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...
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.
I would guess that they settled because they would go bankrupt fighting it. You have no idea if you and their legal team are in agreement, as far as I can tell. Feel free to comment with proof to refute my guess, otherwise my guess is as good as yours.
You have absolutely no idea what you are talking about. Saying your opinion must be correct because Nintendo made an unfounded legal assertion and a small emulator dev team settled rather than lose even more money battling their army of lawyers is like saying everyone ever shot by the police must have been a life-threatening danger to them because they wouldn’t have been shot otherwise. There is legal precedence in the US that emulators are legal because unless they’re made with leaked or stolen proprietary data there’s no reason for them to be with current law.
Nintendo’s ToS is not the law. I don’t know why you think that.
Lol I’m sorry you don’t like corporate IP law. I don’t love it either, I’m only maturely and realistically acknowledging reality.
You’re right I don’t know yzu’s thoughts, but we can see their actions. You don’t fuck with large IPs without readiness to back it up, so it was foolish for yuzu to be dancing on this.
Clearly the nuance of the hardware extraction made it a target of Nintendos lawyers.
If you wrre so sure this project was just like the “legal” emulators then we wouldn’t be here would we?
Reality is that who has more money wins, not that Nintendo’s claims are necessarily legitimate.