It still won’t work with Playtron since it also can’t load Windows kernel drivers under Linux.
The only way this could ever happen without also making it work for SteamOS is if they made a deal with Epic to either support user mode anticheat with their OS or to compile and ship ring 0 anticheat with every release of Playtron.
It also helps to outwardly state your country of residence in a public forum.
Yeah… I looked at the project’s subreddit, and I don’t expect it to last long. The creator’s idea of avoiding Nintendo’s legal team boils down to “assert emulation is legal and condemn piracy within our dev team and community.”
I don’t mean to be a dick, but I don’t think the guy knows what he’s doing. The only way an actively-maintained fork is going to avoid the same fate is if they either give up before Nintendo cares, or:
Even then, there’s a good chance they’re screwed either way. The original Yuzu devs agreed to Nintendo’s terms of explicitly naming Yuzu as a circumvention tool. Settlements don’t serve as precedent, but I suspect it’s going to be extremely hard to argue that a minimal derivative of a circumvention tool is not still a circumvention tool when the original creators stated they designed it as such.
The commit history is gone, there’s a brand-new Patreon link, and most of the submodules aren’t included. I find it hard to believe that developers are going to trust that it isn’t a cash grab, let alone possible to even compile.
I also have a post going on [email protected] about this: https://lemmy.world/post/12728165
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.
Nintendo’s argument in the filing is that Yuzu is designed primarily for circumventing the Switch’s encryption (a.k.a. copyright protection measures). Their justification is that Yuzu uses prod.keys to decrypt various things like the ROM filesystems and the system firmware*. Ryujinx also uses prod.keys, so they would be just as legitimate of a target for that argument as Yuzu is.
Personally, I think they chose to go after Yuzu first because it’s more popular and runs at playable framerates on modern Android devices. If the lawsuit goes in Nintendo’s favor, I guarantee they’ll immediately use that precident to make the same argument against and swiftly kill Ryujinx.
*This is actually a valid argument that is not affected by past suits like Bleem v. Sony.
I’m pretty impressed with The Verge this time around.
They did a very good job quickly explaining the legal stance and argument that Nintendo has with their lawsuit, what needs to happen for it to be successful, and how the precedent set in 1999 around emulators isn’t applicable to this suit.
Unfortunately, it’s more of a gray area than most people think.
17 USC §1201 (f)(1)
Notwithstanding the provisions of subsection (a)(1)(A), a person who has lawfully obtained the right to use a copy of a computer program may circumvent a technological measure that effectively controls access to a particular portion of that program for the sole purpose of identifying and analyzing those elements of the program that are necessary to achieve interoperability of an independently created computer program with other programs, and that have not previously been readily available to the person engaging in the circumvention, to the extent any such acts of identification and analysis do not constitute infringement under this title.
Ok, and that applies to…
17 USC §1201 (a)(1)(A)
No person shall circumvent a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title.
And a technological measure is:
17 USC §1201 (a)(3)
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
Perfect! Right?
17 USC §1201 (a)(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.
And unfortunately, Yuzu is capable of and needs console keys to decrypt games and system firmware files.
The reverse engineering for interoperability exception, (f)(1), only explicitly exempts (a)(1)(A) for research purposes. If Yuzu—as a software product—is found to have the primary purpose of circumventing Nintendo’s DRM, it will be in violation of (a)(2) and the developers are not protected.
This is something that will need to be tested in court, but the only way they would be entirely in the clear is if they stripped out all encryption/decryption code and forced users to use some other tool to fully decrypt the firmware, NAND filesystem, and game image filesystems during dumping. They’ll likely argue that the primary purpose is preservation, and Nintendo will use the fact that the Switch is still sold in retail as a counterargument to suggest that their development of the emulator was unnecessary and not in good faith. If they instead argue that it was created as a development or debugging tool, Nintendo could point to their low barrier of entry for developers to obtain a devkit (as evidenced by the crapton of shovelware and asset flips in the E-Shop).
If they don’t settle, it’s going to be an expensive mess to sort out.
git clone https://github.com/yuzu-emu/yuzu.git
If the developers settle or lose the suit and have to take down the code, at least you’ll still be able to compile all the old releases.
Nintendo give an example in their complaint with The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom saying that it was “unlawfully distributed a week and a half before its release by Nintendo” and that copies of it were “successfully downloaded from pirate websites over one million times before the game was published and made available for lawful purchase by Nintendo”.
Back when I was on that shithole other link aggregation website, I said this would happen because people couldn’t wait 7 more days for the public release before bragging about emulating TotK and sharing a clearly-not-legally-dumped ROM around.
I don’t care what people do in their free time as long as it doesn’t affect anyone else negatively, but it was hard not to see this coming because people couldn’t keep their mouths shut and just enjoy the game. Now, we all might lose future updates to Yuzu if they settle or Nintendo wins the suit…
I prefer the term appropriation:
the action of taking something for one’s own use, typically without the owner’s permission
You wouldn’t then steal it again!
It absolutely is, but that’s not relevant for this post.
If he meant exactly what you said, I agree. But, there is an alternate interpretation of what the guy was saying:
You tend to get different kinds of customers with different price ranges. The ones who can afford to spend money generally don’t give a crap about what you’re billing them for, and they just want the work done properly.
The ones who aim to get a “good deal” tend to be less hands-off and more critical about the work done/supplies used and billed for. Frugal customers take extra time and sanity to field questions/suggestions, and sometimes, it’s just not worth dealing with.
If raising his fee filters out the latter category, it’s hard to blame him. I wouldn’t want to deal with penny-pinchers either, and simply being more expensive than the competition is an effective deterrent.
I’d like to add a couple preservation-adjacent scenarios for you to consider. If a product is no longer made available by its rights holder, would it be unethical to acquire it through other means?
This would be software that was once sold, but is no longer made available by the rights holder. The creator of the software is no longer profiting from new or existing sales, and it’s no longer possible to acquire a copy through legitimate means. At that point, does pirating the software actually hurt anybody?
Argument against: not letting the software fade into obscurity stifles the market by providing freely-available competition to products that are actually being sold.
Argument in favor: preventing piracy of the software will do more harm, as it stifles the growth of any community around the software.
This would be software that is no longer officially sold in its original form, but has been superseded by other software available from the same rights holder. For example, older versions of Adobe Photoshop.
Argument against: pirating discontinued software hurts sales of the currently-available software.
Argument in favor: currently-available software may be inferior to older versions. (example: licensed music being removed from remastered games)
This would be acquiring digital archives of out-of-circulation physical media such as video games or out-of-print books. The media isn’t sold by the rights holders anymore, but it would still be available through used goods resellers.
Argument against: by pirating out-of-circulation media instead of paying for the physical copies, the individual is preventing the flow of capital through the second-hand market.
Argument against: the rights holder may consider selling the media again in the future, and digital archives will prevent prospective buyers from purchasing the media when it eventually does become available.
Argument in favor: it is financially inviable to acquire the media through the second-hand market. (as in: it’s overpriced)
Argument in favor: as the physical media degrades over time, it would become more scarce and may eventually be lost entirely.
Argument in favor: under the assumption that second-hand resellers exist primarily for profiteering, giving them money does not contribute to humanity or culture in any meaningful way.
In this scenario, the individual has already purchased the media, but it is encumbered by DRM. Suppose the DRM either prevents the media from being accessed entirely1, or it hinders its usability2. Would it be ethical to use a “crack” on your purchased copy or acquire a pre-cracked copy from some other party?
[1] Examples include: lifetime activation limits or activation servers being shut down after the expected lifetime of the product.
[2] Examples include: always-online DRM, unnecessary resource usage
Argument against: the existance of a crack could mean lost sales, since some individuals may choose to illegally acquire a pre-cracked copy instead of purchasing the media.
Argument in favor: the DRM is hostile to the consumer. For example, the Sony BMG rootkit that caused excessive resource usage and provided a way for malware to conceal itself.
Argument in favor: if the DRM is never removed from the media in the future it will hinder preservation efforts.
Replace Sunshine with Super Mario Eclipse. It has the original shine sprites, huge quality of life improvements, and an insane amount of new content.