https://twitter.com/stephentotilo/status/1762576284817768457/
"NEW: Nintendo is suing the creators of popular Switch emulator Yuzu, saying their tech illegally circumvents Nintendo’s software encryption and facilitates piracy. Seeks damages for alleged violations and a shutdown of the emulator.
Notes 1 million copies of Tears of the Kingdom downloaded prior to game’s release; says Yuzu’s Patreon support doubled during that time. Basically arguing that that is proof that Yuzu’s business model helps piracy flourish."
I have a .zip containing the latest early access version of Yuzu, for Windows and Linux. It includes the emulator, all required decryption keys, the latest firmware for game compatibility, a tool to automatically download mods, and a convenient guide on how to acquire ROMs.
I will forever distribute this .zip in a non-limited download link to anyone who asks me. Forever. You can PM me today and I’ll send it, you can PM me in 5 years and I’ll send it. Please feel free to do so. It’s not illegal to share where I live, so I’ll share. But do it via PMs, as to avoid causing trouble to the community.
Again, forever. If you’re reading this in the future, unless I’m dead (my mental health is a bit shaky), I’m sending you a fully functional Yuzu pack.
Have a nice day.
Would you consider posting the SHA256 of the download so future pirates may cross reference with this comment thread? Y’arr.
Good idea!
SHA256 (.zip): 81c3101348abff9eb7ca55bdb14464eb4b1011d288b3285c91a013a62a1fea94
SHA256 (most recent download link): 120288a5781e23f2c4767c6448a33f2803ab1d45943301441315aa20b78c7fc5
This is such a dope move, I appriciate your efforts! Thanks for helping the community :)
Decrypting these doesn’t seem to work for me, any idea why?
It’s a hash, not anything encrypted.
Sorry, I don’t smoke. No, not even in code form.
Hang in there, friend, there any many more Nintendo games coming that we must enjoy through piracy to stick it to Nintendo, don’t leave just yet.
Thanks! May we all enjoy gaming together :)
I’m sorry to hear that your mental health is shaky at the moment. I hope things get better for you soon, friend.
I have forked everythjng yuzu in hopes of preserving the source code it’s availible here: https://github.com/F0SSC0RE?tab=repositories
I wouldn’t trust the fork to remain on GitHub. When yt-dl was taken down GitHub got most.of the forks iirc
Yea I should host it elsewhere
Please on me this, and stay strong with the mental health. Seeking help is important and recognising you need it is the first step.
I had no interest on playing switch games, but I do have a problem with authority overstepping. I’ll help you stick it to the man and evangelize more people on the ways of the Corsair. Pm’ed
What is the auto-download mod tool you are referring to?
YuzuModDownloader will detect games in your library, check the built in repositories, download the mods and apply them automatically. Do keep in mind it enables all mods by default, so make sure to go to the game’s settings and disable the ones you don’t need.
Are these mods to improve things like stability and performance? I’ve found I can only use Yuzu to test out games because it’s impossible to put any real time into them due to crashes.
Some allow you to enable better graphics than the native version, some can downgrade graphics to improve performance. Some remove framerate limits. Some are cheats, with infinite health and similar. It varies a lot, really.
For example, with Tears of the Kingdom on a Steam Deck there are mods to make the game run at 16:10, with better performance, and better frame pacing at 30 FPS. If you’re running it on a PC, there are 60 FPS mods with improved draw distances and shadow resolution.
Pretty sure I saw your comment in a Reddit thread about this. You’re doing good work. Stay strong, legend.
Hey man, hope your mental health improves. I’m not quite safe for myself without my anti depressants so I know how that goes.
Keep your chin up.
Pm’d and thank you.
If you send me this (I pm’ed ya) I will be happy to keep this torch aflame as well.
PMed you, hope you’re doing okay buddy. :)
Pmed and also dropping in the comments for mental health solidarity. Here for you friendo ❤️
Hello kind soul, please share that with me. Was never able to make it work due to lack of keys.
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can you send it to me aswell
Hello, I would be greatful if I can do what you said I can do.
I strongly hope and wish you feel better.
I would be super interested! Though I’m not sure how to DM from mlem lol
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Sorry, didn’t mean to create this impression. You’re correct - there are mirrors of the official GitHub, other sites hosting it, pre-built binaries being shared on Internet Archive and Discord. You can find Yuzu, and you can probably do so from websites you already know and trust. The keys and firmware are a bit harder for newcomers (which is why I include them in the pack), Google is filled with junk when you search for those, but if you’re already a member of certain communities or have a hacked Switch, you can obtain those easily too.
But I do keep this updated pack that I use when a friend needs it or I happen to format a new PC. It’s already clean, already features the keys and firmware, and I know I can trust it (I built it after all hehe) so I might as well share. Maybe in the future Yuzu links will be harder to find or filled with crapware, mine will not. Maybe Yuzu will win the court case and be distributed on Steam… That’s great! I’ll probably still keep my pack, you never know with these things.
I basically share everything I have, if somebody wants it. Rarely is my copy the only one or somehow special. I believe the single “rare to find” digital piece of media I own is an .iso backup of a brazilian CD-ROM child’s game. But seriously, I don’t attribute much thought to rarity or importance or my name when sharing these things, I just want people who want Yuzu to have Yuzu.
Hey, Kadu! I was having the hardest time trying to find your comment on multiple apps after seeing it on the web version of Voyager. Now, after finding you, I can’t even DM you on any of the three that I use so I am resorting to commenting here in the hopes you’ll be able to see me and hopefully DM me the link for your zip! If you do see this, thank you so freaking much, and I and many other really appreciate you doing this solid! 😁
So fuckin what? Doesn’t mean you need to be a dick about it
18 million copies sold and they’re pulling this bullshit. Fuck Nintendo at this point.
They could have sold 19 million copies though. Won’t someone think of the billion dollar corporations?
I feel like a large number of the people pirating wouldn’t have bought the game even if it was their only option. Then there’s people who pirated and bought the game both. Unrealized profit is not the same as losing money.
But the IP lobby sucessfully got that idea to the courts. In my country if you are caught torrenting a series episode just for 10 seconds, the courts accept the idea, that you spread like a hundred copies of the IP to people who would have definetely bought it otherwise, so you now owe the IP holder 1000 €.
It is complete horseshit
I think the majority of these is people just downloading it to see if it works for 2 hours and never touch it again lol
Yeah I don’t have a switch, and I’m not about to start it when the second one is near us.
The vast majority of people pirating TOTK are just stealing it.
Surely people downloaded BOTW more times than TOTK over the 5+ years Yuzu has been around.
I wouldn’t have bought the stuff I pirated If I couldn’t have pirate it.
Copies of what
Tears of the kingdom.
God I hate Nintendo, I hate them so goddamn much it’s impossible to find words to express myself.
There are so many things that add up over time. I wouldn’t say I hate them just yet, but I‘be stopped buying their products. The way they go about their business just rubs me the wrong way. If the only way to try to communicate that is disengaging from any of their offerings, be it games or the new switch. Yea, I’m out.
I feel the same. They are really disgusting , greedy and shitty company. I would not spend a single cent on their products.
Notes. Thanks.
I will never not acquire Nintendo products on the open ocean.
Why?
Coz they’re assholes.
sues emulator-devs - but puts old roms onto their own products (mini nintendo etc. contained roms that “pirates” had distributed online for years)
never lowers the prices of their games
sues everyone left and right - like Palworld-developers
They issue takedowns on youtube channels for including nintendo game-music or gameplay
and probably more reasons
They didn’t sue Palworld’s creators, but that’s the exception to the norm.
This is an excellent comment! All these haters up in here but seldom few list why. I think it’s because their arguments wouldn’t hold up, so they don’t voice them. Just pure rage (useless)
Funny how OP just explained above you, and id wager a good chunk of us feel the way he does. The real question is, why would you condone their actions?
OP of the comment I replied to explained nothing. So I don’t know what you’re talking about, unless you’re just making stuff up. Their comment was nothing but pure rage, and it got a lot of support, much of which couldn’t explain their rage either.
Edit: I see a comment above mine, but when I made my reply there were no other comments. Same time.
If you have more than a couple of neurons you don’t need me to explain why I hate Nintendo, unless you’re a corporate bootlicker who thinks Nintendo can do no wrong. If you really can’t fathom why anyone would hate them, then all you gotta do is Google “Nintendo anticonsumer” and you’ll have reading material for the whole week.
I don’t condone anything necessary. What I do do is I buy their games, play them on their systems, and have fun. I see you guys in here talking about pirating their games, not having fun, and not buying shit. What, I should condone that?! Get out of here.
This is a thread about Nintendo suing a completely legal Emulator. I do believe you’re the one who should “get out of here”, if you’re going to say Nintendo has every right to do this, when everyone else here disagrees.
Emulators are not illegal. Fuck off Nintendo.
What’s more, is that from these passages, it sounds like Nintendo even wants backups of games you have lawfully purchased to constitute copyright violation and made illegal (because they have to bypass encryption, therefore violating DMCA). I’m not fluent in legalese though, so correct me if I’m misinterpreting:
These passages imply the writers of them lack basic computer literacy and don’t even understand Nintendo’s own systems.
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“copied the game ROMs into Yuzu” Yuzu is not a VM or other container and the ROMs are simply stored on disk in their original dumped form… Yuzu doesn’t “store” or “contain” any games.
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“any copy not on an authorized cartridge” LOL! What about games downloaded from your own digital marketplace, then?
What about a game you downloaded from Nintendo eShop and stored on an external SD card, which is a standard and well supported storage method on Switch? Is that SD card an “authorized cartridge”?
The authorized cartridge thing would hopefully be ignored due to several other times Nintendo tried to stop developers like Tengen from bypassing their licensing system and developing their own carts for the NES (you know those weird ones that were usually blue or black? Those were “illegal” in Nintendo’s eyes but they lost every single case they took against them to try and stop them from being made).
“copied the game ROMs into Yuzu” Yuzu is not a VM or other container and the ROMs are simply stored on disk in their original dumped form… Yuzu doesn’t “store” or “contain” any games.
ROMs are indeed copied “into Yuzu”. They must be loaded into Yuzu’s memory in order for Yuzu to execute their code or render their assets. In copyright law, even loading something to memory constitutes a “copy”.
Also, almost every emulator is a VM; do you think those ARM instructions are running on your x86 processor and its desktop OS kernel natively?
I thought Yuzu was actually a dynamic recompiler? I remember this practice started in the days of N64 emulation, and these tools are more like debuggers than like VMs. So in this case, ROMs may only be copied “into Yuzu” byte by byte, not stored as a block in memory. At this point it’s really semantics, but that’s what the lawyers are supposed to figure out, right?
Unlike older emulators, Switch emulators don’t even support saving the emulator state, and their savegame data is stored right on the native filesystem. I believe they are actually more like Wine, and remember, Wine Is Not an Emulator.
Yuzu does recompile some parts during runtime by using a JIT, but the rest is still emulated.
You can’t compare them to Wine, since Wine acts as a compatibility layer by translating OS specific calls, but it does not translate between instruction sets.
Thanks for clarifying, I only have a casual knowledge of Yuzu internals and had been led to believe the ARM was translated rather than emulated.
The performance is honestly incredible for software emulating a different instruction set.
It says “not on an authorized cartridge or console”, the latter would cover legitimately downloaded games. Agree on the other points though.
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Ah corporate Lawyer BS, pointing out what they want to be true and not pointing out the other. ROMs are legal under existing Copywrite laws under archival laws in the USA (117) and backup laws in Canada (29.24). The Americans have a bit more of a restricted way of using their archives, but that’s not needs to be argued here, as it appears that Nintendo is blaming Yuzu for actions of the general consumer. It’ll be like blaming your Network provider for allowing a user to download a movie, both legally and illegally, thus they should be punished for both actions.
I also love that Nintendo isn’t not stating it’s illegal here, just that it’s infringing because it’s not authorized.
It’ll be like blaming your Network provider for allowing a user to download a movie
Which, by the way it was recently ruled in the US that ISPs can’t be punished for that. article source
Nintendo is blaming Yuzu for actions of the general consumer
If you read the dmca, that’s something you can do. Making tools that enable others to break copyright protection is specifically disallowed. Which is why it’s one of the more insidious copyright laws
However, the thing is that Yuzu doesn’t do that. Yuzu doesn’t include any form of tooling that breaks encryption, facilitates ROM dumping or offer downloads of Nintendo Copyrighted software. They aren’t facilitating it, the user has to provide all of that chain of the emulation on their own. Hopefully this would be obvious to a judge.
Yuzu doesn’t include any form of tooling that breaks encryption
You cannot state that with certainty. That’s the problem.
Yuzu does indeed include a method to use the Switch’s production keys (which you must dump yourself) to decrypt the games. Whether this constitutes effective DRM is not a question that can easily be answered and must be decided by a court on a case-by-case basis.
This will be what the case will hinge on: Is Ninty’s scheme effective DRM?I would say no because symmetric encryption with a publicly known key may aswell be no encryption at all but that’s not my decision to make.
They aren’t facilitating it, the user has to provide all of that chain of the emulation on their own.
Um, no. The emulator is doing the decryption on its own. All the user does is provide the prod keys and unmodified ROM.
Yuzu itself doesn’t provide tools to dump keys and Roms from the Switch. The user has to procure them, or the means to dump them, themselves. Thus Yuzu doesn’t facilitates DRM circumvention. The user has to solve that part on their own. They do provide guides for how to do it on their website. But Yuzu themselves don’t make or distribute the tooling, and Yuzu the software is incapable of doing it.
The dumps are just that: Dumps; 1:1 copies.
The tools don’t decrypt anything; that happens within Yuzu. Why else would users need to provide the prod keys to Yuzu?
I remember a video of SomeOrdinaryGamers talking about a case where a company (I think it was Nintendo) was arguing that making a copy of games you own yourself should be illegal. The whole case was just that. Probably something from the last 4 months or so.
Anyway, regarding 124, a judge with a working brain would say “There’s nothing here stating that it was Yuzu who allowed, or facilitated, anyone to obtain said reproductions.”
- The copies were not obtained through Yuzu. Yuzu is not a site where the roms are, or even links to any of them. Sure, it exists solely to emulate nintendo’s current hardware, but that’s not the problem.
Sigh. If only law and justice worked based on factual evidence and logic, instead of interpretative contortionism…
the funniest shit about the paperowrk is that nintendo indirectly says nintendo is doing illegal work because they claim a video game emulator is a piece of software that allows users to unlawfully play pirated video games that were published for a specific console on a general purpose device.
they either have to say NSO/Nes/Snes classic are not emulation, or admit their definition of emulators is not the universally accepted definition of it, else Nintendo just Claimed Nintendo is serving up and charging for an unlawful service that is NSO.
FWIW you can lawfully play pirated games, so that means nothing.
Case in point there is some evidence that Nintendo might have used a dumped and illegally distributed version of Super Mario Bros. in their Wii Virtual Console
That’s a funny one too me, because they are the original source when you dig your way down, so how are they doing anything wrong there?
Yeah it’s someone else’s work… which isn’t there’s anyways… so isn’t it always nintendos then?
Removed by mod
It’s illegal if you don’t own the rom or decoded it with their keys. If you have the physical copy of the game, and a way to decrypt it, it’s not illegal to play the rom on an emulator.
So it’s not illegal, it becomes illegal when you don’t have the physical copy, or decode it with their stuff.
That’s rather clear evidence that they dumped their own ROM and distributed that. Since they own the rights to that ROM, they’re not distributing it illegally though. They can dump and distribute their ROMs all they want; they own the rights to them.
I’m no legal expert but Nintendo’s argument seems to surround a video game emulator being a tool whose primary use is to facilitate illegal circumvention of DRM and piracy. Nintendo’s use of emulation for a legal means to resell their games on another platform, could suggest otherwise. The possible use of a ROM illegally distributed by a 3rd party as inputs in a legitimate Nintendo emulator (though Nintendo denies this) could help separate the issues between ROMs and emulation, because Nintendo’s emulator isn’t used for piracy.
Nintendo could use a copy of the freely available Yuzu to emulate Switch games on their rumored Switch 2, if they were so inclined, and it would be a legitimate use case.
Thats funny considering they included emulators in official games. https://www.nintendolife.com/news/2021/03/nerd_explains_the_challenge_of_bringing_super_mario_sunshine_to_switch
I really want a real explanation on how I’ve caused Nintendo financial harm by format shifting my legally owned games. Especially considering I pay for NSO. At some point there has to be precedent that a pirated download does not equal a lost sale and that the individuals are responsible for the infringement and not the tools.
Fuck you, Nintendo.
Typical Nintendo move. So sad to see Yuzu possibly going down this way. Even looks like Nintendo might win this one. I’m just gonna download the entire source from GitHub just in case.
I wish this would just go full hydra mode if it goes down though. Start popping up new anonymous accounts releasing the source code everywhere.
Yuzu may go down, but Nintendo hasn’t learned the lessons of the Streisand effect and the hydra effect. The code is open source. 10 more projects will pop up the day after Yuzu goes down (IF it goes down.)
There’s also still Ryujinx
Shhh. The community always seems to forget this one.
Let’s keep it like that so Nintendo lawyers don’t pay as much attention to it.
Yuzu actually even took steps to make the emulator NOT run pirated versions of the new Mario game before it officially released. I ran it on Ryujinx like a week ahead of its release date, but Yuzu literally refused. They insta-banned anyone who talked about it.
How can I donate to the Yuzu devs to fight Nintendo on this?
Brother… Nintendo’s net income last year was 3.1 BILLION dollars. There is no “fighting Nintendo”.
Let’s be real homie. Yuzu is done. Downvote me all you want after I post this.
As much as we all love Yuzu, the dev’s had to have known this was coming.
I don’t want to be one of those dudes that keeps harping on the “Nintendo should be FOR preserving old games”. We all know Nintendo will continue to kick down ANYONE so much as glancing in their I.P. 's general direction.
Nintendo does what you Nintendon’t want. Always.
Extreme capitalism stifles and suffocates innovation and preservation.
They didn’t expect it to happen because of all of the landmark rulings in the past that emulators are inherently not illegal unless they provide bios to the end user. The only reason why Nintendo is acting now instead of years ago when Yuzu first hit the scene is because it’s in basically a fully working state now and they somehow verified that 1,000,000 people downloaded TOTK. I suspect far more copies of BOTW and Mario Odyssey were downloaded prior.
The thing is whatever beef they might rightfully have with 1,000,000 people pirating TotK, it’s not the emulator who’s to blame. The ones who distributed pirated copies are. They are trying to pin it entirely on the wrong group, out of convenience/intimidation.
This is like suing a motorcycle company because a thief used one as a getaway vehicle.
I believe the issue is that Yuzu was patched to support TotK before TotK was released, which could suggest having used some proprietary code, or at least stuff that the devs shouldn’t have had access to.
They could also make the argument that very few people would’ve downloaded the game if the emulator didn’t exist or at least wasn’t being patched to support a game before it releases.
They definitely didn’t lose 1,000,000 sales. At the same time, I feel like it kind of crosses a line to be pirating a game before it’s even supposed to be sold in stores.
I’ve heard people saying just the opposite. It couldn’t run TotK before official release, and whoever made it run had to modify it independently (because it’s an open source project)
Arguing that people wouldn’t have downloaded it if not for the emulator, not only once again assigns blame to the wrong party (“if they didn’t have motorcycles to get away they might not have stolen it”), but it overlooks that there are modded Switches that can run pirated copies too.
Pirating stuff before it’s even out for sale is pretty sketchy, but Yuzu is not the one doing it. It simply lets people play copies they already have, including those they may have dumped themselves. Nintendo is encroaching on customer ownership rights by trying to argue even doing that is infringing.
I’ve said this before and I’ll say it now: I bet most of those 1,000,000 people would have never bought a copy of the game anyway.
Pretty much, piracy are never lost sales. Either the person is extremely passionate and loving of the product so they’ll buy it anyway regardless if they pirated it or not; or they were just tasting the flavor of the week and never intended to buy it under any circumstance; or they are extremely poor/their economy and context doesn’t allow them to access the product legitimately, so they wouldn’t be capable of buying it even if they wanted; or the product is not legitimately available anymore, so pirating is the only way of accessing it.
Piracy is never a lost sale.
You were downvoted by a nintendo shill.
I bought the game and I still considered emulating it just to run it at higher res.
This is something that makes the Nintendo numbers bullshit. how many of those 1mill downloads were people who already owned/purchased the game? How many of those people don’t even have a switch and would have never purchased the game to begin with?
I’m thinking of it so I can play older patches of the game.
Out of interest, at a high level, why?
Did they patch out interesting exploits/speed run things?
There’s some easy duplication glitches.
And some of them probably did buy the game, even
And many more who were friends of acquaintances of the downloader.
I wonder if Nintendo released their games outside of their own ecosystem if that number would still be as high
I haven’t yet. Sounds like I should add to that statistic.
Extremecapitalism stifles and suffocates innovation and preservation.It’s an inherent contradiction of capitalist competition. Somehow everyone is supposed to be competitive but noone is supposed to win for capitalism to “work”. Otherwise it’s considered a monopoly and “anti-competitive”.
Ironically this requires collaboration.
I kind of doubt this because Yuzu doesn’t actually have any of the cryptographic key material that Nintendo could have a valid reason to sue over. They only offer instructions to dump keys, which has to be argued is causing harm because its completely legal to do on consoles and games that you own.
Dolphin ships with the Wii’s AES key but Nintendo never pursued them in court.
Most likely Nintendo won’t get anywhere and only get Yuzu to remove some wiki pages and stuff which will make it slightly harder to use or slow down development by threatening more lawsuits.
Nintendo know this. What everyone seems to be missing is that defending yourself in lawsuits also costs money.
Apple does this shit all the time.
I’d like to seem them dump all those dollars in a legal battle they can’t win. Imagine if they succeed with the judge. They will lose their audience.
Yuzu team is shit. Keep your money
Elaborate?
You the pineappleEA guy? I love that I can have the patreon version for free with an easy updater thanks to the yuzu team stealing code from him and him having a vendetta.
Found the tinfoil dev lmao
Booo! Nintendo sucks! This was decided 30 years ago. Emulation is not illegal.
Yeah and none of the switch emulator stuff I’ve seen comes bundled with the firmware. You have to track that down separately or dump your own from your Switch.
This sure looks like like a slapp suit to me.
It’s good we are all clear, nintendo isn’t arguing that. They are arguing a case about copyright infringement and being in violation of the dmca
It is not illegal to make copies of games you own and play them on an emulator. That is what was decided by the courts. Nintendo is trying to make that illegal.
They’re using the DMCA to say that because Yuzu lets someone circumvent their encryption (which is illegal, but shouldn’t be), that’s the same as Yuzu circumventing their encryption.
That’s basically like saying VLC should be illegal because it has the capability of copying a DVD.
They’re using the DMCA to say that because Yuzu lets someone circumvent their encryption (which is illegal, but shouldn’t be), that’s the same as Yuzu circumventing their encryption.
Yes, yes they are. That’s how the DMCA works. It’s mental.
That’s not how the DMCA works, or tons of other software would be illegal. It’s illegal to circumvent copy protection under the DMCA (something I wholeheartedly disagree with), but it’s not illegal to make something that can be used to circumvent copy protection.
In fact, there are exemptions to that provision and one of them states that circumventing copy protection in order to play a video game using assistive technologies is legal.
It’s illegal to circumvent copy protection under the DMCA (something I wholeheartedly disagree with), but it’s not illegal to make something that can be used to circumvent copy protection.
It is explicitly illegal to produce any thing whose purpose it is to circumvent DRM:
(1) No person shall manufacture, import, offer to the public, provide, or otherwise traffic in any technology, product, service, device, component, or part thereof, that—
(A) is primarily designed or produced for the purpose of circumventing protection afforded by a technological measure that effectively protects a right of a copyright owner under this title in a work or a portion thereof;I’m telling you, that law is mental.
In fact, there are exemptions to that provision and one of them states that circumventing copy protection in order to play a video game using assistive technologies is legal.
Could you point that specific exception in the law? I can’t find it.
Link for convenience: https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/PLAW-105publ304/pdf/PLAW-105publ304.pdf
The exceptions are handled by the Library of Congress and go through a renewal process every three years. Here’s the one from 2021:
https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/FR-2021-10-28/pdf/2021-23311.pdf
The accessibility use exception is on the last page, middle of the page, paragraph labeled 21.
It’s illegal to make something that’s sole purpose is to circumvent copyright. Yuzu does not have that sole purpose, and doesn’t include the code necessary (prod.keys) to even accomplish it.
The actual text for reference:
Video games in the form of computer programs, embodied in lawfully acquired physical or downloaded formats, and operated on a general-purpose computer, where circumvention is undertaken solely for the purpose of allowing an individual with a physical disability to use software or hardware input methods other than a standard keyboard or mouse.
That explicitly only applies to physically disabled people. Yuzu is not specifically targetted at providing a different input method (at all) and certainly not solely for the physically disabled.
That exception is not relevant to this case.
They’re using the DMCA to say that because Yuzu lets someone circumvent their encryption (which is illegal, but shouldn’t be),
Yes. That’s what I’m saying. That’s what I said.
Yuzu is not infringing on their copyright, some of the users are. Sue the users.
unfortunately, that isn’t how the DMCA works
Can you point me to the provision you’re talking about?
(2) No person shall manufacture, import, offer to the public, provide, or otherwise traffic in any technology, product, service, device, component, or part thereof, that— (A) is primarily designed or produced for the purpose of circumventing a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title; (B) has only limited commercially significant purpose or use other than to circumvent a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title; or © is marketed by that person or another acting in concert with that person with that person’s knowledge for use in circumventing a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title. (3) As used in this subsection— (A) to “circumvent a technological measure” means to descramble a scrambled work, to decrypt an encrypted work, or otherwise to avoid, bypass, remove, deactivate, or impair a technological measure, without the authority of the copyright owner; and (B) a technological measure “effectively controls access to a work” if the measure, in the ordinary course of its operation, requires the application of information, or a process or a treatment, with the authority of the copyright owner, to gain access to the work.
I love YUZU and it’s wonderful…
…but if they didn’t have a Patreon they’d have a better stance
You are being downvoted but reminder to everyone that the public Yuzu is way behind on updates and compatibility, they sell access to their most recent version via their patreon. Something that Ryujinx does not do, it purely is a donation and nothing more.
You can download and view the latest Yuzu source code for free and do practically whatever you want with it (GPLv3), including building and running it.
What paying via Patreon provides you is access to early access builds of the software. You’re paying for the convenience of them compiling the latest version of the software for you.
Don’t know how good a case Nintendo has here unless it can prove that Yuzu itself contains proprietary code that allows the ROMs to be played. If the decryption is being done on the ROMs’ end, then that’s just another reason to go after the ones dumping and distributing the ROMs. Nintendo couldn’t even substantially stop Dolphin, and Dolphin actually had a decryption key straight from Wii firmware in it. Good luck to them, but they’re likely going for the wrong legal target. Taking down what ROM sites they can (which would legally be a lot easier than the emulator makers) is just getting rid of drops in the ocean of the ROMs’ spread, but they’re the target Nintendo should be going after.
Somebody correct me if I’m wrong, but I don’t think Yuzu has any proprietary code. Folks have to go to other websites to download the Switch firmware and keys needed to play games.
That’s not really enough to be not in violation. For example, vlc can’t natively decrypt blurays. This is because both its not bundled with the decryption library nor the decryption keys. Vlc out of the box can not decrypt blurays.
If yuzu can, if you provide some keys, eh that might be enough for them to win. It’s certainly not enough to push nintendo away. You unfortunately need to be extremely careful around the dmca stuff.
You don’t just need to provide keys, but an entire firmware dump. Yuzu contains no executable Switch code AFAIK
Not claiming it does. It seems like it might have the tooling to break copyright enforcement if you give it the right keys is the problem.
It really depends on the kind of encryption being used. I’m pretty sure if it’s a common algorithm that logic does not stand.
They don’t, they just want legal money drain u til they cave. Nintendo is abusive af.
DMCA § 1201 is the anti-circumvention clause. It makes it illegal to circumvent DRM, no copyrighted content reproduction needed.
Yuzu may have defenses if they clean-room broke the encryption, but it’s a fight that will be difficult because the statute itself is unreasonable - essentially outlawing using knowledge to circumvent access controls. To those of us who know about this statute and its history in attempt to lock-down content, it’s a serious scumbag move because they may actually win. The statute is terrible and has been since it was enacted in 1998.
They also seem to be asserting a secondary liability argument - i.e., the infringement of users is Yuzu’s responsibility because Yuzu allegedly facilitated piracy, or recklessly moved forwarded when it knew or had reason to know it would be used as such. This is harder to prove.
Even if Nintendo doesn’t win the suit (but they may win it), they already “won” by filing because this will have a chilling effect on legitimate emulation.
There are two things in conflict that apply to Dolphin, and in general to post-DRM console emulators:
- It’s illegal to create or distribute a device which circumvents DRM.
- It’s legal to ignore DMCA restrictions for the sole purpose of making things interoperable, like running software on machines it wasn’t originally created for when you’d be able to run it on the machine it was created for.
The wording in the legislation is sufficiently vague that it’s not obvious whether it’s illegal to create or distribute a device that circumvents DRM for the sole purpose of interoperability. If a case goes to court, it could set a precedent that has to be applied in the future, or it could be settled out of court to avoid setting a precedent, and so far, there’s no case law setting a precedent.
When Nintendo asked Valve not to allow Dolphin onto Steam, despite what some people were saying, the decryption key was known to be there, and the Dolphin team had legal advice that it was reasonable to expect that the interoperability exceptions had more power than the DRM circumvention restriction. The decryption key is a so-called illegal number, but these are probably not actually illegal, and you can see several examples on the Wikipedia page about them. Nintendo ended up taking no action against Dolphin, and it wouldn’t have been a good case to try and set a precedent with as there weren’t obvious damages now it’s been so long since the Wii stopped being sold, and because the Dolphin team have historically been so diligent about stamping out discussion of piracy in their official communities, making it hard to argue that it’s intended as a DRM circumvention device rather than an interoperability tool. Also, Dolphin’s never taken donations, easily covering all their costs with just basic ads on their site.
Yuzu’s a bit of an easier target. For a start, it’s got a Patreon, and that makes it easier to paint its developers in a bad light as they’re getting money (as well as meaning there’s actual money to recover). They’ve also got data to back up the suggestion that lots and lots of Yuzu users are pirating games instead of just playing games they’ve already got a disk copy of. In a sensible world where laws are applied fairly, there’s an easy argument that hoops to jump through like requiring the user to provide Switch firmware show they’re not trying to make piracy easy, but it’s not like Yuzu will be able to muster up enough money for lawyers to match what Nintendo will be spending.
The worst thing that could come out of this is a decision that interoperability isn’t an excuse for circumventing DRM under any circumstances, as that’ll have serious consequences for a bunch of other projects, and Nintendo are likely to want to push for this precedent to be set rather than accepting an out-of-court settlement. On the other hand, Nintendo could mess up and get the opposite precedent set, although if it looks like that’s going to happen, they’re likely to drop the suit.
they basically have a weak argument because they claim yuzu gives you links to the tools to get the keys to enable piracy.
indeed. they should sue fitgirl instead, who distributes an emulator, with an included rom and keys etc. ready to play
Nope, you have to obtain the decryption keys yourself - I spent hours hunting around online for a set of console keys and firmware dump to get the emulator working on my steam deck.
If you own a moddable switch you can dump the keys legally, but I don’t plan on doing that any time soon.
I sincerely hope that Yuzu developers don’t end up like Gary Bowser and have their income garnished for life by Nintendo.
As much as I dislike Nintendo and wish Yuzu devs all the best I’d like to point out that Bowser wasn’t some innocent guy who was caught by big bad company - Moonie has a video that goes into specifics about his involvement with a pirate enterprise worth a shitton of money.
Other than that yeah, I hope they can survive this situation. I wonder if Ryujinx devs are next.
Isn’t moonie the dude who shit talked Karl Jobst and ended up deleting his video because Jobst called him out on how wrong he was on pretty much everything and how terrible his research was. Like literally just watched a couple YouTube videos level research? Don’t know if I can trust someone who would fuck up THAT bad. I get people make mistakes sometimes but that’s just complete negligence especially for someone with an audience that big.
No idea, I’m only familiar with some of his videos so can’t say one way or another. Is there any place I could read about it?
Edit: Also, I believe the video I mentioned has links to specific legal documents surrounding this case so it should be easy to fact check. Still, I’m not trying to whitewash the situation you wrote about would love to learn more if it happened.
Edit 2: A’ight, while I didn’t have time for a deep dive I did manage to confirm that situation happened.
I sucks since the videos I’ve seen seemed reasonably researched and now I’m wondering whether that was a one-time screw up or a normal thing that simply wasn’t caught more often. Guess I’ll try to look into it more when I’m free.
The video by Karl Jobst himself on the matter is pretty informative and has proof to back up all of his claims. Iirc moonie also quoted legal statue and stuff on his video but was rebuked my Karl as well, don’t quote me on this though, I’ll have to rewatch that video to confirm. Here’s the link. Moonie did end up apologizing in the end and Karl did tell his viewers right off the back to not harass Moonie.
If you like LONG form reasonably researched videos about all sorts of topics check out Hbomberguy. He’s great.
Iirc moonie also quoted legal statue and stuff on his video but was rebuked my Karl as well
Yeah, that’s why I’m planning to look into whether that was a screw up or not, thanks for the link too.
I’m familiar with HBG but it’s always good to mention him.
He’s not innocent and went to jail for it, but does it warrant garnishing his income for life? I think they went too far with that.
Oh no, I completely agree no one should be completely screwed over piracy. Just wanted to add some context as I saw a lot of discussion about him ending with “poor innocent dude” without digging into details. That’s all.
Nintendo has a lot of problems that should absolutely be called out. I hope me trying to add more details didn’t imply otherwise.
They are taking his income for life, that’s an insane overreach specially for a big successful company like Nintendo, and it didn’t matter since the actual team behind it is back selling flashcarts that are even better than having to solder a chip.
Yes, it is insane. That case is also a great showcase of how trying to make example out of a single guy doesn’t really work since, as you mentioned, rest of the team is still doing their thing.
I’d like to think (well, hope anyway) that no one looks at Bowser’s story and thinks “yeah, that’s a reasonable conclusion”.
Oh cool I didn’t know that existed, thanks Nintendo!
As the sweetest revenge maybe someone should leak all Switch games and DLCs into the public Internet.
:)
I reckon that’s the point you were making?
