Nintendo is suing the makers of the Switch emulator Yuzu, claims 'There is no lawful way to use Yuzu'
Nintendo is suing the makers of the Switch emulator Yuzu, claims 'There is no lawful way to use Yuzu'
Nintendo says Yuzu played a large role in encouraging piracy of The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom.
Nintendo is suing the makers of the Switch emulator Yuzu, claims 'There is no lawful way to use Yuzu'::Nintendo of America is suing the maker of the Nintendo Switch emulator Yuzu, saying it "unlawfully circumvents the technological measures" that prevent Switch games from being played on othe
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not sure if they have a case, even if lawful uses of it are very rare, it doesn't mean the software itself is illegal (pretty sure this kind of thing has been settled in court before)
At least here in the states reverse engineering is totally legal. So generally emulators are legal to build. That said Nintendo can and will make their life difficult regardless of whether or not the emulator itself is taken down
This time around, Nintendo is arguing that by using
prod.keys, Yuzu is a copyright protection circumvention product in violation of 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.
The reverse engineering protection under the DMCA only applies to 17 USC §1201 (a)(1)(A), so there's a very real and very scary possibility of Nintendo winning this one and setting a precedent if they can convince a judge that Yuzu's is primarily for DRM circumvention.
Yuzu doesn't ship with prod.keys. You need to provide them from your legally ripped switch. And the guides outline that (https://yuzu-emu.org/help/quickstart/#dumping-decryption-keys). Nintendo needs to go after sites that provide those keys, not Yuzu...
Yuzu doesn't provide them... Yuzu goes out of it's way to tell you how to get them legally. I'm not sure that Yuzu has circumvented anything.
Nintendo could have a claim against tools like Hekate, since that's the tool that has to decrypt stuff to dump it. But I'm not sure that would fly either.
The interesting part of this lawsuit is that it doesn't matter whether Yuzu provides
prod.keysor not. Nintendo is going after them for using the keys to decrypt things, framing the emulator itself as being a Switch DRM circumvention tool.
That‘s the thing with huge, shitty corporations. Even when they know they‘re absolutely in the wrong, they can still go after the small fishes and make their lives hell.
To give another example, LEGO has been flooding small toy sellers in Germany with cease and desist letters for selling sets from competitors that might look like knock-offs to some, but are perfectly legal because LEGO does not own the brick system. And of course they would never go after Amazon for doing the exact same. Only small sellers that are ruined if they can‘t scrape the money together for a proper legal defense.
Shouldn't it be unnecessary to spend on defense if there have been dozens of similar cases with the same result?
I mean not existing laws, just possible optimization against such kind of abuse.
Missing knowledge is probably the problem. Either from small sellers that don't know that they'll win, or from lawyers that don't offer to work pro bono for the same reason.
There have been cases where small sellers lost even though the really really shouldn‘t have by any means. But show a german judge in their 50s a gundam and a transformer and they‘ll say they look identical and it‘s plagiarism. LEGO being a huge name tends to win the most ridiculous cases here sadly.
OK, if in theory IP can be defended (I wouldn't agree still), in practice it just should be abolished (except for falsifying authorship being illegal).
What worries me is they think they have a case. Nintendo isn't dumb. And they have known about Yuzu for a long time. Something must have changed recently that made them think this would be worth it.
Just being an expensive pain to the developer dissuades future developers.
Why now then? Why not a couple years ago when Valve teased that you could use Yuzu on the Steam Deck?
They do specify cite the Tears of the Kingdom release and increasing revenue to Yuzu, maybe that motivated them more.
Anyway I don’t mean they certainly have no case. We'll see.
That was 9 months ago. Still odd that it took so long.
Nintendo has lost this type of case before. Their strategy is usually to drain the defendant of cash.