Im not a lawyer, but is this really good news? Isnt this just setting a precedent that Nintendo can shake down any emulator developer for ~2.4m any time they feel like it? So small developers are basically screwed?

[–] bozo 69 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (2 children)

It's good news in the sense that this won't be setting a new legal precedent surrounding emulation. Nintendo's case argued that the means by which cryptographic keys were obtained was in violation of the DMCA, which is an untested angle that could have dire legal ramifications for many other emulators if it were upheld in court.

On top of this, the Yuzu devs were a bit too brazen with their attitude towards piracy, and after consulting their lawyers they must have realized they have no legal ground to stand on. Any other emulator that runs a tighter ship in regard to copyrighted material (like most do) wouldn't be in such trouble. Nintendo wouldn't have a case with almost all other emulators, Yuzu in particular was giving them a lot to work with.

[–] [email protected] 40 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Yeah.

The Yuzu devs were basically going to lose unless they got the most tech savvy judge/jury in existence AND all of Nintendo's lawyers had food poisoning for a few months straight.

But the Yuzu devs losing in an actual court case would create precedent that would be a lot harder for all the other, more cautious, devs to dance around.

So... yay for Goliath smacking the shit out of David? I guess?

[–] bozo 18 points 9 months ago (2 children)

Yeah, all things considered this might be the best case scenario for this to play out, short of Yuzu somehow winning in court. It sucks to see Yuzu shut down, but the risk of new legal precedent surrounding emulation was far more concerning. At least Yuzu's source code will still live on.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 9 months ago (2 children)

They removed the repo, but many people have archived it.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 9 months ago (3 children)

And that is literally what (the mechanisms that support) DMCA requests are for.

Github/Gitlab and the like will pretty much auto-nuke it the moment they get a claim and might even set up a filter to detect the repo.

Which will basically leave yuzu as dead/unsupported code that only exists on the sketchiest of sites (so the places that make Sourceforge look legit). And there will inevitably be people who get viruses because someone tainted the clone.

Also, I expect the yuzu source code to be even more radioactive than the nintendo leaks of the past few years. Anyone caught copying or referencing it are opening themselves up to massive liability.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 9 months ago

Does that make sense in terms of DMCA and yuzu tho? youtube-dl got taken down for DMCA reasons on GitHub a while ago, while that was pretty much just bs. I haven't looked too much into what yuzu does, but it seems like it's just an emulator without any tools you'd need to also get it to run, to get the game data and some Switch (DRM?) keys. That's comparable to browser cookies being used by youtube-dl to download websites' media.

Also (to me) it more looks like the yuzu devs themselves made stupid choices to promote piracy, not really including the actual app code though

[–] [email protected] 2 points 9 months ago

I guess you could also argue it's "sketchy" in the same way, but source code is just source code: it can easily be hosted anywhere, and is probably only marginally more risky than a fork adding malware and hosting it on github. Oh and for the record, sourceforge is pretty much legit again, and has been for a number of years.

If they do end up surviving I would expect it will happen quietly on a self-hosted git instance which will eventually become known as the official repo. But yeah, certainly there is a higher risk of malware and shadiness happening for the forseeable future.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago

You're missing that the Yuzu repository was not DMCA'd. The Yuzu team took down their own repository, most likely as part of the settlement

[–] [email protected] 7 points 9 months ago

Yeah, i archived it as soon as the news Nintendo were coming after them dropped.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 9 months ago

Hopefully it also gives emulator devs a push to separate out the ROM decrypting piece from future emulators and make them only work with decrypted roms. Then the decryption piece can just be shared under the table, and the biggest piece of development, the emulator, will be protected.

[–] Epzillon 10 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

I think this is the best outcome that could currently happen. If they got a ruling it's very possible that Nintendo would win. That would probably cascade through the entire emulation scene and bring down countless other projects.

(Disclaimer: I'm not American and I'm not very knowledgeable in the American court system. Feel free to correct/inform me if I'm misunderstanding or missing information on this statement.)

Edit: just realized they had to take everything down aswell, that very much sucks.

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