How strong is Nintendo’s legal case against Switch emulator Yuzu?
arstechnica.com
Nintendo is "basically taking the position that emulation itself is unlawful."

Seriously what is this? Nintendo argues that by instructing users how to extract the prod.keys from their own switch the yuzu developers are essencially infringing on the DMCA.

So what? Now you can’t even freely use your own property anymore because it goes against the design intentions of some big company that just want’s to milk their users?

Nintendo goes directly after this 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.”

  • pivot_root@lemmy.world
    181·
    8 months ago

    If Nintendo can prove that the primary purpose of Yuzu is to circumvent Nintendo’s encryption, there is a very real and very scary chance they could win the lawsuit.

    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.

    • ColeSloth@discuss.tchncs.de
      71·
      8 months ago

      It’s less about being right and more about Yuzu devs willing to spend a million dollars to defend themselves and risk a tens of millions of dollars ruling against them. The best case Yuzu will have is winning and court costs. Worse case is owing God knows how much to Nintendo. The system is bullshit.

      • pivot_root@lemmy.world
        3·
        8 months ago

        The system is absolutely bullshit. If this makes it into a courtroom, the odds will likely be even further stacked against Yuzu. The chance of getting a judge that goes out of his/her way to understand the technical arguments is extremely low, and it’s a lot easier to argue that unauthorized decryption is bypassing something than it is to argue that software needing to do it to work isn’t primarily designed to do it.

        Unless the EFF steps in and bankrolls Yuzu, the most realistic case here is that they settle out of court and Nintendo gets exactly what they want.

    • binomialchicken@lemmy.blahaj.zone
      2·
      8 months ago

      I’m no lawyer so I could be completely off-base, but I think the existence of homebrew can make all 3 points defensible, depending on what evidence exists about their primary intent being breaking the DRM. If they have posted publicly things like “this patch should bypass DRM for this particular game” then they would be screwed, but posts like “supports/extends this feature so we can better emulate the functionality in this particular game” should be fine? At least if I understand the precedent set by the Connectix ruling in addition to the wording of what you pasted?