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Nintendo sues Switch emulator Yuzu for ‘facilitating piracy at a colossal scale’ (www.theverge.com)

submitted 10 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Thanks for providing all that info, I was aware of some but not all of that. Is my understanding that just providing the emulator without keys correct? Besides the keys themselves and the switch OS, there’s nothing that bypasses copyright. It does seem like from the other comments here that the devs may not have kept a clean separation which will now bite them.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (1 children)

Almost. The technical stuff is going to be a bit butched, but I'll drop the legal speak and be more human for a minute:

What makes this unique isn't that Nintendo is going after them for providing the keys, but for actually using them. Yuzu asks the user to dump or acquire prod.keys on their own, and then it uses that to read encrypted data. The fact that it does that, regardless of whether the keys were obtained legitimately or not, is where the argument that it's a DRM circumvention tool lays. Yuzu itself is supposedly "circumventing" Nintendo's DRM process by using the keys in a way that bypasses all of the protections that Nintendo put into place to prevent the games from being loaded on non-Switch hardware.

The Yuzu devs' willingness to have FAQs and a quick start guide explaining the requirements and steps to emulate commercial games on Yuzu is definitely going to bite them and undermine any defense they had for not knowingly marketing it as a circumvention tool. Another criterion is that Yuzu has to have some commercial significance if it were to lose its ability to circumvent DRM. And, as we know, it's an emulator...

The best chances they have is to convince the judge that Yuzu isn't primarily designed as a circumvention tool (which, once again, isn't helped by their guide on how to run commercial games) or that it falls under the accessibility exemption added recently.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 10 months ago

Thanks, that all makes a lot of sense.

To me just asking for the key alone seems fine (I'm not a lawyer, but other tools like open transport tycoon and other tools do that), but advertising how to get those keys as you said will probably over the line, and advertising it as posting Nintendo titles more so.