Honestly, I’m surprised this didn’t happen sooner. Emulating old hardware is one thing, but they have a current vested interest in their most recent console.
Still, Nintendo’s lawyers can rub spurge on their eyes, and I hope the Yuzu devs find a great lawyer (or better yet, are safely hidden behind some kind of digital or geopolitical veil).
“Nintendo sues” oh look it’s a day that ends in Y. The only person Nintendo isn’t dead set on suing is Nintendo.
Here’s you 937th remake of Super Mario Bros 2 that you can only rent, have a nice day.
And our online service is absolute trash but you’ll pay anyway to have a legal emulator until we also discontinue that for Super other garbage online service!
Don’t forget that they will hide behind arbitration to avoid paying up for knowing seeking shoddy consoles/controllers.
Oh don’t even get me started. Hall effect has been known since 1879, those JoyCons didn’t use it because it was cheaper to use shitty graphite. They literally went the cheap ass route because they didn’t even care.
That’s not even necessarily the issue. XBox and PS controllers also don’t use Hall effect. I’ve never had an xbox controller drift. You’d have to seriously abuse them for them to break. Nintendo isn’t just cheaping out on the tech but also on the build quality itself. But what do you expect from a company that sells a console that was obsolete when it was released, hardware wise. For the third time.
Gonna be real interesting how this plays out.
IANAL (and am not a lawyer) but the general takeaway of Sony vs Bleem was “emulation fine so long as you aren’t using proprietary code”. Hence why it is generally “find your own BIOS” and all that.
The nonsense about yuzu is facilitating piracy is going to be a mess. But I do wonder if Tears of the Kingdom is not going to be a problem. Because it was not at all hidden as to why Yuzu et al suddenly had a bunch of mysterious compatibility updates a day or two after the leaked roms went online.
Even the argument that the devs who worked on that had totally legit copies they got from Uncle Greg’s Game Store on 2nd street might get into a mess if nintendo argues those weren’t legitimately sold because they broke embargo date. And it is hard to argue those improvements were for people to play their own dumps.
So yeah. Gonna be real interesting (assuming this isn’t just an attempt to legal fee yuzu to death). Because if I were to put on my day job hat: Doing ANYTHING based on pre-release material is a huge no no since they only had access to it because people violated contracts with Nintendo’s distributors.
And… the more I look at this, the more I think the yuzu devs may have fucked it all up for the rest of us and it really depends on if nintendo’s lawyers drill in on that or continue for the broad reaching stuff.
This is a great point and yuzu may get burned for it. Hopefully, it’s not lost on developers of future emulators.
IANAL (and am not a lawyer)
Can we just take a second to say what utter bullshit it is that “facilitating piracy” is so allowed to be an argument?
How are we in this wacky world where rights holders get to say “what you built allows piracy, we demand total control over you”
I mean, like it or not, piracy is incredibly dark grey (if not outright black) in the eyes of the law. Its one of the reasons there is such a strong focus on “abandonware” and “oh, this is about digital preservation” in the various circles. It doesn’t fool anyone but it is at least a stronger protection than the old “Hey FBI. You aren’t allowed to look at my DC++ share” folder that people had back in the day.
I don’t play any Switch games and have never used Yuzu, but I just started donating to their Patreon. Hopefully they can afford to go to court over this. Nintendo can pound sand.
Same, I just signed up. Here’s the URL for anyone else interested:
https://www.patreon.com/yuzuteam
Fuck Nintendo.
Wow, fuck Nintendo. For well over a decade they didn’t give a shit about emulating old games. In fact, it was and is still the only way to play a lot of old games. Now nintendo is trying to use their shit flimsy online emulator as an excuse to claim IP right to 30 year old games they don’t give a shit about. Granted this is about the emulator itself, but doesn’t matter. Guess I won’t be buying the next switch console.
There’s a fairly big difference between “you’re making an emulator for a console we stopped selling anything for a decade ago” and “you are actively cutting into the sales of everything we are currently doing”
Frankly, Im not quite sure what anyone expected. Of course they were going to go after them harder tan usual, especially when they made it pretty obvious they used proprietary code from TOTK. I’m as pro-piracy as they come, but ya still gotta use some of your brain.
E: sp
Eh, I don’t really care. Now that every manufacturer and developer under the sun has decided I don’t own the games I buy. I couldn’t care less about their games getting pirated. I mean, I don’t own the game anyway according to their ToS, I just rent it.
But it’s more than that. I can’t even find old game isos easily anymore. Nintendo went out of their way to threaten legal action against sites that had been up for over a decade so they could do their shitty online emulator store.
They’re going after everyone now. I bought my switch in 2016, won’t be buying another one.
I’m not saying they’re right for it, just stating what reality is. Anyone with half a brain knew this was coming the second they used proprietary code.
The precedent that almost everyone cites (because it is some of the only) is Sony vs Bleem.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bleem!#Sony_lawsuit
Initial release was in 1999 and lawsuits were around the same time. PS2 launched in 2000. So while the bleem marketing was a complete mess, the emulator existing while a console was still “alive” does not matter in the slightest.
It doesn’t matter, it’s legal to create emulators and plugins for interoperability.
Yuzu cannot distribute switch games, nor distribute Nintendo software, but it can emulate the console.
Can’t sell boats anymore, they clearly facilitate piracy at a colossal scale. /s
This is the best summary I could come up with:
If you’ve ever seen a Steam Deck playing a Legend of Zelda game, chances are you were seeing the Yuzu emulator at work.
It also wants to take away its domain names, URLs, chatrooms, and social media presence; hand yuzu-emu.org over to Nintendo; and even seize and destroy its hard drives to help wipe out the emulator.
While there’s legal precedent that suggests it’s okay to reverse engineer a console and develop an emulator that uses none of the company’s source code, those cases are roughly a quarter of a century old or more — it gets trickier when we’re talking about multiple layers of modern encryption and the copyrighted BIOSes that Yuzu and other modern emulators require to run.
DMCA Section 1201(a)(2) bans products “primarily designed or produced for the purpose of circumventing a technological measure that effectively controls access” to a copyrighted work.
“The important thing is that Nintendo is bringing the case as a DMCA circumvention claim,” says Richard Hoeg, a business attorney who hosts the Virtual Legality podcast.
Many small bands of developers have axed their projects after being approached by Nintendo, and it wouldn’t be surprising if Yuzu settled.
The original article contains 721 words, the summary contains 194 words. Saved 73%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
fuck me, yuzu was one of the emulators I was excited about
git clone https://github.com/yuzu-emu/yuzu.gitIf the developers settle or lose the suit and have to take down the code, at least you’ll still be able to compile all the old releases.
Fuck Nintendo
Web browsers facilitate piracy too
Time to boycott Nintendo Online and Nintendo in general for doing so many Ls as of late
Sony v Bleem ended with victory in court for Bleem, but it also ended with Bleem out of money and out of business. Nintendo doesn’t have to have a legal leg to stand on to practically win, just a big pile of money which they definitely do have.
Hey Nintendo, Eat dick.
Good luck to them. Regardless I’m sure it’ll be forked if development stops.
