I think Nintendo first party games are great. And I certainly don’t think they’re losing money… the Switch has the most global sales of any current console by a lot. In fact, the PS2 is the only non-Nintendo console to have sold more.
Strange that they targeted Palworld but not any of the other monster collector games that came out in the last 10 yesrs that weren’t nearly as successful.
They don’t need the money, but them wanting other developers money is what makes them do these petty lawsuits. And if they really wanted the money then they could have just made the pokemon game that Palworld ended up filling the niche for.
But they’re lazy and greedy instead of a fun games company so they choose to hire lawyers to suppress real competitors
In fact, ever since the PS4 I’ve been strictly a PC gamer.
Seeing how Microsoft was able to lower everyone’s standards by charging for online really puts things into perspective for me.
It’s great because now I don’t have to buy hardware or software. Looking forward to emulating switch 2 games before they’re even released like ToTK, lol.
Nintendo never said that all emulation is illegal. Nintendo just does not like that their current gen is being emulated and lot of games are easily available on pirate sites for everyone. Otherwise Nintendo would have tried to shutdown emulators for previous systems too. They were especially worried about the Switch 2 being emulated easily with current emulators, as it doesn’t seen too different. I think that’s all to it.
However, there are still a number of ways that emulators can violate the law. For example, the Nintendo Switch has certain “technical restriction measures” that prevent it from playing pirated games. If a Switch emulator seeks to bypass those measures, it opens itself up to legal trouble.
Which law exactly? There are exceptions for making personal backup copies. So its not really court tested law and we don’t know if it violates the law. As the article said, these cases never went to court and we don’t have a decision by law. Nintendo did all of that out of court.
It makes sense from argumentation standpoint, because Nintendo argues that there are protection mechanisms in the Switch that is illegal to ignore, in emulators. I don’t know if this is true and you don’t know either, because this was not tested in court. Nintendo never ever said that ALL emulation is illegal, which i stated in my initial reply. Otherwise Nintendo would go and take down ALL emulators. Not every kind of emulation is the same.
In example the Dolphin emulator ships with keys extracted from the console. Some say its illegal to distribute these keys, others argue keys are not copyrighted and its not illegal to share, but it was never tested in court either. If Nintendo had a case, they would definitely go against that emulator, as the keys are in the source code in the open public. Nintendo never said that Dolphin or Wii and Gamecube emulation is illegal. Or any other prior console and emulator of Nintendo systems. Nintendo console emulators exist in the public since the 90s.
Its much more nuanced than people are making or understanding. And lot of articles, like the one stated before, are plain and simple wrong and cite without context. And people who don’t understand the situation take this and believe it.
There’s similar legal issues with the “right to a private copy” many European countries have. Those laws were made to allow people to make a copy of their media, in case the original breaks. Important to note is that those private copies weren’t allowed to be distributed to anyone, not even lent to a friend.
This worked well at the time for cassettes and VHS, which did break occasionally.
But at some point most CDs came with copy protection, which got broken pretty quickly. But at least in Germany, they are still considered “working copy protection” and thus are illegal to circumvent, even for a otherwise legal private copy.
The same is the case with Switch games: Copyright owners use copy protection to make otherwise legal use cases illegal.
E.g. Nintendo made it so that Switch games can only be played by decrypting the ROMs, which is illegal for anyone except Nintendo.
At least that’s their standpoint which was never tested in court but it’s not unlikely that it’d be accepted.
But this is still to be discussed, because if the emulator does not circumvent any copy protection and the games are dumped with the protection in place, and the copy protection is reverse engineered, then the games would play with the copy protection decrypting. It does not circumvent the protection, it actively “uses” it. So from that standpoint making backup copies is not illegal in theory. Now would this hold in court? I don’t know. Nintendo does not know either and rather like to take things out of court. Because if Nintendo looses such a case, it would be devastating.
I’m in Germany too and the right to a private copy is exactly what I had in mind too. Not all copy protection measures were accepted for the right to not copy. What I mean is, there was some extremely simple protection mechanisms that were not accepted as a working and effective copy protections, and you were allowed to do a copy; even with the so called copy protection in place. Therefore it effectiveness was kind of important to the discussion too. I guess the Switch has a much more advanced one, so its probably not an exception.
the paragraph after the one you quoted answers this question:
Note that this discussion was based on Japanese law, but the same language is found in the DMCA Section 1201(a)(1)(A): “No person shall circumvent a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title.” That law is more than 26 years old, going into effect a month after Google was founded, but the language remains in place.
It makes no sense to cite a little part of the US DMCA law if the discussion was based on Japanese laws. If you look at www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/1201 , its much more complicated than one sentence. As for the DMCA, this is the next paragraph after the cited above one:
I admit not really to understand, as the language is hard to read for me. It would even be hard in my native language. Does the Japanese law have such clauses and exceptions?
both the DMCA in the US as well as that Japanese law are implementations of the 1996 WIPO Copyright Treaty. that is why they can be discussed in a fairly interchangeable way.
So the lawyer says that Nintendo, despite knowing that the emulators themselves are legal, has unlawfully caused take downs and reputational damage. Sounds kind of illegal
Not really. It sounds like they haven’t gone after them for emulation, but instead for emulation-adjacent things: copying ROMs, circumventing digital locks, etc.
They explicitly mention (one of?) the developers of Yuzu sharing ROMs in the article.
In other words, the emulator itself isn’t illegal, but in order to use the emulator the way most people want, you have to do illegal things, and that’s what they go after you for.
Logical conclusion takedown of the ROM’s and not the emulator. ROM’s can be obtained without problems, I don’t regularly read that sites are taken down or people are taken up. That’s just a convenient excuse. Nintendo just knows that their only argument is exclusive titles. Who would still want a Wii if you could use it better on the steam deck with yuzu?
I also remember that I often read that you have to organize such and such files yourself. Where then reference was made to original hardware/data carriers and not to Rom pages etc. I had problems with Zelda in particular.
Right, emulators aren’t illegal but a bunch of adjacent things can be - for example system BIOS/FW/encryption keys/ROMs if you don’t dump them yourself from your own personal hardware.
What got Yuzu in the crosshairs was announcing support for Tears of the Kingdom before it released, meaning they were testing their emulator on an unreleased game and the odds that every dev and tester had legitimately gotten a copy of the game before official release is so low that they weren’t about to fight it and go through discovery (which might have identified significant additional piracy on their part). It was easier to fold and settle, and probably saved them from an immense amount of fines for piracy used for testing.
I don’t want to contradict that at all. I’m not up to date and only read articles on “IT” sites, but these mostly refer to the fight against F/OSS which is then directed against the emulators. They hardly ever mention action against ROM sites.
Yes, this wasn’t an admission because it’s a well-known fact that is not inconsistent with Nintendo’s earlier actions. The headline is deceptive and people don’t read the article. The article itself contains no new information and it is only worth reading for someone who has been deceived by the headline and needs to be set straight by the same people who wrote the deceptive headline. It’s click bait that shouldn’t exist.
Nintendo used to have a page on emulation on their website incorrectly claiming that it was always illegal and all emulators had solely been created to enable piracy. This new claim is not compatible with their previous action of having that page.
I imagine the steam deck will be capable of emulating switch 2 titles nearly immediately, so there’s little reason to buy it. They really need to make their hardware comparable to their software (minus the notoriously awful Japan™ netcode)
Emulating Switch 2 games on the Steam Deck would be a challenge. Even though it’s on an outdated process node, I think it’s fair to say it’s in the same class of hardware as a Steam Deck (which is 3 years old at this point).
Hardware aside, to my knowledge no one is really actively developing any of the Switch emulators due to the prior legal action that was taken.
Now, eventually it’s possible someone might do it for the Switch 2, but I wouldn’t expect anything quick as whomever does so will very likely incur the mighty wrath of Nintendo’s legal team.
Good luck getting someone to continue emulation development. The only potential chance for development is exclusively on the under web, and the dev has said that “this was supposed to be a hobby” meaning they have an out if they don’t want to continue
Strategic lawsuits against public participation (also known as SLAPP suits or intimidation lawsuits), or strategic litigation against public participation, are lawsuits intended to censor, intimidate, and silence critics by burdening them with the cost of a legal defense until they abandon their criticism or opposition
There are many, many variants. The idea is the smaller player can’t really afford to fight in court, so even if the larger actor has shaky legal claims they will still win.
That’s a rumor. All we know is that they talked with the dev behind closed doors and he deleted everything related to Ryujinx afterwards. Sure, they could have paid him but it’s just as likely that they just threatened him. Let’s not forget how Nintendo made its money.
There’s nothing new in this article. And I don’t think Nintendo ever said that emulation is illegal, just emulating their games is, which technically is true to some part at least in the United States, where sometimes you need to circumvent some security measures to get games emulated which is a forbidden (this is mentioned in the article).
Yea, if I recall correctly, the Yuzu team was sharing roms of latest Nintendo releases internally and Nintendo was able to prove it. At least Jeff Gerstman podcast suggested something to that accord when reporting on it.
Yeah and the Yuzu people had made something like 4 million bucks on the project too. When you start making serious cash off of tools for piracy (and when we’re talking about a current-gen console that’s essentially what it is, not a tool for preservation like older emulators) then you should expect some heat to come your way.
Nintendo has always been a bit on the bastardly side of things when it comes to fan projects but I can’t say that I blame them for going after Yuzu when they felt like they had a winnable case.
Idk their emulation is garbage except for the suspension and rewind. A lot of the open source emulation I have seen, especially of Nintendo products, is immaculate.
That’s just not true. They have their own emulators, but most of the time they are inferior to community ones. I think Virtual Console releases used some kind of optimized emulators for their hardware, but didn’t care about accuracy, etc.
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