this post was submitted on 22 Apr 2025
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Nintendo seeks default judgement and $17,500 in damages from pirated game streamer who ignored court summons (automaton-media.com)
submitted 1 month ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Don't get me wrong: Nintendo deserves no sympathy here. They could do many things to make their games more accessible, but they chose not to.

That's not to say asshats like this deserves any either, though. The homebrew community and emulator developers step in to make Switch software interoperable, and they end up being the ones getting screwed over by both Nintendo and the people who provoked Nintendo.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago (1 children)

the people who provoked Nintendo.

This is my problem with your argument, you're saying that because of piracy they're entitled to crack down on emulation. Piracy is just a pretext they're using here. Emulation is legal and yet they're doing everything in their power to stop it from happening, this has nothing to do with piracy.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

Emulation is legal

Unfortunately, it's not that straightforward anymore. Emulation of modern consoles exists in a legal gray area that may or may not be illegal under the DMCA.

With something like the Switch, the ROMs are encrypted in a way that they can only be unencrypted with keys that are derived from data baked into the console itself. Yuzu for example is still protected as an emulator for some hardware/software platform, but it wouldn't be able to run retail games without being able to decrypt the ROMs.

And that's kind of the problem. Creating tools for preservation and interoperability is permitted by the DMCA, but tools that are made in part or whole to bypass DRM measures is explicitly not. That conflict hasn't been tested in court either, so the first ruling is going to be the one that sets the precedent.

This is my problem with your argument, you're saying that because of piracy they're entitled to crack down on emulation.

My argument isnt that they're entitled to crack down on emulation because of piracy. My argument is that people blatantly and publicly using emulators to play pirated, unreleased games emboldens Nintendo.

I believe Nintendo isn't willing to test that gray area in court without having something to support their anti-emulation position. What they want to do is bully devs into settling because it's a low-risk way to kill development on the emulator without opening up that can of worms that could make Switch emulators unambiguously legal. But, the more evidence Nintendo gets to support their argument, the more confident they become in thinking they would end up winning if they don't get that settlement.

Keep in mind that when they did finally go after Yuzu's devs, they went after them for creating software to circumvent the Switch's DRM (that gray area I mentioned) and not for creating an emulator. If they were actually confident in thinking the legal answer to "is an emulator that decrypts ROMs illegal" was "yes," they would've just went after Yuzu a long time ago instead of waiting 7 years into the console lifestyle.