Nintendo is going after the developers of the open source switch emulator Yuzu

PropaGandalf@lemmy.world to Open Source@lemmy.ml – 637 points – How strong is Nintendo’s legal case against Switch-emulator Yuzu?
arstechnica.com

Seriously what is this? Nintendo argues that by instructing users how to extract the prod.keys from their own switch the yuzu developers are essencially infringing on the DMCA.

So what? Now you can't even freely use your own property anymore because it goes against the design intentions of some big company that just want's to milk their users?

Nintendo goes directly after this argument in its lawsuit, arguing that buying a Switch game only means you "have Nintendo's authorization to play that single copy on an unmodified Nintendo Switch console."

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Were they sleeping for almost a decade now? Doesn't the prod keys users extract belong to them? Fuck capitalism

This is Nintendo's point, making use of the prod keys goes against the DMCA

If Nintendo can prove that the primary purpose of Yuzu is to circumvent Nintendo's encryption, there is a very real and very scary chance they could win the lawsuit.

17 USC §1201 (a)(2)

No person shall manufacture, import, offer to the public, provide, or otherwise traffic in any technology, product, service, device, component, or part thereof, that—

(A) is primarily designed or produced for the purpose of circumventing a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title;

(B) 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; or

(C) is marketed by that person or another acting in concert with that person with that person’s knowledge for use in circumventing a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title.

It's less about being right and more about Yuzu devs willing to spend a million dollars to defend themselves and risk a tens of millions of dollars ruling against them. The best case Yuzu will have is winning and court costs. Worse case is owing God knows how much to Nintendo. The system is bullshit.

The system is absolutely bullshit. If this makes it into a courtroom, the odds will likely be even further stacked against Yuzu. The chance of getting a judge that goes out of his/her way to understand the technical arguments is extremely low, and it's a lot easier to argue that unauthorized decryption is bypassing something than it is to argue that software needing to do it to work isn't primarily designed to do it.

Unless the EFF steps in and bankrolls Yuzu, the most realistic case here is that they settle out of court and Nintendo gets exactly what they want.

I'm no lawyer so I could be completely off-base, but I think the existence of homebrew can make all 3 points defensible, depending on what evidence exists about their primary intent being breaking the DRM. If they have posted publicly things like "this patch should bypass DRM for this particular game" then they would be screwed, but posts like "supports/extends this feature so we can better emulate the functionality in this particular game" should be fine? At least if I understand the precedent set by the Connectix ruling in addition to the wording of what you pasted?

No you misunderstood, when you bought your Switch you didn't buy the hardware and the software on it, you only bought the right to use the hardware and software. It still belongs to Nintendo, and you better watch out you do nothing bad with it!

The thing is, Apple already went through the same lawsuit against jailbreaking a while back and lost. I don’t think Nintendo is going to like where this goes.

They're not betting on winning. They're betting on Yuzu developers being too poor to fight back