Here’s how the makers of the “Suyu” Switch emulator plan to avoid getting sued

nanoUFO@sh.itjust.worksmod to Games@sh.itjust.works – 328 points –
Here’s how the makers of the “Suyu” Switch emulator plan to avoid getting sued
arstechnica.com
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Either emulation is legal and you're therefore okay with devs getting payment for tgeir labor or it's illegal and they need to keep as low a profile as they can

I hate people who try to be on both sides

The monetisation part wasn't what fucked them over, it was merely what made their more illicit activities worse.

The Yuzu team were using leaks to tweak their code, namely the ToTK leak.

IP law is at it's core about monetization and developer compensation. The legality of emulation absolutely hinges on whether or not the alleged infringement is monetized.

The legality of emulation absolutely hinges on whether or not the alleged infringement is monetized.

You are absolutely mistaken. See Sony's lawsuits against Connectix and Bleem!, which were both commercial products, and Sony lost every lawsuit they filed against them.

I don't know where you and the other thousands of people parroting this online are getting this from, but it is not true and never has been.

The legality of emulation absolutely hinges on whether or not the alleged infringement is monetized.

Sony lost all of their suits against Bleem!, sorry but it's not illegal to monetize an emulator. The rampant piracy they were engaging in and essentially promoting is what fucked them. Including using leaks to test their emulator against and patch issues with games that hadn't been released yet. There's been talk that they also had a ROM stash on their discord.

Nope. There have been monetised emulators before that have been deemed legal (see Bleem!)

Also if you break copyright law, the rights holder can come after you regardless if you are making money or not.

I agree but pay walling features is just asking for trouble, I should of specified what I meant with pateron.

The features weren't exactly paywalled, as the source code was always available. They merely provided beta builds to patreons, that were also available free of charge by someone else [1].

[1] https://github.com/pineappleEA/pineapple-src/releases

Selling emulators is legal, as far as we know (been a while since the last ruling). If it's true what others have pointed out, that yuzu devs were distributing copyrighted material in their public discord and talking open about privacy, then Nintendo has support for their argument that yuzu was intentionally designed to circumvent copy protection and purposely facilitates piracy.

Isn't pineapple just stealing the builds from pateron and did they release the current source code or did that get released after pateron build went public. I didn't really keep track of it.

You're likely right, it seems like they made use of the code being open-source and distributed it freely after getting access through patreon. Each commit is quite big with all the source code changes of the specific early access build.