it seems that as long as copyright is not infringed, everything is ok.
Also it seems to me that Nintendo might themselves violate antitrust laws by using their monopoly power on market of Nintendo-compatible games, and not allowing enough competition there.
Your monopoly point is an interesting one. Wonder if there's an actual legal case there, as Nintendo have done a lot of this bullying over the years.
One is certainly allowed to have a monopoly over their own products, that’s what trademarks and patents are for.
It’s hard to argue a game developer is forced to play ball with Nintendo.
There are a whole lot of ways to distribute a video game. Three major consoles. Computers. Things like the steam deck. Smart phones. You could ignore any one or two of them, and still have a great business. In fact, lots of companies do. A whole lot of people have access to more than one of these platforms. You could ignore anyone or two of these platforms, and still sell your product to most of the people in the market. It is a highly competitive environment. If you don’t like Nintendo’s policies, just sell on Xbox and PlayStation and steam. People do this. If an environment is competitive, then by definition, nobody has a monopoly or an unfair advantage.
The Earth has 8 billion people, most of whom have a smart phone, all of which are using one of two operating systems. Not many people have more than one. If Apple says your app cannot be in their App Store, half of humanity, cannot use your app. It is a much different scenario.
Plenty of companies get shut down for regulatory violations, or employee mistreatment. Pointing at some extreme outliers is nothing more than a form of selection bias.
Same reason AirBnB works despite many laws to the contrary. If you get popular enough that the public will vote against people who threaten to enforce the law, out of a desire to keep using the product, you win. It's a race to get too big to be shut down.
You actually said "if you get popular enough that the public will vote against people who threaten to enforce the law".
So someone builds a product that the public likes, something they demand that politicians allow, and somehow this is "too big to be shut down". Do you forget that modern democracies pretend that their authority derives from the will of the people?
The law is not sacred. Get off your high horse.
There are many reasons why popularity alone of the voting public does not translate into policy. The dangers of tyranny of the majority is well known, will of the people is a necessary but not sufficient reason.
There are also some pre-requisites for a functioning democracy like a well-informed electorate which is questionable today at best.
Laws are there to serve society. Some of the ways it serves society is when it restrains society, but people are not stupid and understand when they’re being unreasonably restrained. Unreasonably being the key word, as I’d like to think we’re all generally anti-murder around here, even if we can argue to death about things like AirBnB.
Let me put it like this: the laws of San Francisco (and other cities) protected Taxi drivers from competition, and by the late aughts the local taxi services here were godawful magnets for complaints every weekend that the relevant regulatory authority (the SFMTA) didn’t do a goddamned thing about. If you wanted to go out and enjoy a nice weekend night, the responsible thing was not to drive. But good luck getting home, and if you could get a cab, it would be filthy and the driver would unlawfully insist his card reader was broken (it wasn’t, and it never was, the card reader was probably the most reliable thing in that car given how little wear and tear it would have seen in life).
Uber didn’t walk into a well regulated transportation marketplace. They and Lyft drove headfirst into a marketplace where the existing laws and regulations were suppressing supply and killing the market, and not in service of the passengers (i.e. the voters). They won the battles that mattered which were the political battle by upending a status quo that had favored this shitty little taxi medallion system and the market battle by just being better at a price people were willing to pay than their competition.
Popularity doesn’t always translate to policy in a democracy, but it often does.
We prioritized cars a long time ago, and we’re still paying for it. I’m not happy about that fact either. You can absolutely argue that cyclists are victims to a tyranny by majority much as I can argue that that the presence of Uber and Lyft is a net benefit versus the status quo that existed prior to their coming onto the scene, and I’ll just say both things can be true. People also lose in democracies.
OK, let's take a vote to take your stuff and share it around.
It is popular with tourists, who don't vote in the jurisdictions they visit, and it is popular with some landlords, who are a small minority that generally the renting public have at best indifference and often hatred for. It is very unpopular among renters who now see supply taken off long-term rental market; and it is very unpopular among other homeowners who do not want to live next to hotels.
It is not really a surprise that major tourist destinations are now slapping AirBnB with all kinds of restrictions.
[1] https://www.theyucatantimes.com/2022/01/uber-could-be-return...
Basically, Uber had powerful allies and was willing to do illegal things. That's the difference between Uber and the other apps that got shut down for breaking the law
Why would you want 10 companies competing, bet your investment in one, or "spread it" like a loser, when you can pool ALL your money and make sure ALL the profit accumulates into one giant enormous company ?
Uber in this case happens to be the company chosen for big money.
Nintendo is being a bully here, but what on earth does a monopoly on the market of your own platform even mean?
The landscape has obviously changed since, but not for any good reason in my opinion.
- Nintendo Switch OS only runs on Nintendo Switch hardware -> Nintendo monopoly on Switch OS hardware
- Nintendo Switch hardware and OS only run officially licensed Nintendo game -> Nintendo monopoly on games for Nintendo Switch and OS games
- Nintendo Switch games only run on Nintendo Switch -> Nintendo monopoly on hardware that runs Switch games
(Apple and iPhone are in the same situation)
Compare to the situation with Windows:
- x86 hardware can run any OS, including Linux and Windows -> mostly no Microsoft monopoly, although Windows and Microsoft keys are often pre-installed
- Windows can run on any x86 hardware (and ARM I think?) -> no Microsoft monopoly, although they don't release source to port to other CPU architectures
- Windows can run any software from anyone at no charge -> mostly no Microsoft monopoly, although they can favor their own software
- Windows software can run on any OS, such as Windows or Linux with Wine -> mostly no Microsoft monopoly, although one can argue that having an OS API without an open-source implementation induces lock-in and creates a partial monopoly
It's baffling to me because some users on HN grandstand so much about how making your own product or platform means that you are morally obligated to support any and every third party under the sun. But then the actual tech industry seems to be the direct opposite - if anything companies make lots of fanfare out of achieving basic interop.
But, we'll see what the judge says.
So yeah, it'll be interesting to see what the judge says. :)
Their entire case rests on the presumption that the DMCA protects Nintendo's monopoly over not only distribution, but playback of its console game software.
Emulators are legal. Defending your hobby project in court is infeasible without patrons.
Nintendo has no leg to stand on legally speaking, and there's a precedent waiting to happen.
As for the emulator itself, I don't see any argument that the Yuzu team used "illegal means" (internal SDKs, whatever their equivalent of a DLL is, etc).
A thought for the Ryujinx emulator devs, who are also making an excellent Switch emulator (sometimes more performant than Yuzu). They must be having a really stressful day.
Switch piracy is massive. Almost everyone I know is doing it. I’m not, but I still emulate because switch performance is poo. So I buy the game, and then emulate it in 4K/60, it’s how I finally finished BOTW.
Emulation was awesome. Until...
I don't have the PC anymore but I know what I had happen.
My game files were trashed. Restoring the different saves did nothing.
I promise you, I know how to restore saved files and follow instructions on how to do as such.
The emulators we easy to use. beautiful. responsive. After TOTK, the energy behind them had them getting constantly updated and was a good experience.
Until it wasn't.
Restarted TOTK on my Switch. I had bought it because I support games that are worth it even if I emulate them. I've got a Powkiddy RGB10 where I also emulate games. I've got a plex server where I host my own library.
When I, a random person on the internet you can believe or not believe, say that my emulator died and I lost weeks of progress on my game? I lost weeks of progress on my game. I can't remember which I was using (I switched between them at one point because one was faster/better but I can't remember which one it was)
It's also very quick if you're already set up with atmosphere & homebrew. Longest part was just waiting for my console's nand to dump.
The Switch has a vibrant modding and homebrew scene. People also like modding their consoles to dump their games.
Lots of power users want to dump their games to play the top games on their PC. Tears of the Kingdom runs in 8k, at 60fps, with lots of QOL improvements on PC.
Don't be so sure. From the article:
> Emulator tools aren't inherently illegal, but the way in which Yuzu is being actively used and promoted is what Nintendo appears to be objecting to here.
So it depends on what is actually in the case. At best, Yuzu needs to simply update some of its marketing material. At worst, they need to shut down and open under a new name / LLC, while also updating marketing material.
IANAL, but my understanding is that while emulation is unambiguously legal in the US after Bleem vs. Sony, an emulator which decrypts games is maybe not legal under the DMCA circumvention rules, and those have never really been tested in the context of an emulator. The Bleem case happened shortly after the DMCA was enacted, but PS1 games weren't encrypted or otherwise protected from being read by anything besides a PS1 so Bleem didn't have to circumvent anything. That seems to be the angle Nintendo is taking here, that Yuzu is the equivalent of something like DeCSS since it has the ability to circumvent their DRM scheme.
Back when the movie industry was going after DVD ripping tools I don't recall anyone trying to dodge legal trouble by making the end-user supply the keys instead, so unfortunately we didn't get a decision either way back then.
That way just trying to support that prorietary encryption scheme in the emulator would be enough to run afoul of the DMCA.
But then, as a workaround I could see the proprietary encryption code being supported as an addon (ie: DLL file) that you can just drop in, without distributing it with the emulator itself and letting the users search for it on the digital high seas.
If it ever made it in front a jury, it can be summarized as a big company trying to sue a little company out of existence because the big company doesn't like that the little company is executing the big company's code. But, unfortunately for the big company, executing someone else's code - even without their permission - is not illegal. Nintendo has the resources to sue torrent hosts and take on individuals involved in sharing networks. They have the resources to find the problem and fix it. But they're not using those resources to solve the problem; they're using those resources to scare lawful citizens into inaction because that's a cheaper target. There should never be a legal reward for that kind of scheme.
But, honestly, this should never make it to trial. There are zero merits for argument, here.
Page 17 of the actual court document indicates otherwise: https://www.scribd.com/document/709016504/Nintendo-of-Americ...
> The current iteration of YUZU-EMU.ORG does not feature a live link to Lockpick—which had been hosted on GitHub—because recent enforcement action by Nintendo alerting GitHub to the illegal nature of the software caused GitHub to takedown and delist Lockpick. However, since that time, in Yuzu’s Discord server and elsewhere, Defendant’s agents have been referring users to a different website (RENA21.GITHUB.IO/YUZU-WIKI/) which does feature a live link to Lockpick.
Note that I am explicitly not weighing in on legality or anything, merely pointing out your wording is at odds with the document/allegations themselves.
Archived: https://web.archive.org/web/20231128132815/https://rena21.gi...
Lockpick download link is now 404.
no need, Sony already got us one. Bleem and VGS were a big business, Steve Jobs himself advertised VGS during Macworld 1999 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VUfu-xOGr1U&t=9m0s
Sony sued Bleem and lost in court
Sony Computer Entertainment America v. Bleem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bleem!#Sony_lawsuit
Sadly court case legal fees bankrupted Bleem, Sony later bought VGS from Connectix, and hired Bleem programmers.
(1)Notwithstanding the provisions of subsection (a)(1)(A), a person who has lawfully obtained the right to use a copy of a computer program may circumvent a technological measure that effectively controls access to a particular portion of that program for the sole purpose of identifying and analyzing those elements of the program that are necessary to achieve interoperability of an independently created computer program with other programs, and that have not previously been readily available to the person engaging in the circumvention, to the extent any such acts of identification and analysis do not constitute infringement under this title.
(2)Notwithstanding the provisions of subsections (a)(2) and (b), a person may develop and employ technological means to circumvent a technological measure, or to circumvent protection afforded by a technological measure, in order to enable the identification and analysis under paragraph (1), or for the purpose of enabling interoperability of an independently created computer program with other programs, if such means are necessary to achieve such interoperability, to the extent that doing so does not constitute infringement under this title.
(3)The information acquired through the acts permitted under paragraph (1), and the means permitted under paragraph (2), may be made available to others if the person referred to in paragraph (1) or (2), as the case may be, provides such information or means solely for the purpose of enabling interoperability of an independently created computer program with other programs, and to the extent that doing so does not constitute infringement under this title or violate applicable law other than this section.
"Independently-created computer program" in this case being Yuzu, "other programs" being Switch games.
People using such software without the intent of engaging in RE activities will not be granted the benefit these exceptions. You could legally create your own Switch emulator but distributing it to others outside the legal veil of a corporate entity will not fly.
DeCSS was not spared by it because the interoperability exemption applies only to software, not media like video or music.
This is my legal right, and Yuzu provided open source code to make this task easier for me.
Nintendo is looking for a scapegoat here for their wasted investment in DRM technology.