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:
You’ll need this too…
Is it just the Linux 64 version of yuzu that you use for steam deck, or is it a different one?
I imagine the Linux 64 version would be the correct version for SteamDeck. I haven’t tried it, yet.
Because I respect Nintendo’s intellectual property more than I love fiddling with interesting technology. /s
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
Thanks. FWIW I’m pretty sure that what they are accused of is illegal in all the EU because of the copyright directive.
