Nintendo is suing the makers of the Switch emulator Yuzu, claims ‘There is no lawful way to use Yuzu’::Nintendo of America is suing the maker of the Nintendo Switch emulator Yuzu, saying it “unlawfully circumvents the technological measures” that prevent Switch games from being played on othe
For those also learning about Yuzu thanks only to Nintendo’s lawsuit, let’s save you a search:
And bookmarked.
You’ll need this too…
not sure if they have a case, even if lawful uses of it are very rare, it doesn’t mean the software itself is illegal (pretty sure this kind of thing has been settled in court before)
At least here in the states reverse engineering is totally legal. So generally emulators are legal to build. That said Nintendo can and will make their life difficult regardless of whether or not the emulator itself is taken down
This time around, Nintendo is arguing that by using
prod.keys, Yuzu is a copyright protection circumvention product in violation of 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.
The reverse engineering protection under the DMCA only applies to 17 USC §1201 (a)(1)(A), so there’s a very real and very scary possibility of Nintendo winning this one and setting a precedent if they can convince a judge that Yuzu’s is primarily for DRM circumvention.
Yuzu doesn’t ship with prod.keys. You need to provide them from your legally ripped switch. And the guides outline that (https://yuzu-emu.org/help/quickstart/#dumping-decryption-keys). Nintendo needs to go after sites that provide those keys, not Yuzu…
Yuzu doesn’t provide them… Yuzu goes out of it’s way to tell you how to get them legally. I’m not sure that Yuzu has circumvented anything.
Nintendo could have a claim against tools like Hekate, since that’s the tool that has to decrypt stuff to dump it. But I’m not sure that would fly either.
The interesting part of this lawsuit is that it doesn’t matter whether Yuzu provides
prod.keysor not. Nintendo is going after them for using the keys to decrypt things, framing the emulator itself as being a Switch DRM circumvention tool.
That‘s the thing with huge, shitty corporations. Even when they know they‘re absolutely in the wrong, they can still go after the small fishes and make their lives hell.
To give another example, LEGO has been flooding small toy sellers in Germany with cease and desist letters for selling sets from competitors that might look like knock-offs to some, but are perfectly legal because LEGO does not own the brick system. And of course they would never go after Amazon for doing the exact same. Only small sellers that are ruined if they can‘t scrape the money together for a proper legal defense.
Shouldn’t it be unnecessary to spend on defense if there have been dozens of similar cases with the same result?
I mean not existing laws, just possible optimization against such kind of abuse.
Missing knowledge is probably the problem. Either from small sellers that don’t know that they’ll win, or from lawyers that don’t offer to work pro bono for the same reason.
There have been cases where small sellers lost even though the really really shouldn‘t have by any means. But show a german judge in their 50s a gundam and a transformer and they‘ll say they look identical and it‘s plagiarism. LEGO being a huge name tends to win the most ridiculous cases here sadly.
OK, if in theory IP can be defended (I wouldn’t agree still), in practice it just should be abolished (except for falsifying authorship being illegal).
What worries me is they think they have a case. Nintendo isn’t dumb. And they have known about Yuzu for a long time. Something must have changed recently that made them think this would be worth it.
Just being an expensive pain to the developer dissuades future developers.
Why now then? Why not a couple years ago when Valve teased that you could use Yuzu on the Steam Deck?
They do specify cite the Tears of the Kingdom release and increasing revenue to Yuzu, maybe that motivated them more.
Anyway I don’t mean they certainly have no case. We’ll see.
That was 9 months ago. Still odd that it took so long.
Nintendo has lost this type of case before. Their strategy is usually to drain the defendant of cash.
Yes there is, you could press it and put in a cocktail !
Seriously though you can very legaly copy the bios from your own officially bought switch, copy your legaly bought cartridge, and use them to play the emulator. All of which is legal, just like you could buy spare parts and build your own switch, and copy the bios from a legaly bought one. I’m not going to pretend people do that, but it is possible to use it in a legal manner.
The lawsuit says that they think exactly what you’re talking about is unlawful according to the DMCA. Let’s see how it goes.
Nintendo is taking a new approach to this one, claiming it’s a copyright protection circumvention product. There isn’t any precedent for this yet, and it isn’t protected by the interoperability exception in the DMCA.
This is actually a very scary and very important one to follow, and if Nintendo can successfully convince a judge that the primary purpose of emulators like Yuzu (which decrypt games on the fly) is circumvention, it’s going to open the floodgates against emulators for any systems newer than the PS2.
DeCSS wasn’t precedent for this? How was it different?
DeCSS’s creator was sued in California, under the state’s trade secret law for disclosing the CSS key. Nintendo is suing under the DMCA for Yuzu violating the anti-circumvention provisions laid out in 17 U.S.C. §1201.
I follow emulator stuff pretty closely, and I’m not aware of any judgments for or against emulator devs going it from this angle. I hope I’m wrong, but this could set a very bad precedent if Nintendo is successful.
If you don’t trust my word, the ArsTechnica article does a great job explaining why this is such a huge deal. In particular, this one quote at the end:
“Nintendo isn’t attacking the core concept of emulation’s legality. They are attacking the tools and techniques that you need to make emulation actually work. There’s a whole chain of things you need to make emulation work and Nintendo doesn’t need to destroy every link in the chain.”
Nintendo isn’t retreading old ground about emulators with this lawsuit as much as they’re trying to kill or at least severely complicate the ability for emulators to actually emulate ROMs.
From the article:
Nintendo goes directly after this [personal archive copy] argument in its lawsuit, arguing that buying a Switch game only means you “have Nintendo’s authorization to play that single copy on an unmodified Nintendo Switch console.” Any other copy is by definition an “unauthorized copy,” Nintendo says, even if it’s made by the original purchaser for their own personal use.
What’s more, Nintendo argues that using Yuzu as a way to play legitimate Switch purchases on another platform (e.g. an Android device or Windows machine) is also forbidden. “Nintendo has the right to decide whether or when to enter the market of games for platforms other than its own console,” the company writes.
This part of the argument specifically needs to be smacked and shut down by the courts. (Edit: I’m not saying what the law/DMCA says about it, but I’m saying if the court has discretion they need to shelve this argument from Nintendo.) If I purchase a digital copy of a song from Sony, I don’t want to only be able to listen to it on a Sony Walkman, and only where and when Sony wants.
Hopefully they can find someone with one arm that buys switch games and plays them on PC with a special controller to bolster their case.
Agreed. That is an extremely far reach, and it would have really bad consequences for consumers if not smacked down.
How possible would it be, if this lawsuit does work, that yuzu devs could remove the decryption portion of the code and only work on pre-decrypted roms?
I don’t have enough knowledge about the exact technical details behind the Switch’s DRM, so I can’t really say. Modern DRM involves multiple layers of cryptography, which makes it difficult to reason around unless you know exactly how it works.
If they win this one, I guarantee that workaround won’t be feasible for future consoles. Nintendo could simply make on-the-fly ROM decryption part of the Switch 2/3 firmware to make it impossible to fully decrypt without actually running the game.
ho… Scary indeed. I hope yuzu has a good legal team. Would the ruling also apply to other software product in this category (outside of emulation) ?
Probably not. The argument Nintendo is making is very specific and involves finding out if a rom-decrypting emulator’s primary purpose is {some proclaimed legal activity like preservation} or if it’s actually DRM circumvention.
If they get a favorable ruling, it will open the flood gates for console manufacturers to decimate the emulator landscape for anything newer than the PS2 era, however. Wii+, 3DS, PS3+, and Xbox 360+ all employed some form of encryption. Any emulators for those systems that don’t exclusively load already-decrypted ROMs and firmwares would be prime targets in the coming years.
Outside of emulators, maybe it would make it easier to argue that any homebrew that creates decrypted game backups is a circumvention tool. Anything beyond that would likely be too different of a scenario for Nintendo v. Yuzu to be considered a precedent.
I wonder if creating a test game and key would work. I.e. make a game you know works on the switch, then sign a new version just for yuzu.
Still it would be bullshit hurdle put up
Typical Nintendo move. So sad to see Yuzu possibly going down this way. Even looks like Nintendo might win this one. I’m just gonna download the entire source from GitHub just in case.
I wish this would just go full hydra mode if it goes down though. Start popping up new anonymous accounts releasing the source code everywhere.
For anyone who thinks that’s a good idea heres the link
Of course the source code stays available somehow. What’s more important to Nintendo is that further development stops. At least on the scale it is right now
Can’t development just be moved out of the US? Like in my country even downloading copyrighted materials isn’t a crime, only uploading so emulators are like double legal.
Developers can’t just move… they will always be a target themselves.
Do you have any idea how hard and expensive it is just to move out of the US without brining a company with you?
There’s no way they could afford that, even if they found a country that would take them.
Moving into the EU is probably not that hard, but to be extra safe you’d have to gain EU citizenship somehow and renounce your US one.
EU copyright is pretty bad. How would that help them?
Breaking DRM is legal in the EU.
…in very limited circumstances, just like in the US.
Don’t like every single large company have a 1m x 1m basement in Ireland where their HQ is technically located in for tax reasons? Just do the same thing but for copyright.
Got it. Just spend millions of dollars that the developers of a free open source program definitely have just lying around.
Well since it’s an open source project then just have only people from safe countries publish the changes and code contribution is somewhere private. Don’t include the names of anyone in the US for sure. That’s the idea I’m alluding to.
Though if you wanna take it literally, you can buy the tiniest possible place as a front for your company for like 5k euros here.
It might have helped to have the HQ elsewhere, so to say. Well, too late now.
Where is that? Asking for a friend.
Most of South America.
Brazil, for instance, tacitly encourages piracy. Because foreign media is too expensive for locals to be able to regularly afford it, so the entire country’s foreign media consumption is basically fueled by content piracy. It’s sort of an open secret, where everyone just openly downloads or streams pirated content and the government doesn’t give a fuck.
Estonia
Thanks. FWIW I’m pretty sure that what they are accused of is illegal in all the EU because of the copyright directive.
Most EU countries aren’t following the copyright directive actually. Only Germany, Hungary, Malta and Netherlands are.
Australia. Not sure if it counts for everything, but AFAIK for movies pirating them is okay as long as you’re not sharing (i.e. uploading, seeding, etc.) and it’s for personal use.
story as old as time…nintendo sues * insert piracy/emulation/gameplay video*
Thank you, Barbra Streisand-san.
Fuck Nintendo! Glory to the emulators
There’s a Switch Emulator? Sweet!
Even better, there’s two!
Ryujinx and Yuzu are both competent emulators even though the Switch is Nintendo’s current console
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Cry and seethe, Nintendo.
I hate nintendo. I know a lot of ppl that plays the game with their our bought copies all legal on pc just because it RUNS BETTER. Nintendo…
Yeah that’s me. I owned the games on switch first, then later played them on PC because they ran better and I could mod them. But Ninty is arguing that since playing the games requires encryption keys from a legitimate Switch, that the emulator is impossible to play legally. Because they argue that the act of extracting those encryption keys is illegal, so using them to play your own games is also illegal.
Never mind the fact that you already own the console, and therefore own the keys that are stored on the console. But Nintendo basically argues that buying the console and the game only gives you a license to play the game on a legitimate console using the licensed keys, so emulation is a violation of that software license and the DMCA.
It’s a piss poor argument. But with the way the courts are stacked these days, they may actually win. And if they win, the precedent could have horrible implications for any emulation later than the PS2/GameCube generation.
Just because it’s not lawful (according to them) don’t mean it’s not a good idea.
Maybe if their Switch was priced better and games were cheaper, I’d get one.
Maybe if you weren’t so poor you’d get one heyooooo!
Ha I ain’t poor. I got a custom PC and a PS5. But Nintendo just over charges their stuff. My gf has one of her own, I never played it. Just don’t really have interest in Nintendo games.
Now if the Switch was about $250 new, I might get one and it’d probably collect dust. I stopped playing Nintendo after the GameCube.
…so if I wanted to test my Switch game before I apply for a proper dev kit i’m now officially shit out of luck? Thanks, Nintendo!
Correct. They want you to buy a dev kit for $450.
Just downloaded a copy this morning.
Good thing there is still ryujinx
For now
I think yuzu is associated with more piracy because FitGirl et al include it in their pirate releases for games with Denuvo
I’ll be shocked if they’re not next.
