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Nintendo Switch emulator, Yuzu, developers settling lawsuit from Nintendo with $2.4M payout, handing over its domains, and agreeing "Yuzu [is] primarily designed to circumvent [DRM]". (www.theverge.com)

submitted 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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This also includes ceasing development and destroying their copies of the code.

The GitHub repo page for Yuzu now returns a 404, as well. In addition, the repo for the Citra 3DS emulator was also taken down.

As of at least 23:30 UTC, Yuzu's website and Citra's website have been replaced with a statement about their discontinuation.

Other sources found by @[email protected]:

There is also an active Reddit thread about this: https://www.reddit.com/r/Games/comments/1b6gtb5/

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[–] [email protected] 26 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (2 children)

According to the article:

They are asking a federal judge to say yes to this, specifically:

Developing or distributing software, including Yuzu, that in its ordinary course functions only when cryptographic keys are integrated without authorization, violates the Digital Millennium Copyright Act’s prohibition on trafficking in devices that circumvent effective technological measures, because the software is primarily designed for the purpose of circumventing technological measures.

So I think they're definitely intending to set precedent with this case, though this settlement hasn't been accepted by the court yet.

[–] [email protected] 24 points 8 months ago (1 children)

AFAIK settlements can't be used as precedent. IANAL tho.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (2 children)

Maybe precedent isn't the right term, I worry a statement from an emulator author basically saying "emulators are DRM circumvention devices", could be used as evidence in future though?

[–] [email protected] 22 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (1 children)

Lawyer here, and generally no. At best, the judgment could be persuasive to other courts in the First Circuit--and of course that's what Nintendo wants, hence the effort to craft language that could be easily ported to other sympathetic courts--but the legal theory is absolutely not binding on other parties until/unless the finding/rationale is adopted by a higher court.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (1 children)

Do you think it's possible that Nintendo is having the devs agree to that statement is a way for them to prevent others from forking Yuzu and continuing development? If someone stripped out the ROM decryption code, it would be harder to claim the fork falls under 17 U.S.C. 1201 as a circumvention tool. By having the original creators state it is, would it open up derivative works to being classified as one in future lawsuits regardless of whether it still contains the questionable code?

[–] [email protected] 7 points 8 months ago

It's already a tragedy if original developers will no longer work on it. They also worked on citra. Generally speaking, I think human resource is crucial and emu devs aren't doing enough to protect themselves.

[–] delcake 7 points 8 months ago

It'd feel a bit gross if so, considering they were coerced in to saying it by the terms of the settlement.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 8 months ago

The judge allowing Yuzu to make the statement doesn't make it legally relevant in any context. It's not.