Nintendo Wants to KILL Emulation (This isn't just about Yuzu) | RANT:30

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Nintendo has been battling #emulation and #emulators for a long time... and Yesterday, they filed a lawsuit against the #switch emulator, #yuzu ... Sorry about the damned hashtags, it's over now #retrogaming #roms #lawsuit

Let's talk about what's really going on here. This is not just about Nintendo VS Yuzu. It's more about control over the culture. Check out the video.

Sources:
Nintendo Suing Yuzu:

The Lawsuit

Why Emulators are Legal - Video from a Lawyer:

Nintendo LoveRom/LoveRETRO lawsuit:

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[bumly]

I mean that if Nintendo wins against Yuzu, then this could set a trend for console manufacturers to go after emulation as a whole. Basically all unofficial emulation dead and gone.

If Nintendo can get away with killing Yuzu, then they can definitely get away with killing off all other emulation software. Sony can get away with going after developers creating PCSX2 and RPCS3.

The death of video game preservation, effectively. We'll be trapped in a system where games are left to rot the moment they're no longer profitable for the company who makes the consoles to play them.

It's not just about what happens to Yuzu, it's all the other emulation software that is killed off afterwards.

[bartbasil]

My wife has no conception of owning a media library. She's fine with shoveling out tons of money for monthly for subscription services, and wonders why my interests and hobbies will outlast hers, and why I have more money at the end of the month than she does.


I do not pay for Netflix. I only have Amazon Prime for the shipping.

[BlackHammer]

Meanwhile they’ll be taking games from libraries when licenses run dry. They may live to regret this suit.

[benjammin]

I think the Switch 2 is gonna be a mild improvement over the Switch and Yuzu is going to emulate it quickly in the first few weeks. That is another reason they see Yuzu as a threat.

[ThisOldChris]

Imagine being illegal to sand and refinish your big brand wood kitchen table.
That's the future companies want...

[MisterProducts]

Nintendo should just embrace emulation with an official emulation and mod store where they take a percentage of any profit.

[DrAnimePhD]

The saddest thing about this entire thing is the lawsuit proves Nintendo has a potential audience on PC. They claim one million copies of Tears of the Kingdom were emulated. That alone would warrant doing PC ports as that's potential sales they could've had with an official PC release on Steam or a Nintendo launcher. Instead they would rather force you to have a worse experience than what the pirates offer

[archaichobo]

I can't wait for the Barbera Streisand effect to kick in. Nintendo will lose in more ways than one.

[SporianSummit]

Mate, they've been doing this ever since they went after emuparadise over nintendo roms and emulators, and its probably been happening even before this, and the fact it took people until now to start fighting back is sad to see.

[chrislaustin]

As a former fan of Nintendo since the early 80's when I first got a few Game & Watch units, I can honestly say with every fiber of my being, they have become a rather shit company in resent times. Most of the things mention in this lawsuit have nothing to do with this emulator. If a game leaks early, why is Yuzu responsible for that? It's people on your own production lines, or a retail stores who got the game early, or the ass kissers you send early review copies to are the culprits(this is the most likely IMO). And I've seen social media post from Yuzu as well as Ryujinx when a game gets leaked early that they will not offer any updates for said games in their emulators until it is released officially. As they mention each time they do not support piracy of any type at anytime, so while Nintendo may havesome receipts, so does Yuzu.

This is typical behavior from the bully masters of all gaming, flexing their muscle for no other reason than they can. I would love for a company like Yuzu to fight back, counter sue and have Nintendo pay all their legal fees in the end. Then that would bring an end to all this frivolous BS. But sadly this is Nintendo's MO, and they know most don't have the resources to win these fights, or hell, even stay the course for years, so they never learn the lesson they so rightfully deserve.

[kbytfs]

Due to using emulators on the SteamDeck, and experiencing titles I wouldn't want to risk buying and not liking, I've now bought an OLED switch and those aforementioned titles and more.

All the media that I used to enjoy that went behind a paywall I simply don't consume, I just find an alternative, usually something better.

Litigation like this and the goals behind them are ridiculously short sighted.

[brandonkruse]

This is like suing Sony because the Walkman had the capability to play pirated music.

[Tasty-]

Nintendo has always been like this, it's annoying.
For being such a "family friendly" company they sure are hostile as ever towards consumers.

Its funny, when I subscribed to you... 10 years ago? I remember my buddy and I having this exact same conversation about Nintendo.

[AetherNightmare]

I think a lot of this comes too from an entire generation that has never actually owned any of their media, so they just incorrectly assume it'll always be there for them. They've not gone through the loss of physical, or the censorship campaigns that can happen with digital media (as opposed to optical discs that can technically be pulled from shelves, but your version always remains untouched). Books, movies, games, music, it's never not existed outside of a bubble for them, so they don't understand it can go away forever. Our media is "too old" for them to care about, but they don't realize theirs will soon suffer the same fate. That, or with mobile titles and their lifespans, they've been conditioned to not care. Which is kind of sad, but also really scary for what it means in regards to what information you're "allowed" by corporations and government both to have access too.

Something else I feel more people need to point out as well is that games are the only medium that gets up in arms about what machine you put the data into. With a DVD, nobody cares what brand of player is used. I can legally put the disc in anything and play it wherever I want - dedicated DVD player, computer, Playstation, car, doesn't matter. Music used to legally let you rip the files yourself off of CD's and records using Apple's software, allowing for digital playback on MP3 players/phones. Only games have ever tried to control where you're allowed to run the software you've purchased. Games are the only medium attempting to make full ownership, preservation, and playback illegal somehow. So if you're a defender of Nintendo, why do you think that is okay?

[archelonprime]

Two things:
1. Unless you're an investor of Nintendo, why is ANYONE "defending" them when they have a well documented history of anti-consumer business decisions and snowflaking over other people (specifically YouTubers) engaging in FAIR USE of their IP while whining about violations of copyright law? It's as if they think the rules should only benefit them! 🤔
2. It's amazing how many people have missed the fact that the Switch's hardware has gotten OLD/outdated, which makes the later and more complex games LESS enjoyably to play. The fact that you play an actual Switch game WITH SUPERIOR performance THROUGH AN EMULATOR should be a giant clue as to how much better the publicly available PC hardware has gotten and that many people have voted accordingly with their wallets! The Switch 2 (if that's what it's going to be called) STILL isn't available, so what did Nintendo and their "defenders" think the smarter consumers were going to do?

[SlipperyTeeth]

For anyone curious about what the legal argument is, I think I can summarize it pretty well, including why I think the argument should lose:

First, there's copyright, which I think we all know pretty well by now. The main thing to consider is: The games have copyrights associated with them, and the game consoles have copyrights associated with them - and these are different things.

It's generally agreed that downloading games violates those associated copyrights. There have been rulings in the US that if you own a computer program, then you can make a copy for your own personal use - games are part of that. There have been no rulings on downloading a game that you already own just to save yourself the trouble of copying it yourself, and a ruling on that could really go either way.

As for the copyright on the console, people often say that this is a grey area because there's no specific rulings on consoles, but there is well established law on the copyright of computer devices/machines. If you just manufacture and sell the exact same machine, then you will undoubtedly be in violation of those copyrights. If you make a new machine that accomplishes the exact same purpose (plays that specific format of games/programs), then in principle, it's completely fine, but there are some complicated laws about how you manage to accomplish that - you just have to be very careful. If you make a computer program that emulates the behavior of the machine and accomplishes the same purpose of the machine, then that too is fine - you still have to be a bit careful about how you go about doing it, but it's slightly easier, legally, to do that since they're very different mediums. So, emulation can not be made outright illegal (unless a corporation buys out judges and politicians to overturn legal precedent).

That's all just backstory really, the new legal argument has to do with "circumvention of copyright protection technology". Basically, if you own a copyright, you can protect it by using some form of technology in the copies you distribute that hinders the ability of the buyer to copy it - this includes encrypting the data of the copy so that a cryptographic key is needed to access the contents. So, bypassing that technology is "circumvention of copyright protection technology". If you bypass that technology, make a copy of the contents, and distribute them, then you have both violated the copyright and circumvented its protection. If you only bypass that technology, then you have circumvented that technology even if you haven't violated that copyright.

There are two key details about this:
1. Cracking an encryption is not itself a "circumvention of copyright protection technology". The encryption has to be protecting copyrighted material. For example, I can encrypt a random string of characters, and since that has no copyright associated with it, you can break that encryption without any legal issue - otherwise homework in a cryptography class would be illegal.
2. The copyright owner has to have sole control of that "copyright protection technology". I use this analogy: Suppose you put your stuff in a locker and lock it. If I crack your password, then that's akin to "circumvention"; and if I take your stuff, then that's akin to "copyright violation". Now suppose you put your stuff in a locker, lock it, and tell your password to your friend Amy, then Amy can tell me your password, and if I unlock it that is NOT "circumvention" - I still can't take your stuff that would still be akin to "copyright violation", but I can unlock the locker because you didn't have control over that "protection technology". Interestingly, the way the law is written, I don't even need Amy to tell me the password, I can crack it myself, because the law isn't written in a way that the protection technology has ownership that needs to be transferred - it's only about whether you have control over it.

This is why the lawsuit shouldn't work - why it doesn't have a legal basis. We all agree that the game program is in a format that has an encryption that requires a key to run the data.
1. But what copyright is that key protecting? Spoiler, it's not protecting any of the copyright of the console itself - most of that copyright is in the machine architecture, and you can't encrypt physical objects - so the emulator is completely unaffected by this, legally. You could argue that it's protecting the copyright of the game program, and this may be true depending on the specifics of how it's handled, but that would only apply if the encryption is used to prevent violations of the copyright of the disk's contents - NOT if the encryption is used in order to RUN the disk's contents. At that point, the encryption is no longer protection technology - it is merely part of the format that the disk's contents are written in. When I open a JPEG on my computer, my computer has to understand that "this string of bits is the header, this string of bits is file attributes, this string of bits tells me that these pixels should be these colors based on this formula". None of that protects any copyright of the image I'm looking at - it's just the file format.
2. That alone closes this case, but it gets worse for them. We're talking about a common key. If every game uses that same key, then none of those games have control over that key. This is just by definition. You can pull up the legal code and there's a definition for what constitutes "copyright protection technology", and because of this simple fact, it's not "copyright protection technology". So circumvention isn't even possible in this case BY DEFINITION.

If our legal system is in any way still functional, Nintendo should not win this lawsuit, because the law isn't on their side. The only way Nintendo can win is if they delay the case for so long that Yuzu can't afford to continue, or if judges decide to back the larger corporation out of sheer ideology. The law is clear - this lawsuit is baseless, but also technical enough that most people won't understand who's legally in the right and just let their ideology tell them who SHOULD win regardless of the law.

[SiimKuusik]

I played through Tears of the Kingdom and loved it. Bought a physical copy of it afterwards. I don't own a Nintendo Switch.

[LinkNinjaMaster]

There needs to be a GoFundMe or something for Yuzu's team's legal fees, this is really important and I hope they can go against Nintendo (AND WIN) and not just settle outside of court.

[Technopath]

And shit like this is why, as a creative writer, I do everything under Creative Commons because I'm sick of things like this. Closest thing that can be done to FOSS for literature, imo.

[pacmanman]

Nintendo cannot stop emulation, it’s going to keep thriving whether they like it or not!!