Im not a lawyer, but is this really good news? Isnt this just setting a precedent that Nintendo can shake down any emulator developer for ~2.4m any time they feel like it? So small developers are basically screwed?
Isnt this just setting a precedent.
Not a legal precident, it was settled which means there was no ruling.
It's good news in the sense that this won't be setting a new legal precedent surrounding emulation. Nintendo's case argued that the means by which cryptographic keys were obtained was in violation of the DMCA, which is an untested angle that could have dire legal ramifications for many other emulators if it were upheld in court.
On top of this, the Yuzu devs were a bit too brazen with their attitude towards piracy, and after consulting their lawyers they must have realized they have no legal ground to stand on. Any other emulator that runs a tighter ship in regard to copyrighted material (like most do) wouldn't be in such trouble. Nintendo wouldn't have a case with almost all other emulators, Yuzu in particular was giving them a lot to work with.
Yeah.
The Yuzu devs were basically going to lose unless they got the most tech savvy judge/jury in existence AND all of Nintendo's lawyers had food poisoning for a few months straight.
But the Yuzu devs losing in an actual court case would create precedent that would be a lot harder for all the other, more cautious, devs to dance around.
So... yay for Goliath smacking the shit out of David? I guess?
Yeah, all things considered this might be the best case scenario for this to play out, short of Yuzu somehow winning in court. It sucks to see Yuzu shut down, but the risk of new legal precedent surrounding emulation was far more concerning. At least Yuzu's source code will still live on.
They removed the repo, but many people have archived it.
And that is literally what (the mechanisms that support) DMCA requests are for.
Github/Gitlab and the like will pretty much auto-nuke it the moment they get a claim and might even set up a filter to detect the repo.
Which will basically leave yuzu as dead/unsupported code that only exists on the sketchiest of sites (so the places that make Sourceforge look legit). And there will inevitably be people who get viruses because someone tainted the clone.
Also, I expect the yuzu source code to be even more radioactive than the nintendo leaks of the past few years. Anyone caught copying or referencing it are opening themselves up to massive liability.
Does that make sense in terms of DMCA and yuzu tho? youtube-dl got taken down for DMCA reasons on GitHub a while ago, while that was pretty much just bs. I haven't looked too much into what yuzu does, but it seems like it's just an emulator without any tools you'd need to also get it to run, to get the game data and some Switch (DRM?) keys. That's comparable to browser cookies being used by youtube-dl to download websites' media.
Also (to me) it more looks like the yuzu devs themselves made stupid choices to promote piracy, not really including the actual app code though
I guess you could also argue it's "sketchy" in the same way, but source code is just source code: it can easily be hosted anywhere, and is probably only marginally more risky than a fork adding malware and hosting it on github. Oh and for the record, sourceforge is pretty much legit again, and has been for a number of years.
If they do end up surviving I would expect it will happen quietly on a self-hosted git instance which will eventually become known as the official repo. But yeah, certainly there is a higher risk of malware and shadiness happening for the forseeable future.
Yeah, i archived it as soon as the news Nintendo were coming after them dropped.
Hopefully it also gives emulator devs a push to separate out the ROM decrypting piece from future emulators and make them only work with decrypted roms. Then the decryption piece can just be shared under the table, and the biggest piece of development, the emulator, will be protected.
I think this is the best outcome that could currently happen. If they got a ruling it's very possible that Nintendo would win. That would probably cascade through the entire emulation scene and bring down countless other projects.
(Disclaimer: I'm not American and I'm not very knowledgeable in the American court system. Feel free to correct/inform me if I'm misunderstanding or missing information on this statement.)
Edit: just realized they had to take everything down aswell, that very much sucks.
Nintendo had a clear path to victory in this case, it wasn't a new idea that needed to be tested in court.
The yuzu devs really fucked up by adding in decryption to it. Without that, the emulator was totally safe, and likely why nintendo didn't try and do this years ago.
If you're making an emulator, or anything dealing with copywritten work. Don't add things that break the copyright protection, nintendo can come for you then. It's that simple.
2.4 mil to settle, or paying your lawyers potentially for years to fight the lawsuit and maybe lose?
It’s because Yuzu was profiting off of their development with a Patreon. Keep emulators FOSS and there’s no profits to claim.
Also, because it’s a settlement and not a ruling, it’s not setting a precedent for future lawsuits. Courts historically put a lot of weight on legal precedent, to help make rulings consistent. If one court interprets a new case in a certain way, similar cases in the future will likely look to that first case’s ruling for guidance.
So if one ruling had decided that emulation is illegal, then subsequent lawsuits would have been much much easier for Nintendo. Because Nintendo could basically argue “we already proved emulation is illegal in that previous case, so now we don’t need to do that part again.”
FOSS and Patreon does not exclude each other in any way.
Fuck Nintendo. Get those repos duplicated.
Why is this a sigh of relief? Nintendo has bullied an emulator's dev team and got $2.4 millions out of it. If I was an emu dev, I certainly would not be happy with this news.
Nintendo went after a emu dev team that was actively (and demonstratively) enabling piracy for something they are currently selling. On top of that, the dev team is making significant money off of that work, to the tune of 30k/mo. Every other dev is probably thinking "finally, the other shoe drops on this obvious outcome", most avoid making money off it, and also avoid current systems, both for just this reason. The relieving part is Nintendo's argument isn't about the emulator specifically, ~~there's nothing in the injunction stopping yuzu from continuing~~, and a settlement means no legal precedent.
Edit: Read more, the settlement includes stopping development.
They were not actively enabling piracy at all. Piracy discussion was banned on all their platforms as well as any information on how to get software title keys illegally. They did everything right and were still bullied out of 2.4 million
My thoughts too, quite the opposite.
FOSS emulator developers need to learn that since the DMCA was passed, the state is hostile to them. It isn't fair and it doesn't matter that the Sony v Bleep lawsuit set precedence that emulators are legal because the DMCA is so vague that a judge can rule can rule it is impossible to legally emulate copy protected games. Developers need to start exclusively contributing and maintaining their projects through a pseudonym with no ties to their real identity or move to countries where shit like this doesn't happen.
The main link is to the motion paper. This is the link to the actual agreed-upon final judgment and injunction:
https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.rid.56980/gov.uscourts.rid.56980.10.1.pdf
In short, Yuzu agreed to stop developing and distributing the emulator, cannot distribute source code, assign it to a new entity, encourage any IP violations, and must surrender their domain.
The findings also include admissions that the purpose of the Yuzu software was "primarily" designed to circumvent technical measures in violation of the DMCA.
So it appears Yuzu didn't "win" in any real sense. Nintendo got a chilling amount of damages, effectively their full injunction, and also some agreed-upon "findings of fact" that may serve Nintendo in future litigation to justify claims that emulators are "primarily" designed to circumvent technical measures and circumvent the DMCA.
Someone mentioned this on Reddit, but I wonder how poorly discovery would have gone for Yuzu if the lawsuit had continued.
I can't imagine they were super careful about not bringing up the piracy side of things in various internal and even external communications. I can't help but wonder if they basically talked about or even bragged about how much money they get from adding support for games like TotK.
It's a good point. Honestly, unless everyone in a company is extremely careful, non-lawyers will say very incriminating crap at some point. I think Grokster (the vicarious infringement case Nintendo was probably going to rely on) had quite a bit of that.
This is bad.
Its bad for Yuzu/Tropic Haze. But it is "not bad" for emulation as a whole because there was no legal precedent.
If nintendo decides to continue to strong arm emulator teams into shutting down that is going to be really bad. But that is ALSO when activist orgs tend to get involved and foot the bill/provide lawyers because they want the precedent that prevents those kinds of lawsuits.
You think Nintendo is just going to stop? They can get an easy couple of million now by going after anyone with an emulator. I'm sure they could even go after discontinued console emulators too now they have a shitty service to play their old games.
Interesting. Wonder what that means in terms of github. Yuzu isn't technically distributing the source, is Nintendo taking ownership of it? What stops someone from forking the repo? Who is "yuzu" that's paying this bill?
Presumably forks remain public on Github at their own risk, but Nintendo may shift to a DMCA removal policy now that are about to have a judgment.
The judgment has two sections, one for people who have "privity" and more direct relationships with Tropic Haze, and another for "all third parties acting in active concert and participation with" Tropic Haze. The latter enjoins only sharing code and decryption keys. So it certainly sounds like this was drafted to capture, in the Court's order, people who don't have a relationship but are code-forking.
Nintendo doesn't have nearly as clean legal leverage for randos and individuals that don't have a company built around this emulator, but I actually predict they'll do GitHub DMCA removals on forks based on a broad reading of the injunction.
There is no judgement in a settlement, and settlements are not case-law. The court has little to do with the settlement as it is simply a binding agreement between the parties to resolve the dispute outside of the court. The judge must also agree and sign off but the settlement is only binding to the parties to the suit and does not create any precedent.
If Nintendo wishes to go after anyone else, it will require an entirely new suit. A quick google on the differences between judgements, verdicts, and settlements will explain a lot better.
Yes, if you were to argue it later in court, you would argue that technically it was a judgment to enter the stipulation and dismiss. And the court may strike the "Judgment" wording in the proposed order. But Nintendo presumably wrote it as a "Judgment" knowing the value that such a designation has.
Further, most stipulated settlements don't include substantive findings of fact, and again, Nintendo drafted that section explicitly to blur the line between a court's finding of facts and mere approved stipulated findings of fact. With this order on the books, it will be up to the next case's defendant to later argue that it wasn't equivalent to any other trial findings of fact and order.
Yes, it doesn't technically create precedent as a trial-tested findings of fact by the Court, but a competent litigation attorney would argue that it is probative of the factual issue and fudge the wording in a brief well enough to argue effectively the same.
If they settled that quickly, their lawyers must have told them they'd have gotten fucked six days to Sunday. Obviously this isn't good for Yuzu, but if the settlement is only monetary, that means they can continue development (minus whatever detail Nintendo considered too far, probably the keys thing).
Overall this is probably the least bad outcome.
Edit: apparently it's more than just money, they're shutting down: https://www.theverge.com/2024/3/4/24090357/nintendo-yuzu-emulator-lawsuit-settlement
Given that it's GPL software, though, I expect someone else will pick it up before too long.
Edit2: also looks like this is a recent repo fork: https://github.com/archive-nexus/yuzu
Given that it's GPL software, though, I expect someone else will pick it up before too long.
But I can think of 2.4 million reasons why it won't be. So sad.
That fork will probably be nuked from GitHub soon people better make local copies and a p2p version of the repo if they want it to continue existing
Honest question: Where the hell are they gonna come up with 2.4 mil?
I have no clue how Yuzu as an organization is funded.
I believe they take subscriptions for early release builds of the emulator.
I appreciate the straightforward answer, thanks!
But uh... fuck. This fucking sucks, Yuzu is basically dead now, they have to disband and take down their code.
If Yuzu lives it will only be pirate copies floating around, further development will... basically have to go underground more like game crackers, as this very settlement establishes that Nintendo will sue you into oblivion if you publicly work on this.
Yeah, it's pretty disappointing. I keep hearing people say it'll get forked and people will continue the work. All I can say is "lol."
Nowhere? They will be bankrupt and shutdown the LLC. Whatever their LLC accounts has will go to Nintendo, and any other asset the same. But I doubt they had pretty much anything, maybe the latest Patreon payment and maybe some extra money to pay websites and maybe any office or similar if they rented anything.
This makes me sad.
Will Citra be affected?
Already gone.
Yes.
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