Nintendo sues Switch emulator Yuzu for ‘facilitating piracy at a colossal scale’
Nintendo sues Switch emulator Yuzu for ‘facilitating piracy at a colossal scale’
Will developers give up or go to court?
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!
You know why I played the games on yuzu? It’s because the joycons suck and they are expensive to replace.
I did the stick drift repair on my own, but the L and R buttons are soldiered to the main board so it can’t be repaired.
I bought a right joycon on its own and then the next week the left joycon had the same issue.
I wasn’t going to spend about $90 for an unreliable controller when an entire steamdeck costs $500.
It really paints the picture that the controllers are way over priced how can they alone be 20% the cost of the entire steamdeck.
If Nintendo made decent joycons, then I would not be using Yuzu.
Additionally, I dumped my own games and keys, so they got their money and through some effort, I got a better experience.
I’d like to add that the joycons were not heavily used either.
If anyone or anything is facilitating piracy of Nintendo games on an enormous scale, it's the asinine anti-consumer policies of Nintendo themselves.
Streisand effect is currently very active on this one. Thousands of news outlets, many extremely casual and geared towards average joes who never new emulation existed, are now all being told that "this thing called yuzu can play switch games for free". Nintendo is shooting themselves in the foot. Even if Yuzu dies, it will get forked and people who never knew emulation existed, now do, and look for alternatives.
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.
I'm pretty impressed with The Verge this time around.
They did a very good job quickly explaining the legal stance and argument that Nintendo has with their lawsuit, what needs to happen for it to be successful, and how the precedent set in 1999 around emulators isn't applicable to this suit.
if it runs better, at a higher resolution, with the option of using a reliable controller, i will emulate it.
It is always morally correct to pirate nintendo products.
Or anything by megacorps in general really
Nintendo is basically saying that they are guilty of enabling piracy.
That same argument would paint gun makers as guilty of enabling murder and crime. Nintendo should really be going after rom sharing sites. That’s totally legit, but not the emulation devs.
If they have a fund for legal costs I’ll donate.
Nintendo give an example in their complaint with The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom saying that it was "unlawfully distributed a week and a half before its release by Nintendo" and that copies of it were "successfully downloaded from pirate websites over one million times before the game was published and made available for lawful purchase by Nintendo".
Back when I was on that shithole other link aggregation website, I said this would happen because people couldn't wait 7 more days for the public release before bragging about emulating TotK and sharing a clearly-not-legally-dumped ROM around.
I don't care what people do in their free time as long as it doesn't affect anyone else negatively, but it was hard not to see this coming because people couldn't keep their mouths shut and just enjoy the game. Now, we all might lose future updates to Yuzu if they settle or Nintendo wins the suit...
fuck Nintendo and their shitty buisness.
Emulators are not only good for preserving games, they are good for consumers - preserving their acess to games they own.
their "illegal" bullshit is just because they don't port their games to anything.
Nintendo can eat shit and learn how to port and sell their older titles as well
Why don't they sue PC manufacturers for producing the hardware that led to the emulator?
Why don't people sue gun manufacturers every time somebody is murdered? Or vehicle manufacturers each time an accident happens?
Suing Yuzu for piracy seems incredibly fucking stupid and nonsensical, but I'm sure the Neanderthals in the courtroom will side with Nintendo.
knife manufacturer sued for facilitating murder
Thanks Nintendo, this shit reminded and motivated me to cancel the auto-renew for my subscription. It is done.
Nintendon't: sues for "facilitating piracy"
Also Nintendon't: facilitates piracy by restricting access to games people want to play
Also Nintendon't: facilitates piracy by pointing people to Yuzu
Also Nintendon't: facilitates piracy by hinting that "free" access to games might be at risk
Also Nintendon't:
This is like a CIA Pulitzer. Nintendo could not have made a better endorsement of Yuzu's performance.
brb downloading Yuzu repo
i'm afraid that if NoA wins this, console manufacturers might start slapping DRM into their consoles, and therefore making them (legally) unemulatable and potentially discouraging development of modern console emulation.
now sure, this is a piracy sub, but i'm not sure if the yuzu devs are keen into piracy...
i also wonder if there's any way to fight back. people who dump their legal copies are being screwed as well.
Nintendo is a shady company. When somebody improves their product all they care to do is destroy it and whoever supports it.
The DMCA anti-circumvention angle is scary, it's so draconian they may actually win. Even though Yuzu is open source, not many people want to paint a target on their back.
Devs have to give up, companies have limitless funding for these things while people don’t
They have anti-piracy measures in the emulator though and it’s not like it’s any more difficult to play pirated games on the Switch. So this is sad to see
Hey Nintendo, Eat dick.
Fuck Nintendo!
Yeah? Such a dick about it, Nintendo. Your platform is not special and people will run software however they please.
Emulation is legal. Emulation will remain legal. If you can't deal with it except through courtroom bullying, may devs should look into SLAPP defenses.
I had no idea such a thing existed. I don't usually buy Nintendo stuff, but if this is free I'll probably give it a try
Fuck Nintendo
In other news, I got a DMCA email from Xfinity today. Might or might not be able a Nintendo switch game. 🤪
It was bewildering to me in the moment that when TOTK was leaked that they didn't restrict themselves from working on the emu to handle TOTK. It was some nod and wink "breath of the wild" improvements coming in all of a sudden.
Like... for real? If I were the project lead I would've banned discussion and development about it until after launch. And part of the legal filing from Nintendo is that Yuzu's own telemetry shows that Yuzu devs must be aware of piracy because they can see games being played on the emulator pre-launch. Make of that what you will.
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!
Good luck to those out of touch wankers.
Time to boycott Nintendo Online and Nintendo in general for doing so many Ls as of late
Do existence of a full fledged Switch emulator implies that it could have been build with $40000/month (from yuzu paetron page) and r&d or whatever cost it took was artifically inflated🤨
It needs to work both ways then. Nintendo needs to pay for all the free advertisement that emulators provide.
Anytime I mess with an emulator and play an old game it triggers nostalgia. I then purchase new software and hardware from the company it belongs to.
This is some shady shit that Nintendo is pulling.
The comments section here is pretty much an echo chamber of people defending Yuzu. I'm a game dev and I think this case is more ambiguous. Emulators like Yuzu have the potential to make Switch piracy go mainstream. You don't need to hack anything, you just follow a tutorial and google "yuzu keys", suddenly you can play all Switch games for free. And people don't need to be tech-savvy to do that. Nintendo would be stupid if they would just ignore this. It doesn't help that the Tegra X1 is old, almost identical with other Nvidia chipsets and therefore easy to emulate on a PC.
