New documents filed Monday, February 26 reveal that videogame giant Nintendo is taking action against the creators of the popular emulator tool Yuzu.
The copyright infringement filing, from Nintendo of America, states that the Yuzu tool (from developer Tropic Haze LLC) illegally circumvents the software encryption and copyright protection systems of Nintendo Switch titles, and thus facilitates piracy and infringes copyright under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA).
Nintendo alleges that Tropic Haze’s free Yuzu emulator tool unlawfully allows pirated Switch games to be played on PCs and other devices, bypassing Nintendo’s protection measures.
The official Yuzu website suggests that the tool is to be used with software you yourself own: “You are legally required to dump your games from your Nintendo Switch” — but it’s common knowledge, that this is not how these tools are primarily used.
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I think @Fake4000@lemmy.world made a solid point here.
Nintendo goes after those that make money. That includes ROM sites too. For example, Nintendo didn’t sue Dolphin developers, they told Valve to take down their software. Please correct me if I am wrong.
I am not saying that Nintendo goes only after those that make money but maybe a money papertrail takes away the anonymousness of the internet. Bank accounts makes finding people a whole lot easier.
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Amorally, probably. Ilegally? No, they are not.
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It is when the product is using their IP to violate copyright laws.
I fully support emulators and pirating, but I don’t lie to myself about it being legal or ethical.
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If you read the lawsuit Nintendo is suing because Yuzu acknowledges their software can’t run without the Switch’s decryption keys. Yuzu also has instructions to extract the decryption keys on their website. So Yuzu is not completely reverse engineering how the Switch runs games.
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That’s a failure on the DMCA, not on Yuzu.
The law clearly establishes the protection by which you are allowed to make a personal backup copy. Yuzy thus should by design allow you to play this backup copy, as would any other emulator that actually did its job. If you need to break DRM in order to get your own keys to play your personal copy in the first place, it’s not Yuzu’s fault, it’s a DMCA provision that has been put n place without forethought on how it clashes against the use provision.
Oh please, that’s the same argument of, “It’s not a bong, it’s a tobacco pipe.” Yeah, they might call it that to circumvent the law, but everyone knows damn well that 99% of users aren’t using it for that.
They’re profiting off selling a tool that breaks encryption and bypasses copyright protections. The profit is the issue here.
While I support their efforts, I can also realize that Nintendo absolutely has a right to try to stop them, and it’s not unethical for them to do so.
Would your comment be as sarcastic if you replaced cars with guns? Doubt it.
🤦
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And yet cars kill a lot more people than guns.
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Not in the United States they don’t.
https://abcnews.go.com/US/116-people-died-gun-violence-day-us-year/story?id=97382759/
Only if you count suicides. The countries that don’t have guns still have suicides, so banning guns would not prevent those deaths.
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Even putting pills in blister packs caused a statistically significant drop in OD suicides using OTC drugs.
Turns out that many people just need a bit of resistance to stop them from implementing a permanent solution to a temporary situation.
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South Korea has no guns and people manage to jump off bridges just fine
SK has a much higher suicide rate than the US, so maybe the underlying issue should be fixed instead of trying to impose higher barriers to people trying to kill themselves
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That’s like if I was to say “only if you count fast cars. The countries that don’t have as many fast cars still have accidents, so speed limits should be universally abolished.”
“Guns don’t kill people - people kill people. Guns defend people against people with smaller guns.”
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
“Guns don’t kill people - people kill people. Guns defend people against people with smaller guns.”
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
Nonironically yes
So what purpose does an emulator server legally speaking? And I don’t think anyone uses their car for accidents.
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especially true for when manufacturers stop supporting the console you invested into, stops making replacement parts, issuing security patches, etc. Having the ability to make, repair and use copies of the games you purchase is critical to digital preservation.
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But let’s be real though. Getting a car and driving it a crowd on purpose is an extraordinarily small percentage of car users. You can’t say the same about emulation. A torrent site I frequent has 28000 downloads of Smash Bros Ultimate. I don’t believe for a second there are 28000 broken copies people are trying to replace.
Don’t get me wrong, I love emulation. It has huge benefits! Access to out of print games, higher framerates and resolutions. But I’m not going to pretend piracy isn’t a massive component of it, particularly on current gen systems.
You’re either missing the crux of the argument entirely somehow, or your rebuttal is complete shit on purpose.
None of your points are the fault of Yuzu’s creators.
Just like: gun manufacturers cannot be sued for school shootings, Salinger couldn’t be held liable for the frequency his seminal work was found in psychopaths’ belongings, and Oscar Meyer isn’t at fault when you lost a non-zero amount of their meat products up your ass. Just sayin’.
They provide compatibility for software made to run on one platform to work on another.
Providing compatibility is one of the most protected use cases of reverse engineering in US law.
Lots of terrorist groups do.
Never heard of banger racing?
In addition to “format shifting,” which is a well-recognized use case, and game preservation, which is a huge and under-recognized public interest in emulator development, emulators are also used for the development of homebrew software. E.g., there’s a port of Moonlight for the Switch, which lets you play Steam games streamed from a PC using your Switch, letting it serve many of the purposes of a Steam Deck. That’s huge! It would be way less practical to develop this kind of software if you could only test on real hardware. Testing on real hardware is also essential, of course, but testing on an emulator is vastly faster for rapid iteration.
Increased user accessibility, backing up and ensuring continued usability of purchased software, democratizing hardware choice, allowing for continued community support for software that has been abandoned, teaching people how software works in relation to different hardware…
I don’t see anyone else bringing up that, in the case of the Switch, emulation actually plays better than on original hardware. Higher framerate, resolution, and graphics settings. And no broken JoyCons.
Emulation also opens up save states, speed up/slow mo, romhacks, widescreen mods, ultra widescreen mods, save file editing, cheats, and lots of other legitimate uses. Speed runners often use emulation to practice the hardest sections using save states before doing their line run on OG hardware.
Some of those use cases are also possible on flash carts (romhacks, save file editing, and some forms of cheats), but a lot really on emulation.
Legally, you’re allowed to make copies of games that you own and use them in an emulator. You can download mods, play multiplayer across the Internet when servers get shut down and also take advantage of better hardware and get better resolution and framerates, then there are quality of life improvements like savestates.