Just last week, on Tuesday, February 26th, 2024, news broke out about the Yuzu emulator team being sued by none other than Nintendo themselves, with Nintendo claiming that the emulator apparently allowed users to play certain games early (due to street dates being broken) and also allowing...
If they went to trial they could have been blasted for way more. + Legal fees.
It’s a bummer, but don’t feel sorry for them. It was clear violation, they knew they were on thin ice, or should have known.
Violation of what?
Are you serious? You think the yuzu team is paying 2.4 mil for fun?
It’s quite clear that emulation of Nintendo’s private product is illegal and against tos.
Did I really need to explain that to you?
Edit you may have your opinion on IP law, but that’s just an opinion . There’s no way these devs didn’t know they were in a grey area, at minimum.
Nintendo’s ToS doesn’t mean anything to people who never agreed to it. Someone can buy a fusee-vulnerable Switch and use tools to dump the
prod.keysand legally-purchased cartridges without ever agreeing to a single thing.Yuzu absolutely went into a gray area with not exclusively using pre-decrypted ROMs. That’s where they opened themselves up to Nintendo’s argument in the lawsuit.
Using a digital product comes with a tos. When you turned on the console the first time you agreed to it. When you used the cloud services you agreed.
The point is that the hypothetical user never used the console’s ToS-encumbered software. Fusee bypasses the bootloader and jumps straight into a user-provided payload, which doesn’t have any terms attached to it. Those payloads are capable of dumping
prod.keysand the data off the cartridges to an SD card.I mean, yeah, sure. If you never ever actually booted the Switch OS or any games on your emulator, you were never subject ot the ToS. I would wager that’s a tiny minority of users though, no?
And are the cartridges not Nintendo IP?
They’re NAND chips containing encrypted games soldered to a PCB and connected to the console through a proprietary data transfer interface. A cartridge is a glorified SD card, and you don’t need to agree to any ToS to buy one second-hand.
I guess i, and Nintendo, and yuzu’s legal team disagree with Lemmy on the idea that all this hoop jumping is free and open to do. Cracking encrypted content on proprietary hardware made with the express purpose of being used on fixed hardware with explicit TOS certainly seems like a violation.
I bet the original packaging of the game carts spoke to this, but I bet the cart itself doesn’t.
It’s not.
What is illegal - and what got the Yuzu team who blindly ran into it like idiots despite people warning them about this since ~forever - is making bank from emulating others’ hardware.
In this case, Yuzu made so much money from their patreon that they created an LLC to handle the cash flow. That part in particular made it trivial for a rightsholder - like Nintendo - to show commercial purpose behind the Yuzu project and hence take its developers to court. It’s how they got import injunctions against stuff like the R4 cards, too. Showing commercial purpose is trivial when bloody Amazon is selling your bloody physical product. Or in this case, if there’s a whole LLC just to manage all the money you’re making and blowing on coke/hookers (I don’t even want to know how much money they siphoned off personally if Nintendo could instantly make them agree to >2 mil, they must have a lot of millions around).
That it is, but that’s only grounds for losing online access and shit. Not the same thing as being open to a broadside from Nintendo’s lawyers.
No, they were fully aware they were in fully illegal territory, IMO.
They have been warned about this frequently since they started their patreon, and recently there was some R4-like action with Switch emulator cards. Which again led to the whole commercial-vs-free discussion for emulators, and they doubled down on their approach and made a company.
IMO, what actually happened is that they set a ton of money aside (we can estimate they got 1.2mil, but I would estimated it at 2x++ that based on how quickly they accepted). They knew Nintendo would eventually sue them. They got the 2.4mil recompensation offer, this is significantly less than they actually made. And hid. So they’re instantly accepting it to “cash out” the rest.
I doubt it’s alot of millions. Their Patreon was earning 30’000$ per month.
It’s likely that being a company they can manage this in a way that one indvidual couldn’t.
I wouldn’t call it a clear violation of 17 U.S.C. 1201, but it was a plausible one. I do agree that they would have been blasted for legal fees trying to figure that part out, however.
Nintendo had a leg to stand on, but it was highly dependent on whether the judge would find an emulator’s primary purpose to be DRM prevention. A good judge that does research into the subject likely wouldn’t find it to be the case, since the primary purpose is emulation and decrypting game titles is only a small part of that. Ending up with a luddite or corporate shill judge is always a huge risk, though.
Japanese IP law IIRC, not american.
They sued under the DMCA, though?