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 8 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.