Just last week, on Tuesday, February 26th, 2024, news broke out about the Yuzu emulator team being sued by none other than Nintendo themselves, with Nintendo claiming that the emulator apparently allowed users to play certain games early (due to street dates being broken) and also allowing piracy of the current Nintendo Switch system.

Today, in a rather surprisingly quick manner, it seems like Tropic Haze LLC., the company behind the Yuzu team, has reached a settlement with Nintendo in regards to the lawsuit. According to a recent official document uploaded just a few minutes ago, Tropic Haze will pay up 2.4 million USD in favour to Nintendo, with both parties agreeing in the settlement and its amount.

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UPDATE: According to the proposed Final Judgement and Permanent Injunction document, Yuzu as a whole in its current form will cease to exist, meaning no further development and prohibition of any distribution of built or source code forms of it.

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Official document of the settlement
Final Judgement and Permanent Injunction

 

[gisel213]

Haven't had time to comment, but wanted to chime in since I haven't been online in a while...

After what Nintendo did to the YuZu emulator, I say pirate all their sh*t. To add insult to injury, I just bought the Citra emulator less than a month ago and didn't realize that the devs of YuZu also developed for Citra... So I guess I'm SOL now and out of a refund too? F*CK Nintendo!

Post automatically merged: Mar 6, 2024

The fork you might be referring to: https://www.dsogaming.com/news/nintendo-switch-emulators-nuzu-and-suyu-rise-from-the-ashes-of-yuzu/

Yeah them 12tb hard-drives for 80 bucks looking real good right now to hold such a library. Think I'll buy 3 and a 2tb nvme ssd paired with a i3 14100f and a 1660 Super with windowed NZXT case. Builds Switch Monument and Let's not forget decoration with figurines on the inside ahhh gives me a reason to open this

 

[LingFox]

This is all sorts of odd. Didn't the supreme court used to say that emulators were all in all legal, like when Sony tried to sue the creators of Bleem? (source)
How much money did Nintendo threw at them to overrule that? Don't they realize that this can backfire at them spectacularly since anyone now can sue them over some obscure library used in their hardware? (it's an exaggeration, but I don't think it's too far from the truth).

Probably don't care... yet

Due to how Dolphin is made, it cannot be sued.

Nintendo showing their true Yakuza roots, once again. This is also incredible, it would be like me suing Miracle Blade because someone with a knife entered my house and stabbed my couch. The knife wielding maniac would still get out free, it's the wrong objective. What a bunch of idiots.

Emulators are retro-engineering, without retro-engineering even they wouldn't have most of the stuff they use. Also, ever considered releasing games on pc? emus are also used just to force a pc-port since most of those executives are too dumb to consider it.

 

[NoobletCheese]

Due to how Dolphin is made, it cannot be sued.

Why not tho? I mean if I design a combustion engine I don't think others can make copies of it - the design is still my intellectual property.

YUZU devs: "But we see now that because our projects can circumvent Nintendo's technological protection measures and allow users to play games outside of authorized hardware, they have led to extensive piracy"

Their logic is invalid - just because a tool can be used for evil, doesn't mean it should be illegal (guns being an extreme example).

Post automatically merged: Mar 6, 2024

Yuzu fucked up b/c they profited on their emulator which required illegal keys.

According to Gemini just now...

 

[LingFox]

Why not tho? I mean if I design a combustion engine I don't think others can make copies of it - the design is still my intellectual property.

YUZU devs: "But we see now that because our projects can circumvent Nintendo's technological protection measures and allow users to play games outside of authorized hardware, they have led to extensive piracy"Their

That example is completely wrong and disingenuous. you know that Nylon used to be Trademark but it lost it because it was to widely spread it couldn't be used as a trademark anymore, right? (not a source, but a quick example can be found on this blogpost)
A more fitting example is making a console with opensource or non-proprietary library, which is, apparently, what dolphin is: something that isn't immediately proprietary to Nintendo.


Also they already tried and failed in the past.
source 1
not-a-source (wikipedia lol)

tl;dr Dolphin devs haven't used anything proprietary to Nintendo.

BTW: Emulators needs to shut the hell up, don't make publicity if you're not ready to face legal troubles from eager subhuman lawyers. As in, don't put your emulator on steam, epic, origin or whatever else popular marketplace you're aiming, keep it on github or gitlab and let people download and thinker with it.

It's a similar case to Palworld and Pokémon: similar but not equal, and I don't care for either, i'm just happy that something like that made the fandom seethe and showed the pokémon company, and to an extent, nintendo, that they shouldn't hold a monopoly. As of why people let monopolies exist on the first place, it's a mistery. Maybe it's the lack of FOSS mentality.

logic is unsound - just because a tool can be used for evil, doesn't mean it should be illegal (guns being an extreme example).

I wholly agree.

 

[Bladexdsl]

BTW: Emulators needs to shut the hell up, don't make publicity if you're not ready to face legal troubles from eager subhuman lawyers. As in, don't put your emulator on steam, epic, origin or whatever else popular marketplace you're aiming, keep it on github or gitlab and let people download and thinker with it.

yep back in the days emus were only available on the dark web and they survived. putting your emu on steam is basically waving a flag to big N saying come and get me

 

[LingFox]

yep back in the days emus were only available on the dark web and they survived

if by "dark web" you mean dedicated forums like GBATemp, then yes, they did.
most of the gaming-related items found on the darkweb are also on the clearnet.
If anything, people used more IRCs and IRC clients like MIRC to share games and roms, but that's not darknet, that's just not using the web-browser. And it's also how most of the SCENE still does business, although most of the SCENE left because they got hired by that spyware that is Denuvo, may a(n economical) meteor strike them down tomorrow.
The modern equivalent would be using some matrix client that isn't a nightmare to use and a node that isn't matrix's default homenode, since it's the most censored and pozzed place ever, about as bad as any social media platform you can think of.

all of this boils down to a single issue:
Copyright laws are outdated and unnecessary anymore. They don't protect the author, they protect the publisher's lawyers offices.

The examples are how Konami's game department basically holds the Metal Gear IP hostage, David Hayter can't use his own voice if it "sounds too much like snake" on commercial products (which is ridiculous at best); Denuvo hunts down crackers/scene to hire them (held at the risk of a lawsuit); And now Nintendo hunts down retro-engineers lest they learn how a piece of shit android tablet lets us play videogames at more than 15 fps.

 

[NoobletCheese]

Just got done watching it and the key takeaways appear to be:

1. Emulators can be legal and devs can even legally use the console's BIOS in development of the emulator, but cannot include the BIOS in the final product.

2. Dolphin is almost certainly illegal as it contains cryptographic keys whose sole purpose is to circumvent copyright. I think this is fair and Dolphin devs shouldn't include the key with the emulator (for legal reasons, but not moral reasons imo.... as I said previously I don't have a moral issue with piracy or emulators as long as the user wasn't going to buy the product anyway, and used copies don't generate any profit for the devs either. edit: or should I say the profit is divided by how many people onsold the game...and there doesn't appear to be any limit to how many people can onsell the same copy, theoretically allowing the profit to be reduced to almost nothing).

It occurred to me also the hardware which Dolphin emulates is IBM PowerPC which isn't actually made by Nintendo.

 

[l7777]

If I understand correctly, Nintendo's primary argument was that folks associated with Yuzu, even indirectly, were helping people get the needed Switch decryption keys. While Yuzu could have likely prevailed after a lengthily court battle I'm sure it was easier to simply settle and move on with their lives. It is sadly a downside of our legal system. A corporation with lots of $$$ to burn can target a small developer and get them to cease operations even if they are in the clear because they don't have the funds/desire to fight a legal battle.

This is a perfect example of why GBATemp and some developers are so proactively against any piracy discussions.

IMO Ryujinx should already be taking steps to solidify their stance against piracy and in no way point people to Switch keys potentially even removing references to them.

That said, in the long term I'm sure another group will pickup where the current emulators left off, it's not like Nintendo can completely scrub the internet of all traces of Yuzu, other Switch emulators, or the existing keys.

 

[NoobletCheese]

It is sadly a downside of our legal system. A corporation with lots of $$$ to burn can target a small developer and get them to cease operations even if they are in the clear because they don't have the funds/desire to fight a legal battle.

In other countries if you lose the case you have to pay legal fees to the defendant. This would have a chilling effect which imo is desirable given that it's better to let a guilty person go free than hurt an innocent person.

edit: I guess it's still a problem as the small fish can't afford a very expensive lawyer which the big whale can easily afford to pay if they lose, and vice versa

Post automatically merged: Mar 6, 2024

Dolphin was developed by 100+ anonymous devs on Github so who are Nintendo going to sue? All of them? They'd have to go after Github I suppose.

 

[Foxi4]

God! if I see another white knight Nintendo bot typing these long essays I might lose it here....
Yuzu fucked up b/c they profited on their emulator which required illegal keys. They made the same mistake sxos did basic greed. The users were basically advertising it with Tears of the Kingdom all over Youtube. Shutting down 1 emulator is like trying to cut off hydra's head - 3 more will just pop up in its place as long game dumps are out there.

There is absolutely nothing untoward about making a for profit emulator. That is not illegal, and never was. As for the keys, it is ultimately the user who has to circumvent copy protection and extract one from a device in order for the emulator to function. Yuzu did not feature any copyrighted content and Nintendo didn’t suggest that as a cause of action. They claimed that Yuzu facilitated piracy, which is rather nebulous. Nintendo constructed an idea of secondary liability which would’ve been interesting to see argued in court, but this kind of lawfare is both expensive and risky so Yuzu’s team rightfully decided not to play that game. That doesn’t make Nintendo’s actions justifiable and consumers are free to exercise their own discernment and moral compass.

As far as I’m concerned, when I purchase a Nintendo Switch, I am also purchasing a license for any and all software contained within it, which includes any and all keys it may contain. If those keys are necessary in order to allow for interoperability with other software I might be using then guess what, I’m extracting them, and there’s a readily available DMCA exemption for that purpose. That’s not “piracy”, I am one user, I’m not distributing content that I already own to other users unless you want to argue that I’m distributing it to myself, which is stupid. If I want to play my copy of Doom on a toaster then I will, the same applies to TOTK. If Nintendo doesn’t want me to play TOTK on a device other than the Nintendo Switch then maybe they should A) optimise their software better or B) release hardware that doesn’t make a toaster the preferable option.

All of this contrarian nonsense on behalf of a multibillion dollar mega giant of a company really rubs me the wrong way. In order to use Yuzu at all the user had to have a Switch to extract a key from. If Nintendo wants to claim that keys were shared illegally, they can go for it and have fun chasing people who are doing that - that’s their property and shouldn’t be shared. If they want to chase game pirates, more power to them - their property, shouldn’t be shared. Chasing after developers of an emulator as a catch-all solution is the wrong way to go about it.

 

[LingFox]

They'd have to go after Github I suppose.

Which, in turn, is owned by Microsoft.


What is annoying are those contrarian defending this mess. They're defending the same company that tried to patent the game mechanic where you can join items together. Well, guess what? Tabletop Simulator did it before them, and I'm sure lots of other games did it before TOTK.

There is absolutely nothing untoward about making a for profit emulator

Lol, that's basically what supreme court case also established. There's a reason why most android emulators are paid. It's shit, but you can do it. emulators are legal, sharing bios and roms isn't. Although then you have devs like Carmack that don't care if you pirate Doom.

Chasing after developers of an emulator as a catch-all solution is the wrong way to go about it.

Especially if someone decides to counter this move by getting the Supreme Court involved, since everyone will quote that Sony vs Bleem, and overturning that case would render basically all of the internet and US infrastructure illegal. Besides, that case is also why people fixing their printers can't be held accountable by tech corps and stuff.

A) optimise their software better or B) release hardware that doesn’t make a toaster the preferable option.

or C) Open source the hardware so people can thinker with it. There's a reason why people loved consoles like the wii or psp, piracy aside, it was great to just fiddle with it and port stuff that wasn't thought with that hardware in mind. such as SDR software or TV. It's also annoying how Nintendo is basically claiming that everything inside the Nintendo Switch is proprietary to them despite ARM not being something inherent to Nintendo (arm holdings would have a laugh with this claim), as well as some libraries being actually open source/MIT

 

[Dark_Ansem]

There is absolutely nothing untoward about making a for profit emulator. That is not illegal, and never was. As for the keys, it is ultimately the user who has to circumvent copy protection and extract one from a device in order for the emulator to function. Yuzu did not feature any copyrighted content and Nintendo didn’t suggest that as a cause of action. They claimed that Yuzu facilitated piracy, which is rather nebulous. Nintendo constructed an idea of secondary liability which would’ve been interesting to see argued in court, but this kind of lawfare is both expensive and risky so Yuzu’s team rightfully decided not to play that game. That doesn’t make Nintendo’s actions justifiable and consumers are free to exercise their own discernment and moral compass.

As far as I’m concerned, when I purchase a Nintendo Switch, I am also purchasing a license for any and all software contained within it, which includes any and all keys it may contain. If those keys are necessary in order to allow for interoperability with other software I might be using then guess what, I’m extracting them, and there’s a readily available DMCA exemption for that purpose. That’s not “piracy”, I am one user, I’m not distributing content that I already own to other users unless you want to argue that I’m distributing it to myself, which is stupid. If I want to play my copy of Doom on a toaster then I will, the same applies to TOTK. If Nintendo doesn’t want me to play TOTK on a device other than the Nintendo Switch then maybe they should A) optimise their software better or B) release hardware that doesn’t make a toaster the preferable option.

All of this contrarian nonsense on behalf of a multibillion dollar mega giant of a company really rubs me the wrong way. In order to use it, at all, the user had to have a Switch to extract a key from. If Nintendo wants to claim that keys were shared illegally, they can go for it and have fun chasing people who are doing that - that’s their property and shouldn’t be shared. If they want to chase game pirates, more power to them - their property, shouldn’t be shared. Chasing after developers of an emulator as a catch-all solution is the wrong way to go about it.

Please stop saying agreeable things, it feels... unnatural.

 

[NoobletCheese]

Well, perhaps at least we can take comfort in the fact that Nintendo didn't actually win the case, so there is no legal precedent being set here. All that happened was Nintendo threw its financial weight around to get the outcome it wanted.

 

[Foxi4]

Please stop saying agreeable things, it feels... unnatural.

You will start feeling this weird sensation more and more often. Do not be afraid - this is a good sign. Come into the light, we have ROMs and cookies.

 

[Dark_Ansem]

You will start feeling this weird sensation more and more often. Do not be afraid - this is a good sign. Come into the light, we have ROMs and cookies.

Dear God, please hide this message from the eyes of BADtendo

 

[Foxi4]

Dear God, please hide this message from the eyes of BADtendo

This is the way of the New Epoch. They can send agents to kill the messengers, they cannot kill the message.

 

[LingFox]

I still think that this all happened because someone during a meeting looked at the charts going down something % and said "ok, we need to do something about it" and them someone said "oh people are still ranting about the N64 emulator running like shit", then the lawyers hearing the word "Emulators" started foaming from their mouth and went wild. They also defenestrated the poor soul that suggested to release more interesting games instead of acting like the yakuza. Poor soul, was so depressed that they killed themselves by ordering a missile strike on their location after tying themselves to a chair.

 

[Nerdtendo]

”I don’t care how many puppies Miyamoto personally kicked, I just have to buy “New Nintendogs + Cats + Parrots Soccer” or I’ll scream”. It is perfectly reasonable to remind people who have a problem with this kind of litigiousness that they’re actively bankrolling the perpetrator. It’s not the first time and it most likely isn’t the last. Let’s be real for a moment here - there’s a very good reason why a Switch emulator was targeted above all else, despite Nintendo systems being emulated since the dawn of time. That reason is black and it’s called “Steamdeck”.



Yuzu allowed you to play the exact same Nintendo games on other platforms, except *better*, and the resurgence of UMPC’s became an existential threat to Nintendo’s own hardware. With the Switch 2 looming over the horizon the possibility of sales being negatively affected by the existence of a possibly better alternative became both very real and prescient. This was the reasoning behind Sony going after Bleem! and it’s most likely a major motivator behind going after Yuzu - both products allowed users to play games at higher resolutions and with better framerate than the native product they were designed for, using hardware that is readily available to consumers. Ultimately the party most affected by all of this is neither Yuzu nor Nintendo, it’s the consumer. Devices like the Steamdeck, the ROG Ally, other “portable PC’s” or even just regular laptops did what Nintendoesn’t, and they can’t go after them, so Yuzu had to die, this is pretty straightforward. Suing Yuzu is infinitely easier than making hardware that doesn’t suck. Did any of this affect Nintendo’s bottom line? Most likely not by much as emulation is still most prevalent among big brain nerds and there’s a barrier to entry here whereas the Switch is a simple “pick up and play” affair. Did it affect it enough to be noticeable to them, or to seem like a threat? Probably.

I am hyper aware of this. I've been following this scene for... 10ish years now? The point I'm trying to make isn't "I want to keep Nintendo's dick in my mouth". In fact, I haven't, and do not intend to, continue supporting Nintendo financially until their stance on game preservation changes. However, let's not kid ourselves. This isn't a matter of kicking puppies. This is a matter of video games. No matter how big of a stink we want to make, or how much were bothered, there are simply more important issues in this world to spend our energy on. Ultimately, the market is king. Outside of our very niche community, no one cares about this. Nintendo will continue to make money. Even if this entire site boycotted Nintendo forever, it would only be considered a rounding error. Even though I have no intention to spend any money with them, I'm not going to kid myself and imagine for a second that withholding my money from Nintendo is going to make any difference. It's like all those people who were trying to boycott every company that supported Israel rather than Palestine. It's just making yourself miserable for the sake of virtue signaling.

TLDR; I haven't a don't intend to buy from Nintendo. However, it doesn't matter if I did. I don't take orders from people on the Internet and you shouldn't either.

 

[J-Will]

Nintendo can go fuck themselves

 

[Foxi4]

I am hyper aware of this. I've been following this scene for... 10ish years now? The point I'm trying to make isn't "I want to keep Nintendo's dick in my mouth". In fact, I haven't, and do not intend to, continue supporting Nintendo financially until their stance on game preservation changes. However, let's not kid ourselves. This isn't a matter of kicking puppies. This is a matter of video games. No matter how big of a stink we want to make, or how much were bothered, there are simply more important issues in this world to spend our energy on. Ultimately, the market is king. Outside of our very niche community, no one cares about this. Nintendo will continue to make money. Even if this entire site boycotted Nintendo forever, it would only be considered a rounding error. Even though I have no intention to spend any money with them, I'm not going to kid myself and imagine for a second that withholding my money from Nintendo is going to make any difference. It's like all those people who were trying to boycott every company that supported Israel rather than Palestine. It's just making yourself miserable for the sake of virtue signaling.

TLDR; I haven't a don't intend to buy from Nintendo. However, it doesn't matter if I did. I don't take orders from people on the Internet and you shouldn't either.

The video game industry operates on extremely narrow margins and every sale counts. Media has been devalued to almost nothing - if we were to adjust the cost of video games for inflation properly we’d be paying hundreds of dollars a pop. You might think that you choosing to take your money elsewhere doesn’t make a dent because the hardcore community is so small, but what you neglect to account for is that the hardcore community *is* the hardcore community - they’re the big spenders that will otherwise happily buy anything that has a Nintendo badge on it. Attacking SX doesn’t make a splash because SX is only relevant to pirates - attacking an open source emulator *does* make a splash because it affects legitimate users.