Speculating here but it feels like part of Nintendo's beef is the popularity of PC form factors that look like a Nintendo Switch. Most notably the Steam Deck but there are loads of them.
It would be amazing if Valve stepped up with legal funds/protection there. They do get money from people buying SteamDecks for emulation and well... free publicity if they take on Nintendo.
That flies in the face of what Valve did TO Dolphin. It was Valve that proactively reached out to Nintendo before putting Dolphin in Steam. Of course Nintendo responded "please don't", so Dolphin got blocked.
Valve doesn't really benefit that much financially from emulation though. Steam deck profit margins are probably razor thin given the cost of the competition (many of whom are in China on top of it all).
I don't think this is likely. There is a convincible future where Nintendo publishes more and more games outside of their hardware platforms, so Valve needs to keep good business relations with Nintendo.
On other hand after sale of device emulation does not pay... And selling games is where they earn money. Fight for emulation is useless legal fight for them and they are not org build for litigation.
You can just as easily run pirated games on real hardware as you can a steamdeck, and vice-versa. You're conflating emulation and piracy. Emulation does not mean piracy as it is perfectly legal (and moral) to dump a game that you own so that you can play it on your preferred hardware.
I play my switch games on my PC completely legally. All the games I play are owned by me, and all of them were backed up using my own switch and my own prod.keys.
The majority of HN makes a living from software that by nature can’t be pirated, so they have little sympathy for people who work on software that can be pirated.
I mean Valve literally had a trailer with a nintendo emulator as an app installed... Valve doesn't need to do RND for its games because they can just use whatever is on steam that is playable on the deck plus a ton of games from nintendo consoles via emulators as a selling point.
Nintendo could do the exact same thing if they made their platforms open like Steam does. That the switch is limited to only Switch games is entirely a choice they made because their whole existence they've been all about proprietary and locked down.
I knew that Patreon would bite them some day. Any time money comes into a "offensive" open source project, whoever feels they are getting hurt can make a claim a lot easier. Somewhat surprised they haven't yet sued Ryujinx (the other Switch emulator project) for also having a Patreon.
>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.
it's fully legal to state what you are compatible that
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
I am not part of that scene, but I am sympathetic to emulation. Is there a notable difference between Yuzu and other switch emulators? I wonder if there are other reasons than Patreon ( money changing hands ) or there were other considerations?
Yuzu has amazing compatibility. I'm guessing it's getting too good for Nintendo. Their concerns with TotK are not without merit. I played it on Yuzu (on PC) because it was a much better experience than on the switch. Within a few days of the game being out, there were resolution and fps patches which made the game run much better. That said, I'm not sure how Yuzu can be blamed for TotK piracy. Guessing Nintendo is throwing a hail mary here and hoping they can connect the dots during discovery.
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.
Making money is not a factor for fair use, but one factor is whether it’s a for-profit endeavor; you can be making money to fund an operation without doing so for profit. And even then, courts haven’t been too concerned with that aspect when other aspects are clearly met.
You need some sort of legal entity to receive the money, with ties to some real persons. It makes some corp. going after you so much easier, compared to trying to get to 'rightbyte' or 'judge2020' for doing git commits.
> Making money is not a factor for fair use, but one factor is whether it’s a for-profit endeavor
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.
It doesn't change much legally to my knowledge, given that Sony v. Connectix was about a commercial, for-profit emulator (literally sold in stores) that directly competed with a console being commercialized at the same time (the PlayStation) and Sony lost in that case, with the 9th Circuit declaring it was fair competition and legal for Connectix to emulate PlayStation games.
Keep in mind that it's not about winning or losing in court. Most people don't have the money to fight. So they give up as soon as they get a letter from a lawyer.
I'm actually surprised it took so long considering they were seeking crowdfunding while openly advertising the piracy use case and raking in thousands of dollars a month (now $30,000 - wow). Patreon rewards can be construed as profit-seeking; Patreon even charges sales tax if you donate under a reward tier (they don't if you go through the no-reward custom donation flow). It's cool to hate on Nintendo for being overly litigious these days, and they deserve that reputation, but with projects where piracy is clearly the main goal, and a significant amount of money is involved, I find it hard to sympathize. Even if it's technically legal, it strikes me as parasitic behavior.
Nothing Nintendo can do can shut the emulation genie... because China.
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.
They're crapping themselves because somebody has just released [1] a cartridge that lets you run "backups" stored on a SD card on an actual physical switch.
Each cart has a unique key though, so I imagine Nintendo will go on a big banning spree.
I know someone who uses a GPD WIN 3 as their primary computer and really loves it. Seems nice from the little I got to interact with it. I also like how the GPD WIN 4 looks like a giant PSVita lol
Obviously they don't; for one, if someone else is doing it, why bother, and secondly, why link yourself with the effort.
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:
I don't believe so (the Sony v. Bleem cases mainly ended up in favor of Bleem), but also I don't think anyone has tried since the DMCA. It looks like Nintendo is taking a 'trafficking in circumvention device' legal strategy as opposed to a strictly anti-emulator legal strategy.
DMCA was in effect the year before Sony first sued Bleem -- and it's notable that Bleem mostly won the lawsuits, but legal fees bankrupted them anyway.
This won't matter. The goal will be to run them out of money. It's an open source project and they most likely don't have the capital to fund any sort of lengthy lawsuit.
I really wish our system had some kind of financial handicap when it came to access to the legal system. Weaponizing the legal system to bankrupt people that would be found Not Guilty shouldn't be possible.
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.
bleem! (PlayStation emulator) was sued by Sony and was forced to close down because of legal fees, so I guess that counts as a success for Sony.
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?
ROM sites are different in that they are distributing the copywrited media
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.
I think ROM sites were an artifact of the internet speeds we had access to early on. Where it wasn't practical to just download an entire library for an older console. Downloading an N64 ROM over dialup still took a little longer than an mp3, whole collections of them were out of the question. Even early broadband in many areas was limited to speeds where a single ROM was more practical to download.
Complete ROM collections were, and probably still are, available for most old systems as torrents and on usenet.
Sony also sued Connectix and lost. Sony purchased the rights to the emulator made by Connectix a year or so later. Connectix shut down 2 years after they sold the VGS to Sony but it isn't clear their fate was negatively impacted by Sony.
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?)
> Are there any cases of emulators being sued successfully?
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.
Yep, Sony "lost," but they still killed Bleem and forced the creator into an agreement to, among other things, not make any more Playstation emulators. So really, Sony 100% won.
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.
Things like this and companies like Nintendo must be stopped, it's both morally and legally correct to emulate when people actually owns the machine and cartridges.
Disagreed. I'm guessing that 99.99% of Switch emulator users do not own the cartridges. They're stealing, which is not only morally wrong, but legally wrong.
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.
piracy is not stealing. the potential profit that they could have had is just potential, not actual, so you don't steal money. You also do not steal the game since the game is still owned by nintendo/others. Please don't accuse users of doing something they don't do. Also, this lawsuit is not against users, it's against an emulator creator, they didn't still nor pirate the nintendo content (it can be debatable if they had access to proprietary nintendo code and the emulator was written based on that code, but if not we can for sure say that they do not infringe nintendo's copyright)
When the game isn't be sold any more, along with the console, emulation makes sense.
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.
> and you're absolutely kidding yourself if you think any meaningful percentage own the game.
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
> for at least 2 years now has been more than good enough to run games of a current gen system
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
Legally it doesn't really matter at all whether or not the console is currently commercialized, at least from precedents like Sony v. Connectix (Connectix was selling a commercial (literally in shelves) emulator directly competing with the PlayStation while it was being commercialized and won the lawsuit Sony filed against them)
A quick glance shows that they developed their own Bios to do this, Yuzu specifically requires you to insert a copy of the Switch's firmware, it won't work otherwise.
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.
> When the game isn't be sold any more, along with the console, emulation makes sense.
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.
> 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
>all this copyright nonsense which should be abolished.
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?
Looking over the legal document, realistically, their arguments are so damaging from a software perspective that they should lose. IANAL, but from skimming the legal document:
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"
> [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"
How on earth can they claim that the developers of Yuzu are responsible for copying done by their users?
There's a concept of "contributory" infringement: while you're not personally infringing the copyright, you know about the infringement and you're helping it, encouraging it, and so on. This is what the studios sued Sony under for the Betamax. Of course, they lost, and that precedent is helpful for Yuzu, though not a total slam dunk: what they wrote on their website in terms of marketing and instructions and so on could matter here, what the devs wrote to each other or publicly that might reveal their knowledge and encouragement of infringement could matter, etc.
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.
You can claim what ever the hell you want, doesn't mean it will last longer then 5 seconds in court. It's very common people make outlandish claims, these then get dismantled by a judge and jury into usually 1 that sticks. Even though you went in with 50.
I'm not sure they're necessarily claiming the keys are copywritten (which honestly would be a terrible strategy), but instead that yuzu's ability to injest keys and encrypted copywritten works (decrypting them on the fly as needed like a switch would) constitutes a circumvention device banned by 17 US § 1201.
You might be right, I was connecting this with the Dolphin case which was making the argument that the keys are copyrightable. Essentially this is an extension of that, which is arguing that any circumvention is a violation of 17 US § 1201.
True, but therefore setting up for the kinds of information that they'd be looking for in discovery. For instance, perhaps Yuzu keeps telemetry data around?
I feel like there ought to be a sliding scale of cost associated with filing a law suit. If you're a very large company suing a very small company, it should be very expensive to file. Expensive enough to make your lawyers encourage you to think really hard about whether or not this is actually a threat to your business.
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.
Readit News
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...
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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.
Is that piracy?
>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.
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
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.
It's Nintendo. They sue everybody.
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
Justice costs money.
Dead Comment
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.
[1] https://migswitch.com/
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:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nhZIz6C23ew
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.
It can be used to win cases against other emulators and even shut them down with limited legal action.
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.
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?
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.
Complete ROM collections were, and probably still are, available for most old systems as torrents and on usenet.
Emulators are usually not stolen and are just reverse engineered.
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?)
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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.
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.
Deleted Comment
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 ?
Can you elaborate? I see no reason why that wouldn't be the case.
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.
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.
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
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.
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?
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"
How on earth can they claim that the developers of Yuzu are responsible for copying done by their users?
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.
That's the whole point of court.
https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/1201
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.