Obligatory fuck Nintendo, but I also blame the selfish dumbfucks who keep posting videos of themselves playing unreleased games on YouTube and Reddit. If you want nice things contingent on having software which exists in a legal gray area, don’t openly poke the litigious hornets’ nest.
From a theoretical point of view, emulators of modern consoles may actually be illegal. Under the DMCA, emulation for preservation is protected as a periodically-renewed exemption list defined by the library of congress. But, (paraphrasing) “creating or distributing any hardware or software device—or component of such—designed to circumvent DRM technology” is still illegal irrespective of any exemptions. A reasonable (and bullshit) interpretation of that means that any emulator which is capable of bypassing any DRM features (such as decrypting ROM using user-provided keys) is a violation under the act.
I say theoretical because it hasn’t ever actually been tested in a court. Nintendo v. Tropic Haze LLC nearly gave us the answer, but the latter chose to settle instead.
Because people are technologically inept and buy into the propaganda that kernel-level anticheat is more effective than the alternative solutions.
Now it all works except for anti-cheat because
of those terrible cheaters.publishers are too cheap to pay for dedicated authoritative servers, instead relying on P2P networking that blindly trusts other clients’ game state updates.
FTFY
It also helps to outwardly state your country of residence in a public forum.
Yeah… I looked at the project’s subreddit, and I don’t expect it to last long. The creator’s idea of avoiding Nintendo’s legal team boils down to “assert emulation is legal and condemn piracy within our dev team and community.”
I don’t mean to be a dick, but I don’t think the guy knows what he’s doing. The only way an actively-maintained fork is going to avoid the same fate is if they either give up before Nintendo cares, or:
Even then, there’s a good chance they’re screwed either way. The original Yuzu devs agreed to Nintendo’s terms of explicitly naming Yuzu as a circumvention tool. Settlements don’t serve as precedent, but I suspect it’s going to be extremely hard to argue that a minimal derivative of a circumvention tool is not still a circumvention tool when the original creators stated they designed it as such.
The commit history is gone, there’s a brand-new Patreon link, and most of the submodules aren’t included. I find it hard to believe that developers are going to trust that it isn’t a cash grab, let alone possible to even compile.
The Yuzu developers are the same team that created Citra. If it wasn’t directly required as part of that settlement, it’s out of an abundance of caution.
Part of the settlement is that the individuals responsible for Yuzu would permanently stop working on circumventing Nintendo’s DRM, and working on Citra could land them a follow-up lawsuit with even harsher penalties for breaking the previous settlement.
I prefer “FukUzTu,” pronounced as fuck-youz-too.
A fork named spitefully by a community that they tried to squash.
I also have a post going on !technology@lemmy.world about this: https://lemmy.world/post/12728165
Almost. The technical stuff is going to be a bit butched, but I’ll drop the legal speak and be more human for a minute:
What makes this unique isn’t that Nintendo is going after them for providing the keys, but for actually using them. Yuzu asks the user to dump or acquire prod.keys on their own, and then it uses that to read encrypted data. The fact that it does that, regardless of whether the keys were obtained legitimately or not, is where the argument that it’s a DRM circumvention tool lays. Yuzu itself is supposedly “circumventing” Nintendo’s DRM process by using the keys in a way that bypasses all of the protections that Nintendo put into place to prevent the games from being loaded on non-Switch hardware.
The Yuzu devs’ willingness to have FAQs and a quick start guide explaining the requirements and steps to emulate commercial games on Yuzu is definitely going to bite them and undermine any defense they had for not knowingly marketing it as a circumvention tool. Another criterion is that Yuzu has to have some commercial significance if it were to lose its ability to circumvent DRM. And, as we know, it’s an emulator…
The best chances they have is to convince the judge that Yuzu isn’t primarily designed as a circumvention tool (which, once again, isn’t helped by their guide on how to run commercial games) or that it falls under the accessibility exemption added recently.
Nintendo’s argument in the filing is that Yuzu is designed primarily for circumventing the Switch’s encryption (a.k.a. copyright protection measures). Their justification is that Yuzu uses prod.keys to decrypt various things like the ROM filesystems and the system firmware*. Ryujinx also uses prod.keys, so they would be just as legitimate of a target for that argument as Yuzu is.
Personally, I think they chose to go after Yuzu first because it’s more popular and runs at playable framerates on modern Android devices. If the lawsuit goes in Nintendo’s favor, I guarantee they’ll immediately use that precident to make the same argument against and swiftly kill Ryujinx.
*This is actually a valid argument that is not affected by past suits like Bleem v. Sony.
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.
Unfortunately, it’s more of a gray area than most people think.
17 USC §1201 (f)(1)
Notwithstanding the provisions of subsection (a)(1)(A), a person who has lawfully obtained the right to use a copy of a computer program may circumvent a technological measure that effectively controls access to a particular portion of that program for the sole purpose of identifying and analyzing those elements of the program that are necessary to achieve interoperability of an independently created computer program with other programs, and that have not previously been readily available to the person engaging in the circumvention, to the extent any such acts of identification and analysis do not constitute infringement under this title.
Ok, and that applies to…
17 USC §1201 (a)(1)(A)
No person shall circumvent a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title.
And a technological measure is:
17 USC §1201 (a)(3)
to “circumvent a technological measure” means to descramble a scrambled work, to decrypt an encrypted work, or otherwise to avoid, bypass, remove, deactivate, or impair a technological measure, without the authority of the copyright owner; and
Perfect! Right?
17 USC §1201 (a)(2)
No person shall manufacture, import, offer to the public, provide, or otherwise traffic in any technology, product, service, device, component, or part thereof, that—
(A) is primarily designed or produced for the purpose of circumventing a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title;
(B) has only limited commercially significant purpose or use other than to circumvent a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title; or
© is marketed by that person or another acting in concert with that person with that person’s knowledge for use in circumventing a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title.
And unfortunately, Yuzu is capable of and needs console keys to decrypt games and system firmware files.
The reverse engineering for interoperability exception, (f)(1), only explicitly exempts (a)(1)(A) for research purposes. If Yuzu—as a software product—is found to have the primary purpose of circumventing Nintendo’s DRM, it will be in violation of (a)(2) and the developers are not protected.
This is something that will need to be tested in court, but the only way they would be entirely in the clear is if they stripped out all encryption/decryption code and forced users to use some other tool to fully decrypt the firmware, NAND filesystem, and game image filesystems during dumping. They’ll likely argue that the primary purpose is preservation, and Nintendo will use the fact that the Switch is still sold in retail as a counterargument to suggest that their development of the emulator was unnecessary and not in good faith. If they instead argue that it was created as a development or debugging tool, Nintendo could point to their low barrier of entry for developers to obtain a devkit (as evidenced by the crapton of shovelware and asset flips in the E-Shop).
If they don’t settle, it’s going to be an expensive mess to sort out.
git clone https://github.com/yuzu-emu/yuzu.git
If 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.
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…
I prefer the term appropriation:
the action of taking something for one’s own use, typically without the owner’s permission
You wouldn’t then steal it again!
Windows is a selling point for these companies. Never mind the absolute shithole that is Windows UX without a keyboard and mouse, little Timmy can use it to play Roblox and Forkknife!
Because a subset of people are and always will be idiots. Remember: some people think unions exist to steal your money, socialism is communist dictatorship propaganda, and privatization of government services is good for everybody.