Nintendo is suing the creators of Switch emulator Yuzu

bozo@lemmy.world to Games@lemmy.world – 508 points –
Nintendo Accuses Console-Emulator of Hacking Mario Kart, Zelda
news.bloomberglaw.com

Nintendo's full case filing


https://twitter.com/stephentotilo/status/1762576284817768457/

"NEW: Nintendo is suing the creators of popular Switch emulator Yuzu, saying their tech illegally circumvents Nintendo's software encryption and facilitates piracy. Seeks damages for alleged violations and a shutdown of the emulator.

Notes 1 million copies of Tears of the Kingdom downloaded prior to game's release; says Yuzu's Patreon support doubled during that time. Basically arguing that that is proof that Yuzu's business model helps piracy flourish."

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God I hate Nintendo, I hate them so goddamn much it's impossible to find words to express myself.

There are so many things that add up over time. I wouldn’t say I hate them just yet, but I‘be stopped buying their products. The way they go about their business just rubs me the wrong way. If the only way to try to communicate that is disengaging from any of their offerings, be it games or the new switch. Yea, I’m out.

I feel the same. They are really disgusting , greedy and shitty company. I would not spend a single cent on their products.

Why?

Coz they're assholes.

sues emulator-devs - but puts old roms onto their own products (mini nintendo etc. contained roms that "pirates" had distributed online for years)

never lowers the prices of their games

sues everyone left and right - like Palworld-developers

They issue takedowns on youtube channels for including nintendo game-music or gameplay

and probably more reasons

They didn't sue Palworld's creators, but that's the exception to the norm.

This is an excellent comment! All these haters up in here but seldom few list why. I think it's because their arguments wouldn't hold up, so they don't voice them. Just pure rage (useless)

Funny how OP just explained above you, and id wager a good chunk of us feel the way he does. The real question is, why would you condone their actions?

I don't condone anything necessary. What I do do is I buy their games, play them on their systems, and have fun. I see you guys in here talking about pirating their games, not having fun, and not buying shit. What, I should condone that?! Get out of here.

This is a thread about Nintendo suing a completely legal Emulator. I do believe you're the one who should "get out of here", if you're going to say Nintendo has every right to do this, when everyone else here disagrees.

OP of the comment I replied to explained nothing. So I don't know what you're talking about, unless you're just making stuff up. Their comment was nothing but pure rage, and it got a lot of support, much of which couldn't explain their rage either.

Edit: I see a comment above mine, but when I made my reply there were no other comments. Same time.

If you have more than a couple of neurons you don't need me to explain why I hate Nintendo, unless you're a corporate bootlicker who thinks Nintendo can do no wrong. If you really can't fathom why anyone would hate them, then all you gotta do is Google "Nintendo anticonsumer" and you'll have reading material for the whole week.

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the funniest shit about the paperowrk is that nintendo indirectly says nintendo is doing illegal work because they claim a video game emulator is a piece of software that allows users to unlawfully play pirated video games that were published for a specific console on a general purpose device.

they either have to say NSO/Nes/Snes classic are not emulation, or admit their definition of emulators is not the universally accepted definition of it, else Nintendo just Claimed Nintendo is serving up and charging for an unlawful service that is NSO.

FWIW you can lawfully play pirated games, so that means nothing.

That’s a funny one too me, because they are the original source when you dig your way down, so how are they doing anything wrong there?

Yeah it’s someone else’s work… which isn’t there’s anyways… so isn’t it always nintendos then?

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That's rather clear evidence that they dumped their own ROM and distributed that. Since they own the rights to that ROM, they're not distributing it illegally though. They can dump and distribute their ROMs all they want; they own the rights to them.

I'm no legal expert but Nintendo's argument seems to surround a video game emulator being a tool whose primary use is to facilitate illegal circumvention of DRM and piracy. Nintendo's use of emulation for a legal means to resell their games on another platform, could suggest otherwise. The possible use of a ROM illegally distributed by a 3rd party as inputs in a legitimate Nintendo emulator (though Nintendo denies this) could help separate the issues between ROMs and emulation, because Nintendo's emulator isn't used for piracy.

Nintendo could use a copy of the freely available Yuzu to emulate Switch games on their rumored Switch 2, if they were so inclined, and it would be a legitimate use case.

I cannot even come up with a way to express how goddamn hilarious that is!!

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I really want a real explanation on how I’ve caused Nintendo financial harm by format shifting my legally owned games. Especially considering I pay for NSO. At some point there has to be precedent that a pirated download does not equal a lost sale and that the individuals are responsible for the infringement and not the tools.

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Emulators are not illegal. Fuck off Nintendo.

18 million copies sold and they're pulling this bullshit. Fuck Nintendo at this point.

They could have sold 19 million copies though. Won’t someone think of the billion dollar corporations?

I feel like a large number of the people pirating wouldn't have bought the game even if it was their only option. Then there's people who pirated and bought the game both. Unrealized profit is not the same as losing money.

But the IP lobby sucessfully got that idea to the courts. In my country if you are caught torrenting a series episode just for 10 seconds, the courts accept the idea, that you spread like a hundred copies of the IP to people who would have definetely bought it otherwise, so you now owe the IP holder 1000 €.

It is complete horseshit

I think the majority of these is people just downloading it to see if it works for 2 hours and never touch it again lol

Yeah I don't have a switch, and I'm not about to start it when the second one is near us.

I wouldn't have bought the stuff I pirated If I couldn't have pirate it.

Surely people downloaded BOTW more times than TOTK over the 5+ years Yuzu has been around.

What's more, is that from these passages, it sounds like Nintendo even wants backups of games you have lawfully purchased to constitute copyright violation and made illegal (because they have to bypass encryption, therefore violating DMCA). I'm not fluent in legalese though, so correct me if I'm misinterpreting:

These passages imply the writers of them lack basic computer literacy and don't even understand Nintendo's own systems.

  • "copied the game ROMs into Yuzu" Yuzu is not a VM or other container and the ROMs are simply stored on disk in their original dumped form... Yuzu doesn't "store" or "contain" any games.

  • "any copy not on an authorized cartridge" LOL! What about games downloaded from your own digital marketplace, then?

What about a game you downloaded from Nintendo eShop and stored on an external SD card, which is a standard and well supported storage method on Switch? Is that SD card an "authorized cartridge"?

“copied the game ROMs into Yuzu” Yuzu is not a VM or other container and the ROMs are simply stored on disk in their original dumped form… Yuzu doesn’t “store” or “contain” any games.

ROMs are indeed copied "into Yuzu". They must be loaded into Yuzu's memory in order for Yuzu to execute their code or render their assets. In copyright law, even loading something to memory constitutes a "copy".

Also, almost every emulator is a VM; do you think those ARM instructions are running on your x86 processor and its desktop OS kernel natively?

I thought Yuzu was actually a dynamic recompiler? I remember this practice started in the days of N64 emulation, and these tools are more like debuggers than like VMs. So in this case, ROMs may only be copied "into Yuzu" byte by byte, not stored as a block in memory. At this point it's really semantics, but that's what the lawyers are supposed to figure out, right?

Unlike older emulators, Switch emulators don't even support saving the emulator state, and their savegame data is stored right on the native filesystem. I believe they are actually more like Wine, and remember, Wine Is Not an Emulator.

Yuzu does recompile some parts during runtime by using a JIT, but the rest is still emulated.

You can't compare them to Wine, since Wine acts as a compatibility layer by translating OS specific calls, but it does not translate between instruction sets.

Thanks for clarifying, I only have a casual knowledge of Yuzu internals and had been led to believe the ARM was translated rather than emulated.

The performance is honestly incredible for software emulating a different instruction set.

The authorized cartridge thing would hopefully be ignored due to several other times Nintendo tried to stop developers like Tengen from bypassing their licensing system and developing their own carts for the NES (you know those weird ones that were usually blue or black? Those were "illegal" in Nintendo's eyes but they lost every single case they took against them to try and stop them from being made).

It says "not on an authorized cartridge or console", the latter would cover legitimately downloaded games. Agree on the other points though.

Ah corporate Lawyer BS, pointing out what they want to be true and not pointing out the other. ROMs are legal under existing Copywrite laws under archival laws in the USA (117) and backup laws in Canada (29.24). The Americans have a bit more of a restricted way of using their archives, but that's not needs to be argued here, as it appears that Nintendo is blaming Yuzu for actions of the general consumer. It'll be like blaming your Network provider for allowing a user to download a movie, both legally and illegally, thus they should be punished for both actions.

I also love that Nintendo isn't not stating it's illegal here, just that it's infringing because it's not authorized.

It'll be like blaming your Network provider for allowing a user to download a movie

Which, by the way it was recently ruled in the US that ISPs can't be punished for that. article source

Nintendo is blaming Yuzu for actions of the general consumer

If you read the dmca, that's something you can do. Making tools that enable others to break copyright protection is specifically disallowed. Which is why it's one of the more insidious copyright laws

However, the thing is that Yuzu doesn't do that. Yuzu doesn't include any form of tooling that breaks encryption, facilitates ROM dumping or offer downloads of Nintendo Copyrighted software. They aren't facilitating it, the user has to provide all of that chain of the emulation on their own. Hopefully this would be obvious to a judge.

Yuzu doesn’t include any form of tooling that breaks encryption

You cannot state that with certainty. That's the problem.

Yuzu does indeed include a method to use the Switch's production keys (which you must dump yourself) to decrypt the games. Whether this constitutes effective DRM is not a question that can easily be answered and must be decided by a court on a case-by-case basis.
This will be what the case will hinge on: Is Ninty's scheme effective DRM?

I would say no because symmetric encryption with a publicly known key may aswell be no encryption at all but that's not my decision to make.

They aren’t facilitating it, the user has to provide all of that chain of the emulation on their own.

Um, no. The emulator is doing the decryption on its own. All the user does is provide the prod keys and unmodified ROM.

Yuzu itself doesn't provide tools to dump keys and Roms from the Switch. The user has to procure them, or the means to dump them, themselves. Thus Yuzu doesn't facilitates DRM circumvention. The user has to solve that part on their own. They do provide guides for how to do it on their website. But Yuzu themselves don't make or distribute the tooling, and Yuzu the software is incapable of doing it.

The dumps are just that: Dumps; 1:1 copies.

The tools don't decrypt anything; that happens within Yuzu. Why else would users need to provide the prod keys to Yuzu?

To dump the keys, third party tools rely on DRM circumventing sploits. You essentially have to hack your own device, certain versions of Switch and certain software updates are no longer susceptible. But it remains that Yuzu doesn't do any of that. Those tools and sploits were developed by others.

it decrypts games using your console keys though? i've seen mention of that in their docs so i'm not sure, but yeah if it does that, it's similar to things that decrypt blurays. feasibly against the dmca because of how broad the dmca is.

I remember a video of SomeOrdinaryGamers talking about a case where a company (I think it was Nintendo) was arguing that making a copy of games you own yourself should be illegal. The whole case was just that. Probably something from the last 4 months or so.

Anyway, regarding 124, a judge with a working brain would say "There's nothing here stating that it was Yuzu who allowed, or facilitated, anyone to obtain said reproductions."

  1. The copies were not obtained through Yuzu. Yuzu is not a site where the roms are, or even links to any of them. Sure, it exists solely to emulate nintendo's current hardware, but that's not the problem.

Sigh. If only law and justice worked based on factual evidence and logic, instead of interpretative contortionism...

Typical Nintendo move. So sad to see Yuzu possibly going down this way. Even looks like Nintendo might win this one. I'm just gonna download the entire source from GitHub just in case.

I wish this would just go full hydra mode if it goes down though. Start popping up new anonymous accounts releasing the source code everywhere.

Yuzu may go down, but Nintendo hasn't learned the lessons of the Streisand effect and the hydra effect. The code is open source. 10 more projects will pop up the day after Yuzu goes down (IF it goes down.)

There’s also still Ryujinx

Shhh. The community always seems to forget this one.
Let's keep it like that so Nintendo lawyers don't pay as much attention to it.

Booo! Nintendo sucks! This was decided 30 years ago. Emulation is not illegal.

Yeah and none of the switch emulator stuff I've seen comes bundled with the firmware. You have to track that down separately or dump your own from your Switch.

This sure looks like like a slapp suit to me.

It's good we are all clear, nintendo isn't arguing that. They are arguing a case about copyright infringement and being in violation of the dmca

It is not illegal to make copies of games you own and play them on an emulator. That is what was decided by the courts. Nintendo is trying to make that illegal.

They’re using the DMCA to say that because Yuzu lets someone circumvent their encryption (which is illegal, but shouldn’t be), that’s the same as Yuzu circumventing their encryption.

That’s basically like saying VLC should be illegal because it has the capability of copying a DVD.

They’re using the DMCA to say that because Yuzu lets someone circumvent their encryption (which is illegal, but shouldn’t be), that’s the same as Yuzu circumventing their encryption.

Yes, yes they are. That's how the DMCA works. It's mental.

That’s not how the DMCA works, or tons of other software would be illegal. It’s illegal to circumvent copy protection under the DMCA (something I wholeheartedly disagree with), but it’s not illegal to make something that can be used to circumvent copy protection.

In fact, there are exemptions to that provision and one of them states that circumventing copy protection in order to play a video game using assistive technologies is legal.

It’s illegal to circumvent copy protection under the DMCA (something I wholeheartedly disagree with), but it’s not illegal to make something that can be used to circumvent copy protection.

It is explicitly illegal to produce any thing whose purpose it is to circumvent DRM:

(1) 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 protection afforded by a technological measure that effectively protects a right of a copyright owner under this title in a work or a portion thereof;

I'm telling you, that law is mental.

In fact, there are exemptions to that provision and one of them states that circumventing copy protection in order to play a video game using assistive technologies is legal.

Could you point that specific exception in the law? I can't find it.

Link for convenience: https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/PLAW-105publ304/pdf/PLAW-105publ304.pdf

The exceptions are handled by the Library of Congress and go through a renewal process every three years. Here’s the one from 2021:

https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/FR-2021-10-28/pdf/2021-23311.pdf

The accessibility use exception is on the last page, middle of the page, paragraph labeled 21.

It’s illegal to make something that’s sole purpose is to circumvent copyright. Yuzu does not have that sole purpose, and doesn’t include the code necessary (prod.keys) to even accomplish it.

The actual text for reference:

Video games in the form of computer programs, embodied in lawfully acquired physical or downloaded formats, and operated on a general-purpose computer, where circumvention is undertaken solely for the purpose of allowing an individual with a physical disability to use software or hardware input methods other than a standard keyboard or mouse.

That explicitly only applies to physically disabled people. Yuzu is not specifically targetted at providing a different input method (at all) and certainly not solely for the physically disabled.

That exception is not relevant to this case.

I didn’t say it was. I used it as an example of when circumventing copy protection is allowed under the DMCA.

They’re using the DMCA to say that because Yuzu lets someone circumvent their encryption (which is illegal, but shouldn’t be),

Yes. That's what I'm saying. That's what I said.

Yuzu is not infringing on their copyright, some of the users are. Sue the users.

unfortunately, that isn't how the DMCA works

Can you point me to the provision you’re talking about?

(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. (3) As used in this subsection— (A) to “circumvent a technological measure” means to descramble a scrambled work, to decrypt an encrypted work, or otherwise to avoid, bypass, remove, deactivate, or impair a technological measure, without the authority of the copyright owner; and (B) a technological measure “effectively controls access to a work” if the measure, in the ordinary course of its operation, requires the application of information, or a process or a treatment, with the authority of the copyright owner, to gain access to the work.

Yes, so distributing the code necessary to perform the decryption is illegal. That’s why you have to hack an actual switch to get the code necessary to perform the decryption (prod.keys). All Yuzu is doing is running that code through an AES library to get the game and emulating a Switch to play it. You can’t make AES libraries illegal just because they can be used to decrypt copy protection.

It’s the same with DVD decryption. VLC is not illegal because it doesn’t include the codes used to decrypt DVDs. Once you have those codes, VLC can copy a DVD for you.

No, it's broader than that. Providing a mechanism is enough. Yes, this is functionally making maths illegal, and yes, this is a complaint we've had with the dmca for 20 years.

Providing the keys is against dmca, as is Providing the tooling that specifically breaks the rights management. This is just the shitty way Americans made the copyright system.

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I love YUZU and it’s wonderful…

…but if they didn’t have a Patreon they’d have a better stance

You are being downvoted but reminder to everyone that the public Yuzu is way behind on updates and compatibility, they sell access to their most recent version via their patreon. Something that Ryujinx does not do, it purely is a donation and nothing more.

You can download and view the latest Yuzu source code for free and do practically whatever you want with it (GPLv3), including building and running it.

What paying via Patreon provides you is access to early access builds of the software. You're paying for the convenience of them compiling the latest version of the software for you.

You can even get all the latest EA builds as .exe files on the Yuzu PineappleEA GitHub!

You can get all the latest Yuzu EA builds for free on their GitHub

But the fact that they’re kinda “selling” access… wait, why exactly DO they “sell” access even? They might not have as much legal trouble if they didn’t do that.

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Don't know how good a case Nintendo has here unless it can prove that Yuzu itself contains proprietary code that allows the ROMs to be played. If the decryption is being done on the ROMs' end, then that's just another reason to go after the ones dumping and distributing the ROMs. Nintendo couldn't even substantially stop Dolphin, and Dolphin actually had a decryption key straight from Wii firmware in it. Good luck to them, but they're likely going for the wrong legal target. Taking down what ROM sites they can (which would legally be a lot easier than the emulator makers) is just getting rid of drops in the ocean of the ROMs' spread, but they're the target Nintendo should be going after.

They don't, they just want legal money drain u til they cave. Nintendo is abusive af.

Somebody correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think Yuzu has any proprietary code. Folks have to go to other websites to download the Switch firmware and keys needed to play games.

That's not really enough to be not in violation. For example, vlc can't natively decrypt blurays. This is because both its not bundled with the decryption library nor the decryption keys. Vlc out of the box can not decrypt blurays.

If yuzu can, if you provide some keys, eh that might be enough for them to win. It's certainly not enough to push nintendo away. You unfortunately need to be extremely careful around the dmca stuff.

You don't just need to provide keys, but an entire firmware dump. Yuzu contains no executable Switch code AFAIK

Not claiming it does. It seems like it might have the tooling to break copyright enforcement if you give it the right keys is the problem.

It really depends on the kind of encryption being used. I'm pretty sure if it's a common algorithm that logic does not stand.

they basically have a weak argument because they claim yuzu gives you links to the tools to get the keys to enable piracy.

indeed. they should sue fitgirl instead, who distributes an emulator, with an included rom and keys etc. ready to play

Nope, you have to obtain the decryption keys yourself - I spent hours hunting around online for a set of console keys and firmware dump to get the emulator working on my steam deck.

If you own a moddable switch you can dump the keys legally, but I don't plan on doing that any time soon.

As the sweetest revenge maybe someone should leak all Switch games and DLCs into the public Internet.

I sincerely hope that Yuzu developers don't end up like Gary Bowser and have their income garnished for life by Nintendo.

As much as I dislike Nintendo and wish Yuzu devs all the best I'd like to point out that Bowser wasn't some innocent guy who was caught by big bad company - Moonie has a video that goes into specifics about his involvement with a pirate enterprise worth a shitton of money.

Other than that yeah, I hope they can survive this situation. I wonder if Ryujinx devs are next.

Isn't moonie the dude who shit talked Karl Jobst and ended up deleting his video because Jobst called him out on how wrong he was on pretty much everything and how terrible his research was. Like literally just watched a couple YouTube videos level research? Don't know if I can trust someone who would fuck up THAT bad. I get people make mistakes sometimes but that's just complete negligence especially for someone with an audience that big.

No idea, I'm only familiar with some of his videos so can't say one way or another. Is there any place I could read about it?

Edit: Also, I believe the video I mentioned has links to specific legal documents surrounding this case so it should be easy to fact check. Still, I'm not trying to whitewash the situation you wrote about would love to learn more if it happened.

Edit 2: A'ight, while I didn't have time for a deep dive I did manage to confirm that situation happened.

I sucks since the videos I've seen seemed reasonably researched and now I'm wondering whether that was a one-time screw up or a normal thing that simply wasn't caught more often. Guess I'll try to look into it more when I'm free.

The video by Karl Jobst himself on the matter is pretty informative and has proof to back up all of his claims. Iirc moonie also quoted legal statue and stuff on his video but was rebuked my Karl as well, don't quote me on this though, I'll have to rewatch that video to confirm. Here's the link. Moonie did end up apologizing in the end and Karl did tell his viewers right off the back to not harass Moonie.

If you like LONG form reasonably researched videos about all sorts of topics check out Hbomberguy. He's great.

Iirc moonie also quoted legal statue and stuff on his video but was rebuked my Karl as well

Yeah, that's why I'm planning to look into whether that was a screw up or not, thanks for the link too.

I'm familiar with HBG but it's always good to mention him.

He's not innocent and went to jail for it, but does it warrant garnishing his income for life? I think they went too far with that.

Oh no, I completely agree no one should be completely screwed over piracy. Just wanted to add some context as I saw a lot of discussion about him ending with "poor innocent dude" without digging into details. That's all.

Nintendo has a lot of problems that should absolutely be called out. I hope me trying to add more details didn't imply otherwise.

They are taking his income for life, that's an insane overreach specially for a big successful company like Nintendo, and it didn't matter since the actual team behind it is back selling flashcarts that are even better than having to solder a chip.

Yes, it is insane. That case is also a great showcase of how trying to make example out of a single guy doesn't really work since, as you mentioned, rest of the team is still doing their thing.

I'd like to think (well, hope anyway) that no one looks at Bowser's story and thinks "yeah, that's a reasonable conclusion".

maybe if their games went on sale more..

"Fuck you, here's a switch port for a Wii U game. It's $15 more expensive than the original release because fuck you that's why."

-Nintendo

Maybe if emulating the game wasn't often better than playing it on the only hardware the game is made for...

Yup. I was in a second hand game shop (cex) a month or so ago and most switch games were only 10 quid cheaper than the e shop. Mario and legend of Zelda where something like 50 pounds. That's because those games don't actually drop in price either psychically or on the eShop much.

I've been holding off on jailbreaking my launch Switch until the next one is out, but I think the time has come.

EDIT: Aaand done. Biggest surprise so far is that there's a homebrew Pizza Tower port for it! This game really belongs on consoles.

RCM loader/jig is like $8

I've had one for years, waiting for when Nintendo dropped support. I'm not gonna give them any more money as far as the Switch is concerned, so no reason not to go for it now. A project for this weekend, maybe.

How can I donate to the Yuzu devs to fight Nintendo on this?

Brother.. Nintendo's net income last year was 3.1 BILLION dollars. There is no "fighting Nintendo".

Let's be real homie. Yuzu is done. Downvote me all you want after I post this.

As much as we all love Yuzu, the dev's had to have known this was coming.

I don't want to be one of those dudes that keeps harping on the "Nintendo should be FOR preserving old games". We all know Nintendo will continue to kick down ANYONE so much as glancing in their I.P. 's general direction.

Nintendo does what you Nintendon't want. Always.

Extreme capitalism stifles and suffocates innovation and preservation.

They didn't expect it to happen because of all of the landmark rulings in the past that emulators are inherently not illegal unless they provide bios to the end user. The only reason why Nintendo is acting now instead of years ago when Yuzu first hit the scene is because it's in basically a fully working state now and they somehow verified that 1,000,000 people downloaded TOTK. I suspect far more copies of BOTW and Mario Odyssey were downloaded prior.

The thing is whatever beef they might rightfully have with 1,000,000 people pirating TotK, it's not the emulator who's to blame. The ones who distributed pirated copies are. They are trying to pin it entirely on the wrong group, out of convenience/intimidation.

This is like suing a motorcycle company because a thief used one as a getaway vehicle.

I believe the issue is that Yuzu was patched to support TotK before TotK was released, which could suggest having used some proprietary code, or at least stuff that the devs shouldn't have had access to.

They could also make the argument that very few people would've downloaded the game if the emulator didn't exist or at least wasn't being patched to support a game before it releases.

They definitely didn't lose 1,000,000 sales. At the same time, I feel like it kind of crosses a line to be pirating a game before it's even supposed to be sold in stores.

I've heard people saying just the opposite. It couldn't run TotK before official release, and whoever made it run had to modify it independently (because it's an open source project)

Arguing that people wouldn't have downloaded it if not for the emulator, not only once again assigns blame to the wrong party ("if they didn't have motorcycles to get away they might not have stolen it"), but it overlooks that there are modded Switches that can run pirated copies too.

Pirating stuff before it's even out for sale is pretty sketchy, but Yuzu is not the one doing it. It simply lets people play copies they already have, including those they may have dumped themselves. Nintendo is encroaching on customer ownership rights by trying to argue even doing that is infringing.

edit: Maybe my analogy is lacking because one might argue that they rely on the tool to make use of the illicitly acquired thing, which is not necessarily true for a motorcycle. But if we say instead "the bluray player is to blame that people shoplifted" or "the media player is to blame that people downloaded pirated movies", then I believe it should be even more clear that they are accusing the wrong party.

The only way for Nintendo's reasoning to work is if they try to argue that not even someone who dumps their own roms and extracts their own keys from their own console ought to have the right to do it. Which would be disastrous for customer rights and preservation. Nintendo cannot be allowed to get away with that.

I've said this before and I'll say it now: I bet most of those 1,000,000 people would have never bought a copy of the game anyway.

Pretty much, piracy are never lost sales. Either the person is extremely passionate and loving of the product so they'll buy it anyway regardless if they pirated it or not; or they were just tasting the flavor of the week and never intended to buy it under any circumstance; or they are extremely poor/their economy and context doesn't allow them to access the product legitimately, so they wouldn't be capable of buying it even if they wanted; or the product is not legitimately available anymore, so pirating is the only way of accessing it.

Piracy is never a lost sale.

I bought the game and I still considered emulating it just to run it at higher res.

This is something that makes the Nintendo numbers bullshit. how many of those 1mill downloads were people who already owned/purchased the game? How many of those people don't even have a switch and would have never purchased the game to begin with?

I'm thinking of it so I can play older patches of the game.

Out of interest, at a high level, why?

Did they patch out interesting exploits/speed run things?

I wonder if Nintendo released their games outside of their own ecosystem if that number would still be as high

I haven't yet. Sounds like I should add to that statistic.

Extreme capitalism stifles and suffocates innovation and preservation.

It's an inherent contradiction of capitalist competition. Somehow everyone is supposed to be competitive but noone is supposed to win for capitalism to "work". Otherwise it's considered a monopoly and "anti-competitive".

Ironically this requires collaboration.

I had a feeling my adjective was too much.

The way you explain it makes me picture an ouroboros where, instead of the snake eating it's ass, it's the ass eating the snake.

I kind of doubt this because Yuzu doesn't actually have any of the cryptographic key material that Nintendo could have a valid reason to sue over. They only offer instructions to dump keys, which has to be argued is causing harm because its completely legal to do on consoles and games that you own.

Dolphin ships with the Wii's AES key but Nintendo never pursued them in court.

Most likely Nintendo won't get anywhere and only get Yuzu to remove some wiki pages and stuff which will make it slightly harder to use or slow down development by threatening more lawsuits.

Nintendo know this. What everyone seems to be missing is that defending yourself in lawsuits also costs money.

Apple does this shit all the time.

I'd like to seem them dump all those dollars in a legal battle they can't win. Imagine if they succeed with the judge. They will lose their audience.

Yuzu team is shit. Keep your money

You the pineappleEA guy? I love that I can have the patreon version for free with an easy updater thanks to the yuzu team stealing code from him and him having a vendetta.

Edit: I am dumb, of course the source code is out there. I have visited this repository a thousand times but my monkey brain can't remember what I ate for breakfast.

https://github.com/yuzu-emu/yuzu

Everyone download the hell out of it and never let this die.

~ ~ ~

If it isn't already open source, Yuzu team needs to get that shiz open source post-haste. Let's get that code absolutely everywhere.

When that popular manga app Tachiyomi got legal bonked, the bajillion forks of it kept some semblance of the original going.

I know there's money to be made and something like an emulator is considerably more complex than a book reading app/scraper, but it would at least give the project a chance of not dying forever.

there are already 3rd party repositories that come from yuzu. e.g Yuzu Pineapple is a repository that autocompiles the source code that yuzu puts out so that you dont have to sub to get early access builds prebuilt.

The legality of the emulation itself has long been established, but I've been concerned for a while that illegal DRM circumvention of the games themselves has been a viable legal avenue. Under the DMCA, even the process to dump your own legally-licensed games has arguably been in a legal grey area for a while now, with how they are locked down. If any method to playing the games become illegal, any unauthorized emulation of games becomes de facto illegal.

I'd cite legal precedent here, but there's been a substantial right-wing, pro-corporate shift in American courts over time. Who knows how this will go.

They might have a case if yuzu is actually decrypting switch software. That would be stupid of the developers, though. I would assume that they require you to provide decrypted games.

That's basically the only leg nintendo has to stand on here, but nintendo can out lawyer you into the poor house regardless.

AFAIK rooted Switch consoles are used to decrypt the games and Yuzu just tries to execute whatever nonencrypted Switch binary. Unless Nintendo can prove that either the Yuzu developers themselves are behind ripping commercial Switch games or directly colluded with the rippers, they'd have a hard time to actually win. That said, regular people with normal income levels will probably just sign everything because a prolonged lawsuit is about just bankrupting them, not being ruled the win by the judge.

From their own guide

yuzu starts with the error "Missing Derivation Components"

yuzu requires console keys to play your games. Please follow our Quickstart Guide to dump these keys and system files from your Nintendo Switch.

Their guide also talks about dumping games from your console so I'm not sure how far it goes, but if they want console keys they are likely decrypting something

Yuzu doesn't do any encryption breaking. The user is meant to use their Switch to dump their keys, which are legally owned by the user. Then it uses those legal keys to decrypt the ROMs by the exact normal method that the Switch itself uses. They were going based on precedent legal rulings about console emulation. Copying the decryption keys and making copies of the software for archival purposes have both been previously ruled to be perfectly legal for the enduser and don't constitute piracy. This suit will challenge that notion.

Then it uses those legal keys to decrypt the ROMs by the exact normal method that the Switch itself uses

this is the part where they circumvent the copyright protection, even if you do it "the same way" it's still not authorized, the DMCA is fairly broad about this stuff, one of the reasons it's so bad

Yet another reason I never buy anything from Nintendo. Fuck those fucks. On average only like 2 Nintendo games per console generation are ever any good anyway. They should be held responsible for all the e-waste they generate.

Shit like this is why I moved away from Nintendo for my gaming platform of choice.

But take heart, Nintendo, I'll try to make time to enjoy Nintendo first party games later on a pre-loaded cheap Chinese knock-off device.

Except, I definitely won't because Nintendo will definitely succeed in stuffing the genie back into the bottle, and preventing their games from being enjoyed on un-approved platforms in un-approved ways. /s

Maybe they should have named it Ryujinx or something else that sounds less phonetically like "you sue"