On the practical side, the fact that the developers were a for profit company also made Nintendo's job much easier.
Taking down a more legally careful, decentralized open source project should prove harder.
Emulation was; breaking cryptographic locks under the DMCA never was. In addition, most of the pro-emulation lawsuits were decided before the relevant DMCA sections even came into effect (e.g. Bleem), and are quite possibly already obsolete.
If you're curious, here's the most relevant parts of the text:
> No person shall manufacture, import, offer to the public, provide, or otherwise traffic in any technology, product, service, device, component, or part thereof, that [...] has only limited commercially significant purpose or use other than to circumvent a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title;[...]
> As used in this subsection—[...]a 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.
FYI: I am not a lawyer, but you can listen to a lawyer explain the above at the following link https://youtu.be/wROQUZDCIMI?t=868
> Developing or distributing software, including Yuzu, that in its ordinary course functions only when cryptographic keys are integrated without authorization, violates the Digital Millennium Copyright Act [...]
so, first reading, no: just taking Yuzu and splitting out the DRM stuff isn't legal if Yuzu still _depends_ on that DRM to function. you could maybe come up with some thing where you do full Switch emulation, with the code having literally zero concept of DRM/cryptography, and can only play homebrew games. do that and some other party would likely come around and do the (likely illegal) work to convert Switch games into a format your emulator understands. quite a bit like MAME cores, really.
fun speculating about how to bypass the spirit of this ruling though, huh? IMO if you actually want to do this don't bother with the roundabout. just do it directly and don't incorporate yourself in a state that cares about DMCA like a dumbass, and strictly distance your operations from your legal identity if you live under such a repressive regime.
Oh sweetheart, have you learnt about intimidation by legal fees? Doesn't matter whether it's legal or not, not many can bank to take against dedicated Nintendo legal team.
But once you start taking "donations" and run the project like a business with non-trivial revenue, they can take you down easily by following the money trail.
Wait what? When did this happen? Doesn't this story (about devs settling) mean the opposite of a court case being won or lost?
> Plaintiff Nintendo of America Inc. (“Plaintiff” or “Nintendo”) and Tropic Haze LLC (“Defendant” or “Tropic Haze”), by and through their undersigned counsel, hereby consent to judgment in favor of Nintendo, and jointly move the Court to enter monetary relief in the sum of US$2,400,000.00 in favor of Nintendo and against Defendant.
Translation:
"Hey court, we both agree that Nintendo wins, can we just skip the rest of this and mark this down as a win for them?"
But it does set a "precedent" in that when courts deal with similar cases in the future, they would look back and see the settlement, and it does influence a judges' assessment of whether Nintendo has a case or not, in the sense of "well, the defendants in the prior case forfeited, they must have had an open and shut case, right?"
In a perfect world where courts have all the time and resources to try a case, this shouldn't happen, but in practice courts use all sorts of heuristics (as long as they're not explicitly banned)...