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?
Isnt this just setting a precedent.
Not a legal precident, it was settled which means there was no ruling.
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.
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?
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.
They removed the repo, but many people have archived it.
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.
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
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.
Yeah, i archived it as soon as the news Nintendo were coming after them dropped.
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.
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.
Nintendo had a clear path to victory in this case, it wasn't a new idea that needed to be tested in court.
The yuzu devs really fucked up by adding in decryption to it. Without that, the emulator was totally safe, and likely why nintendo didn't try and do this years ago.
If you're making an emulator, or anything dealing with copywritten work. Don't add things that break the copyright protection, nintendo can come for you then. It's that simple.
2.4 mil to settle, or paying your lawyers potentially for years to fight the lawsuit and maybe lose?
Sure, its probably the right thing for Yuzu, but whether its right for the emulation community as a whole? I guess we will see, at least there is no legal precident being set.
I mean, small developers who set up a money-making pateron based on an emulator for a currently sold system, without providing a way to pull your own system info or games from carts (and is therefore heavily reliant on piracy of things currently being sold by the parent company to run) is basically screwed, but this isn't news, and pretty much every other emu dev would run away screaming from such a setup.
They really put themselves in this boat, but since that money-making pateron is a thing, they're probably wiping those tears with dollar bills.
The primary source for legal precedent is Sony vs Bleem.
I mean, small developers
Just like you told your girlfriend the other night, size doesn't matter
who set up a money-making pateron based on an emulator for a currently sold system,
Bleem was a commercial product to emulate Sony Playstations that came out while the PS1 was still active.
without providing a way to pull your own system info or games from carts (and is therefore heavily reliant on piracy of things currently being sold by the parent company to run)
As long as they aren't giving details on how to rip the games (which, funny enough, would be the dumper) they are in the same grey zone as system BIOSes and the like
is basically screwed, but this isn’t news, and pretty much every other emu dev would run away screaming from such a setup.
There are other nintendo switch emulators. And emulators like RPCS3 very much were active while their target consoles were actively sold.
But look how it ended for Bleem.
The costs of fighting it are overwhelming enough that it can force you out of doing it.
The right and wrong of it doesn't seem to matter any more.
It’s because Yuzu was profiting off of their development with a Patreon. Keep emulators FOSS and there’s no profits to claim.
Also, because it’s a settlement and not a ruling, it’s not setting a precedent for future lawsuits. Courts historically put a lot of weight on legal precedent, to help make rulings consistent. If one court interprets a new case in a certain way, similar cases in the future will likely look to that first case’s ruling for guidance.
So if one ruling had decided that emulation is illegal, then subsequent lawsuits would have been much much easier for Nintendo. Because Nintendo could basically argue “we already proved emulation is illegal in that previous case, so now we don’t need to do that part again.”
FOSS and Patreon does not exclude each other in any way.
Fuck Nintendo. Get those repos duplicated.
Why is this a sigh of relief? Nintendo has bullied an emulator's dev team and got $2.4 millions out of it. If I was an emu dev, I certainly would not be happy with this news.
Nintendo went after a emu dev team that was actively (and demonstratively) enabling piracy for something they are currently selling. On top of that, the dev team is making significant money off of that work, to the tune of 30k/mo. Every other dev is probably thinking "finally, the other shoe drops on this obvious outcome", most avoid making money off it, and also avoid current systems, both for just this reason. The relieving part is Nintendo's argument isn't about the emulator specifically, ~~there's nothing in the injunction stopping yuzu from continuing~~, and a settlement means no legal precedent.
Edit: Read more, the settlement includes stopping development.
They were not actively enabling piracy at all. Piracy discussion was banned on all their platforms as well as any information on how to get software title keys illegally. They did everything right and were still bullied out of 2.4 million
Just because it wasn't being actively discussed doesn't mean that piracy wasn't an intended use of the software.
It's like the argument of, "this bong on my car's floorboard is definitely for tobacco, officer."
Yeah, bongs can be used for tobacco, but that's definitely not their main use case. Same with emulators.
By that logic all emulators in existence are piracy tools. In which case how brazen or not they are is irrelevant.
I don't think it would been won in court by Nintendo, but it was a big risk for them which accepting this causes them 0 issues, they only lose whatever the company had and no repercussion to them personally. Of course they lost their jobs...
My thoughts too, quite the opposite.
got $2.4 millions out of it
Did they really? I doubt their LLC had that much money. But honestly I don't even know what or how much money they would have there, I guess it was used for the webpage and similar, maybe pay themselves from the Patreon... but I guess that would be gone monthly... Idk.... Maybe they rented some office space??? Idk...
They will declare it bankrupt and that's the end of it....and unless they owned something with it which I doubt there isn't much assets if any to give Nintendo or sell.
FOSS emulator developers need to learn that since the DMCA was passed, the state is hostile to them. It isn't fair and it doesn't matter that the Sony v Bleep lawsuit set precedence that emulators are legal because the DMCA is so vague that a judge can rule can rule it is impossible to legally emulate copy protected games. Developers need to start exclusively contributing and maintaining their projects through a pseudonym with no ties to their real identity or move to countries where shit like this doesn't happen.
Honest question: Where the hell are they gonna come up with 2.4 mil?
I have no clue how Yuzu as an organization is funded.
I believe they take subscriptions for early release builds of the emulator.
I appreciate the straightforward answer, thanks!
But uh... fuck. This fucking sucks, Yuzu is basically dead now, they have to disband and take down their code.
If Yuzu lives it will only be pirate copies floating around, further development will... basically have to go underground more like game crackers, as this very settlement establishes that Nintendo will sue you into oblivion if you publicly work on this.
Yeah, it's pretty disappointing. I keep hearing people say it'll get forked and people will continue the work. All I can say is "lol."
It has apparently been rehosted as 'Nuzu' on github... but I wouldn't be surprised if that or any similar instance just gets taken down once it gets reasonably popular.
MSFT sure as shit doesnt want to get sued by Nintendo.
Oh, you'll always be able to find a copy if you're willing to look for it. I will be very surprised if we see meaningful development again.
Yeah thats the main problem, significant development is likely to be crushed.
Nowhere? They will be bankrupt and shutdown the LLC. Whatever their LLC accounts has will go to Nintendo, and any other asset the same. But I doubt they had pretty much anything, maybe the latest Patreon payment and maybe some extra money to pay websites and maybe any office or similar if they rented anything.
This makes me sad.
Will Citra be affected?
Already gone.
Yes.
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