ndh

nonbinary transfemme anarchist

  • she/they

Never dare hope for good fortune when playing against loaded dice
But dare to flip the tables of the carnies who rigged the game

~~~ ~~~ ~~~

Aspiring pro wrestler looking for training, a queer fantasy author and gamedev hobbyest.

Ask me about wrestling, narrative games and tabletop RPGs.


QuestForTori
@QuestForTori

There's ample legal precedent in America that emulators are legal so long as it's made in a clean room dev environment and does not contain tools to decrypt or break copy protection, which Yuzu requires you to obtain on your own.

Nintendo knows that if this went to court there's a good chance it'd get thrown out just from that precedent, and instead is trying to make the scariest legal threats they can to settle out of court. Which is exactly what happened.

Nintendo's goal is to make it appear as though emulation IS illegal by threatening every single developer they can until they bend to their will, even if they've done nothing wrong.

Once again, I must reiterate, Yuzu has no means of circumventing copy protection on its own. it is only capable of this if the user provides decryption keys and a firmware, and that's almost certainly only illegal if you didn't dump them yourself. I may not be a lawyer, but the legal precedent on file suggests this conclusion strongly enough that I'm confident Nintendo is just waving their dick around and trying to scare everyone into silence for even discussing emulation.

Fuck Nintendo and keep pirating their games.


You must log in to comment.

in reply to @QuestForTori's post:

Obviously it should be legal and Nintendo is being awful, but has "can decrypt but doesn't include keys" been tested in court before? The Dolphin Steam release was never actually a lawsuit (and they still have the keys anyway), nor was the DVD encryption key thing, and I haven't been able to find anything else relevant.

Both the act and the distribution of tools to do, yes, but crucially the tool must be primarily designed to circumvent protection, and there are exceptions granted for the purposes of archival, interoperability with other software, and other cases.

Dolphin, after they lawyered up in response to Nintendo telling Steam to not approve the Dolphin Steam release, argued that their inclusion of encryption keys + ability to decrypt were both protected under the interoperability exceptions. Had Yuzu had the funds and time for a case (or support from, say, the EFF), I think it's not clear that they would've lost by making that argument themselves, especially since they don't include encryption keys themselves.

De facto and de jure are often different. The former matters more, obviously, and that's the clear tactic here. The law is also malleable, and de facto precedent can change it. IP lawyers always use this fact when attacking PR problems for their clients. IP is a fuck.