Nintendo is suing the creators of Switch emulator Yuzu

Nintendo’s full case filing

twitter.com/stephentotilo/…/1762576284817768457/

“NEW: Nintendo is suing the creators of popular Switch emulator Yuzu, saying their tech illegally circumvents Nintendo’s software encryption and facilitates piracy. Seeks damages for alleged violations and a shutdown of the emulator.

Notes 1 million copies of Tears of the Kingdom downloaded prior to game’s release; says Yuzu’s Patreon support doubled during that time. Basically arguing that that is proof that Yuzu’s business model helps piracy flourish.”

Dudewitbow,

the funniest shit about the paperowrk is that nintendo indirectly says nintendo is doing illegal work because they claim a video game emulator is a piece of software that allows users to unlawfully play pirated video games that were published for a specific console on a general purpose device.

they either have to say NSO/Nes/Snes classic are not emulation, or admit their definition of emulators is not the universally accepted definition of it, else Nintendo just Claimed Nintendo is serving up and charging for an unlawful service that is NSO.

schmidtster,

FWIW you can lawfully play pirated games, so that means nothing.

Rentlar, (edited )

Case in point there is some evidence that Nintendo might have used a dumped and illegally distributed version of Super Mario Bros. in their Wii Virtual Console

Mango,

I cannot even come up with a way to express how goddamn hilarious that is!!

Atemu,
@Atemu@lemmy.ml avatar

That’s rather clear evidence that they dumped their own ROM and distributed that. Since they own the rights to that ROM, they’re not distributing it illegally though. They can dump and distribute their ROMs all they want; they own the rights to them.

Rentlar,

I’m no legal expert but Nintendo’s argument seems to surround a video game emulator being a tool whose primary use is to facilitate illegal circumvention of DRM and piracy. Nintendo’s use of emulation for a legal means to resell their games on another platform, could suggest otherwise. The possible use of a ROM illegally distributed by a 3rd party as inputs in a legitimate Nintendo emulator (though Nintendo denies this) could help separate the issues between ROMs and emulation, because Nintendo’s emulator isn’t used for piracy.

Nintendo could use a copy of the freely available Yuzu to emulate Switch games on their rumored Switch 2, if they were so inclined, and it would be a legitimate use case.

schmidtster,

That’s a funny one too me, because they are the original source when you dig your way down, so how are they doing anything wrong there?

Yeah it’s someone else’s work… which isn’t there’s anyways… so isn’t it always nintendos then?

catloaf,

They’re profiting from something they themselves say is illegal.

schmidtster,

It’s illegal if you don’t own the rom or decoded it with their keys. If you have the physical copy of the game, and a way to decrypt it, it’s not illegal to play the rom on an emulator.

So it’s not illegal, it becomes illegal when you don’t have the physical copy, or decode it with their stuff.

TORFdot0,

I really want a real explanation on how I’ve caused Nintendo financial harm by format shifting my legally owned games. Especially considering I pay for NSO. At some point there has to be precedent that a pirated download does not equal a lost sale and that the individuals are responsible for the infringement and not the tools.

friend_of_satan,

Thats funny considering they included emulators in official games. nintendolife.com/…/nerd_explains_the_challenge_of…

ParkedInReverse,

nintendo-insider.com link for an article that works.

adaveinthelife,

Oh cool I didn’t know that existed, thanks Nintendo!

LodeMike,

Looks like they’re about to find out.

steeznson,

Maybe they should have named it Ryujinx or something else that sounds less phonetically like “you sue”

samus12345, (edited )
@samus12345@lemmy.world avatar

I’ve been holding off on jailbreaking my launch Switch until the next one is out, but I think the time has come.

EDIT: Aaand done. Biggest surprise so far is that there’s a homebrew Pizza Tower port for it! This game really belongs on consoles.

improbablypoopingrn,

RCM loader/jig is like $8

samus12345,
@samus12345@lemmy.world avatar

I’ve had one for years, waiting for when Nintendo dropped support. I’m not gonna give them any more money as far as the Switch is concerned, so no reason not to go for it now. A project for this weekend, maybe.

fne8w2ah,

As the sweetest revenge maybe someone should leak all Switch games and DLCs into the public Internet.

AGD4, (edited )

I Found It!

:)I reckon that’s the point you were making?

Epzillon,

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.

laughterlaughter,

Yuzu may go down, but Nintendo hasn’t learned the lessons of the Streisand effect and the hydra effect. The code is open source. 10 more projects will pop up the day after Yuzu goes down (IF it goes down.)

sebinspace,

There’s also still Ryujinx

Appoxo,

Shhh. The community always seems to forget this one.
Let’s keep it like that so Nintendo lawyers don’t pay as much attention to it.

therealjcdenton, (edited )

How can I donate to the Yuzu devs to fight Nintendo on this?

ZeroMmX,

Brother… Nintendo’s net income last year was 3.1 BILLION dollars. There is no “fighting Nintendo”.

Let’s be real homie. Yuzu is done. Downvote me all you want after I post this.

As much as we all love Yuzu, the dev’s had to have known this was coming.

I don’t want to be one of those dudes that keeps harping on the “Nintendo should be FOR preserving old games”. We all know Nintendo will continue to kick down ANYONE so much as glancing in their I.P. 's general direction.

Nintendo does what you Nintendon’t want. Always.

Extreme capitalism stifles and suffocates innovation and preservation.

Mango,

I’d like to seem them dump all those dollars in a legal battle they can’t win. Imagine if they succeed with the judge. They will lose their audience.

mlg,
@mlg@lemmy.world avatar

I kind of doubt this because Yuzu doesn’t actually have any of the cryptographic key material that Nintendo could have a valid reason to sue over. They only offer instructions to dump keys, which has to be argued is causing harm because its completely legal to do on consoles and games that you own.

Dolphin ships with the Wii’s AES key but Nintendo never pursued them in court.

Most likely Nintendo won’t get anywhere and only get Yuzu to remove some wiki pages and stuff which will make it slightly harder to use or slow down development by threatening more lawsuits.

sebinspace,

Nintendo know this. What everyone seems to be missing is that defending yourself in lawsuits also costs money.

Apple does this shit all the time.

Robaque, (edited )

Extreme capitalism stifles and suffocates innovation and preservation.

It’s an inherent contradiction of capitalist competition. Somehow everyone is supposed to be competitive but noone is supposed to win for capitalism to “work”. Otherwise it’s considered a monopoly and “anti-competitive”.

Ironically this requires collaboration.

ZeroMmX,

I had a feeling my adjective was too much.

The way you explain it makes me picture an ouroboros where, instead of the snake eating it’s ass, it’s the ass eating the snake.

dangblingus,

They didn’t expect it to happen because of all of the landmark rulings in the past that emulators are inherently not illegal unless they provide bios to the end user. The only reason why Nintendo is acting now instead of years ago when Yuzu first hit the scene is because it’s in basically a fully working state now and they somehow verified that 1,000,000 people downloaded TOTK. I suspect far more copies of BOTW and Mario Odyssey were downloaded prior.

therealjcdenton, (edited )

I wonder if Nintendo released their games outside of their own ecosystem if that number would still be as high

Tattorack,
@Tattorack@lemmy.world avatar

I haven’t yet. Sounds like I should add to that statistic.

TwilightVulpine,

The thing is whatever beef they might rightfully have with 1,000,000 people pirating TotK, it’s not the emulator who’s to blame. The ones who distributed pirated copies are. They are trying to pin it entirely on the wrong group, out of convenience/intimidation.

This is like suing a motorcycle company because a thief used one as a getaway vehicle.

otp,

I believe the issue is that Yuzu was patched to support TotK before TotK was released, which could suggest having used some proprietary code, or at least stuff that the devs shouldn’t have had access to.

They could also make the argument that very few people would’ve downloaded the game if the emulator didn’t exist or at least wasn’t being patched to support a game before it releases.

They definitely didn’t lose 1,000,000 sales. At the same time, I feel like it kind of crosses a line to be pirating a game before it’s even supposed to be sold in stores.

TwilightVulpine, (edited )

I’ve heard people saying just the opposite. It couldn’t run TotK before official release, and whoever made it run had to modify it independently (because it’s an open source project)

Arguing that people wouldn’t have downloaded it if not for the emulator, not only once again assigns blame to the wrong party (“if they didn’t have motorcycles to get away they might not have stolen it”), but it overlooks that there are modded Switches that can run pirated copies too.

Pirating stuff before it’s even out for sale is pretty sketchy, but Yuzu is not the one doing it. It simply lets people play copies they already have, including those they may have dumped themselves. Nintendo is encroaching on customer ownership rights by trying to argue even doing that is infringing.

edit: Maybe my analogy is lacking because one might argue that they rely on the tool to make use of the illicitly acquired thing, which is not necessarily true for a motorcycle. But if we say instead “the bluray player is to blame that people shoplifted” or “the media player is to blame that people downloaded pirated movies”, then I believe it should be even more clear that they are accusing the wrong party.

The only way for Nintendo’s reasoning to work is if they try to argue that not even someone who dumps their own roms and extracts their own keys from their own console ought to have the right to do it. Which would be disastrous for customer rights and preservation. Nintendo cannot be allowed to get away with that.

laughterlaughter,

I’ve said this before and I’ll say it now: I bet most of those 1,000,000 people would have never bought a copy of the game anyway.

dustyData,

Pretty much, piracy are never lost sales. Either the person is extremely passionate and loving of the product so they’ll buy it anyway regardless if they pirated it or not; or they were just tasting the flavor of the week and never intended to buy it under any circumstance; or they are extremely poor/their economy and context doesn’t allow them to access the product legitimately, so they wouldn’t be capable of buying it even if they wanted; or the product is not legitimately available anymore, so pirating is the only way of accessing it.

Piracy is never a lost sale.

laughterlaughter,

You were downvoted by a nintendo shill.

specseaweed,

I bought the game and I still considered emulating it just to run it at higher res.

chiliedogg,

I’m thinking of it so I can play older patches of the game.

jeeva,

Out of interest, at a high level, why?

Did they patch out interesting exploits/speed run things?

chiliedogg,

There’s some easy duplication glitches.

otp,

And some of them probably did buy the game, even

laughterlaughter,

And many more who were friends of acquaintances of the downloader.

jose1324,

Yuzu team is shit. Keep your money

redcalcium,

Elaborate?

yamanii,
@yamanii@lemmy.world avatar

You the pineappleEA guy? I love that I can have the patreon version for free with an easy updater thanks to the yuzu team stealing code from him and him having a vendetta.

mlg,
@mlg@lemmy.world avatar

Found the tinfoil dev lmao

Takina_sOldPairTM,
@Takina_sOldPairTM@lemmy.world avatar

Fuck you, Nintendo.

bozo,

What’s more, is that from these passages, it sounds like Nintendo even wants backups of games you have lawfully purchased to constitute copyright violation and made illegal (because they have to bypass encryption, therefore violating DMCA). I’m not fluent in legalese though, so correct me if I’m misinterpreting:

https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/401db9b1-de2f-4bae-b00b-c8eef540a6e7.png

https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/c193a4f9-0944-42f2-b666-de31da18d2f8.png

the16bitgamer,
@the16bitgamer@lemmy.world avatar

Ah corporate Lawyer BS, pointing out what they want to be true and not pointing out the other. ROMs are legal under existing Copywrite laws under archival laws in the USA (117) and backup laws in Canada (29.24). The Americans have a bit more of a restricted way of using their archives, but that’s not needs to be argued here, as it appears that Nintendo is blaming Yuzu for actions of the general consumer. It’ll be like blaming your Network provider for allowing a user to download a movie, both legally and illegally, thus they should be punished for both actions.

I also love that Nintendo isn’t not stating it’s illegal here, just that it’s infringing because it’s not authorized.

echo64,

Nintendo is blaming Yuzu for actions of the general consumer

If you read the dmca, that’s something you can do. Making tools that enable others to break copyright protection is specifically disallowed. Which is why it’s one of the more insidious copyright laws

dustyData,

However, the thing is that Yuzu doesn’t do that. Yuzu doesn’t include any form of tooling that breaks encryption, facilitates ROM dumping or offer downloads of Nintendo Copyrighted software. They aren’t facilitating it, the user has to provide all of that chain of the emulation on their own. Hopefully this would be obvious to a judge.

echo64,

it decrypts games using your console keys though? i’ve seen mention of that in their docs so i’m not sure, but yeah if it does that, it’s similar to things that decrypt blurays. feasibly against the dmca because of how broad the dmca is.

Atemu,
@Atemu@lemmy.ml avatar

Yuzu doesn’t include any form of tooling that breaks encryption

You cannot state that with certainty. That’s the problem.

Yuzu does indeed include a method to use the Switch’s production keys (which you must dump yourself) to decrypt the games. Whether this constitutes effective DRM is not a question that can easily be answered and must be decided by a court on a case-by-case basis.
This will be what the case will hinge on: Is Ninty’s scheme effective DRM?

I would say no because symmetric encryption with a publicly known key may aswell be no encryption at all but that’s not my decision to make.

They aren’t facilitating it, the user has to provide all of that chain of the emulation on their own.

Um, no. The emulator is doing the decryption on its own. All the user does is provide the prod keys and unmodified ROM.

dustyData, (edited )

Yuzu itself doesn’t provide tools to dump keys and Roms from the Switch. The user has to procure them, or the means to dump them, themselves. Thus Yuzu doesn’t facilitates DRM circumvention. The user has to solve that part on their own. They do provide guides for how to do it on their website. But Yuzu themselves don’t make or distribute the tooling, and Yuzu the software is incapable of doing it.

Atemu, (edited )
@Atemu@lemmy.ml avatar

The dumps are just that: Dumps; 1:1 copies.

The tools don’t decrypt anything; that happens within Yuzu. Why else would users need to provide the prod keys to Yuzu?

dustyData,

To dump the keys, third party tools rely on DRM circumventing sploits. You essentially have to hack your own device, certain versions of Switch and certain software updates are no longer susceptible. But it remains that Yuzu doesn’t do any of that. Those tools and sploits were developed by others.

captain_oni,

It’ll be like blaming your Network provider for allowing a user to download a movie

Which, by the way it was recently ruled in the US that ISPs can’t be punished for that. article source

evranch,

These passages imply the writers of them lack basic computer literacy and don’t even understand Nintendo’s own systems.

  • “copied the game ROMs into Yuzu” Yuzu is not a VM or other container and the ROMs are simply stored on disk in their original dumped form… Yuzu doesn’t “store” or “contain” any games.
  • “any copy not on an authorized cartridge” LOL! What about games downloaded from your own digital marketplace, then?

What about a game you downloaded from Nintendo eShop and stored on an external SD card, which is a standard and well supported storage method on Switch? Is that SD card an “authorized cartridge”?

ADTJ,

It says “not on an authorized cartridge or console”, the latter would cover legitimately downloaded games. Agree on the other points though.

Kolanaki, (edited )
@Kolanaki@yiffit.net avatar

The authorized cartridge thing would hopefully be ignored due to several other times Nintendo tried to stop developers like Tengen from bypassing their licensing system and developing their own carts for the NES (you know those weird ones that were usually blue or black? Those were “illegal” in Nintendo’s eyes but they lost every single case they took against them to try and stop them from being made).

Atemu, (edited )
@Atemu@lemmy.ml avatar

“copied the game ROMs into Yuzu” Yuzu is not a VM or other container and the ROMs are simply stored on disk in their original dumped form… Yuzu doesn’t “store” or “contain” any games.

ROMs are indeed copied “into Yuzu”. They must be loaded into Yuzu’s memory in order for Yuzu to execute their code or render their assets. In copyright law, even loading something to memory constitutes a “copy”.

Also, almost every emulator is a VM; do you think those ARM instructions are running on your x86 processor and its desktop OS kernel natively?

evranch,

I thought Yuzu was actually a dynamic recompiler? I remember this practice started in the days of N64 emulation, and these tools are more like debuggers than like VMs. So in this case, ROMs may only be copied “into Yuzu” byte by byte, not stored as a block in memory. At this point it’s really semantics, but that’s what the lawyers are supposed to figure out, right?

Unlike older emulators, Switch emulators don’t even support saving the emulator state, and their savegame data is stored right on the native filesystem. I believe they are actually more like Wine, and remember, Wine Is Not an Emulator.

badabim,

Yuzu does recompile some parts during runtime by using a JIT, but the rest is still emulated.

You can’t compare them to Wine, since Wine acts as a compatibility layer by translating OS specific calls, but it does not translate between instruction sets.

evranch,

Thanks for clarifying, I only have a casual knowledge of Yuzu internals and had been led to believe the ARM was translated rather than emulated.

The performance is honestly incredible for software emulating a different instruction set.

ICastFist,
@ICastFist@programming.dev avatar

I remember a video of SomeOrdinaryGamers talking about a case where a company (I think it was Nintendo) was arguing that making a copy of games you own yourself should be illegal. The whole case was just that. Probably something from the last 4 months or so.

Anyway, regarding 124, a judge with a working brain would say "There’s nothing here stating that it was Yuzu who allowed, or facilitated, anyone to obtain said reproductions."

  1. The copies were not obtained through Yuzu. Yuzu is not a site where the roms are, or even links to any of them. Sure, it exists solely to emulate nintendo’s current hardware, but that’s not the problem.

Sigh. If only law and justice worked based on factual evidence and logic, instead of interpretative contortionism…

inclementimmigrant,

18 million copies sold and they’re pulling this bullshit. Fuck Nintendo at this point.

Chriszz,

Copies of what

chunkystyles,

Tears of the kingdom.

TORFdot0,

They could have sold 19 million copies though. Won’t someone think of the billion dollar corporations?

dangblingus,

Surely people downloaded BOTW more times than TOTK over the 5+ years Yuzu has been around.

PineRune,

I feel like a large number of the people pirating wouldn’t have bought the game even if it was their only option. Then there’s people who pirated and bought the game both. Unrealized profit is not the same as losing money.

yamanii,
@yamanii@lemmy.world avatar

Yeah I don’t have a switch, and I’m not about to start it when the second one is near us.

dangblingus,

The vast majority of people pirating TOTK are just stealing it.

caut_R,

I think the majority of these is people just downloading it to see if it works for 2 hours and never touch it again lol

tryptaminev,

But the IP lobby sucessfully got that idea to the courts. In my country if you are caught torrenting a series episode just for 10 seconds, the courts accept the idea, that you spread like a hundred copies of the IP to people who would have definetely bought it otherwise, so you now owe the IP holder 1000 €.

It is complete horseshit

woodgen,

I wouldn’t have bought the stuff I pirated If I couldn’t have pirate it.

polysics, (edited )

Edit: I am dumb, of course the source code is out there. I have visited this repository a thousand times but my monkey brain can’t remember what I ate for breakfast.

github.com/yuzu-emu/yuzu

Everyone download the hell out of it and never let this die.

~ ~ ~

If it isn’t already open source, Yuzu team needs to get that shiz open source post-haste. Let’s get that code absolutely everywhere.

When that popular manga app Tachiyomi got legal bonked, the bajillion forks of it kept some semblance of the original going.

I know there’s money to be made and something like an emulator is considerably more complex than a book reading app/scraper, but it would at least give the project a chance of not dying forever.

Dudewitbow,

there are already 3rd party repositories that come from yuzu. e.g Yuzu Pineapple is a repository that autocompiles the source code that yuzu puts out so that you dont have to sub to get early access builds prebuilt.

AceFuzzLord,

deleted_by_author

    •
    KRAW,
    @KRAW@linux.community avatar

    Cool, so you’ve outed yourself as someone not 100% against racial slurs. If Nintendo was a black-owned company, would you have done the same?

    SoleInvictus,
    @SoleInvictus@lemmy.world avatar

    No judgment either way, just info:

    This spells “xiao riben” in Chinese. To anyone not familiar, this is derogatory Chinese slang for Japanese people, basically meaning “little Japanese person”. English speakers would use the term midget or runt. It hails back to WWII, when it was commonly believed that the Japanese were smaller than the Chinese.

    thantik,

    Yuzu actually even took steps to make the emulator NOT run pirated versions of the new Mario game before it officially released. I ran it on Ryujinx like a week ahead of its release date, but Yuzu literally refused. They insta-banned anyone who talked about it.

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