- cross-posted to:
- gaming@beehaw.org
- cross-posted to:
- gaming@beehaw.org
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
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?
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.
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 at it from this angle. I hope I’m wrong, but this could set a very bad precedent if Nintendo is successful.
From the article:
This part of the argument specifically needs to be smacked and shut down by the courts. 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.