Nintendo has never been friendly to emulation, or most fan content in general, but there are protections for fair-use and this team appears to be building their work behind those, rather than playing fast and loose with them.
*Making money* by helping people run Zelda _before it came out_ was begging for trouble.
Nintendo's approach to fan projects and emulators is ridiculous, don't get me wrong — but Yuzu authors were definitely playing with fire and overstepping what's generally accepted in the community.
Yuzu did not offer improvements before launch day. There were badly patched unofficial versions that were trying. Nintendo does allege though that Yuzu was doing research to develop the patches before launch day.
Consider that Nintendo leaves Dolphin more-or-less alone. I think Nintendo understands where emulation sits legally, and they went after Yuzu because of what was happening around the emulator, and not because of the emulator itself.
Kind of. Some TOs are calling Nintendo's bluff. Nintendo released a set of guidelines[0] on what kinds of tournaments can be hosted. However, Collision 2024 just happened with attendees and a prize pool surpassing the guidelines.
[0]: https://en-americas-support.nintendo.com/app/answers/detail/...
Also, as Nintendo can argue, imagine this was a movie. Imagine it was a movie being shown on screen for two hours. That would be case closed. Now imagine it was a movie recutting competition. Again, case closed. So what makes a tourney special? In the eyes of the law, a judge might say, absolutely nothing.
You might argue, “well, there’s skill being applied, whereas a movie is passive.” No dice there - just because you put effort into your copyright violation is meaningless. You might argue a movie is a full work when a video game only displays a subset - but do you think you could publicly perform 30 minutes of The Lord of the Rings and be OK? Of course not.
I would argue that the competitive nature of tournaments implies that the entrants all have a copy of the game along with hardware to run the game (emulation withstanding). The only thing is streaming the event. Even then, what would be the difference between streaming a tournament and streaming myself or a small group of friends playing? It doesn't seem like that would infringe upon the core purpose of the game.
For movies, it’s fairly simple and widely understood you are buying a license for private viewing. While there’s some room for interpretation, it goes without saying that if you are inviting strangers and/or charging admission and/or running advertising, you’re inviting scrutiny.
Also, let’s just be honest, the moment you run advertising for anything, it’s almost impossible to argue this is not a publicly available event. Public is also fairly broad - collages have to license every movie they want to show to a classroom, for example. My college paid over $2000 to Netflix for a single showing to Math Club of one movie for about 7 viewers.
> The game is a multiplayer game intended to be played with other people
The law only cares about copyright. What it is, is irrelevant.
As for your point about how the participants must have bought the game - I don’t think that would work either. Imagine you ran your unapproved Lord of the Rings convention. You also had the movies playing on repeat the whole time. I don’t think arguing that “only people who have bought the movies have any interest in being here” would protect you.
literally in the text of the DMCA itself
This is also why this carve-out is practically useless and also does not define guidelines for fair use.
Esports and tourneys in general generate a decent amount of money, are recurring and control a decent chunk of the narrative around games affecting their marketing.
Not trying to defend Nintendo or any other company, but their objective as a profit-driven organisation is to generate maximum profits.
I honestly think game streaming is a grey area that could easily be made illegal by the wrong company getting sued for it.
In one of the various Nintendo leaks in the past few years was a bunch of documentation of "Operation Belgian Waffle", their attempt to "Knock and Talk" with a private investigator, law enforcement, and Nintendo Legal visiting a fairly well-known hacker in the scene. All of this was being spearheaded and commanded by Nintendo of Japan towards the subsidiaries in other countries.
https://torrentfreak.com/nintendo-conducted-invasive-surveil...
Nintendo was already operating inside the Discord as per screenshots of evidence in the case, so they really had some leverage here.