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 @Daughter3546@lemmy.world:
- https://gbatemp.net/threads/yuzu-emulator-shutting-down-paying-nintendo-2-4-million-in-lawsuit-settlement.650039/
- https://www.gamesindustry.biz/nintendos-yuzu-lawsuit-puts-emulation-in-the-spotlight-opinion
- https://www.ign.com/articles/nintendo-says-tears-of-the-kingdom-was-pirated-1-million-times-pre-release-in-lawsuit-against-emulator-creator
There is also an active Reddit thread about this: https://www.reddit.com/r/Games/comments/1b6gtb5/
And I was thinking of cloning the repo. Fuck
I set up a script the other day to check the repo every half hour or so and download any updates. I will give myself a reminder tomorrow to post it on Dropbox or something, if you don’t find it elsewhere.
Any chance you can send it to me as well?
Torrenting is probably the best idea.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
It also agrees to not delete any other “evidence” that infringes Nintendo’s IP rights.
You can read through the entirety of the proposed final judgment and permanent injunction at the bottom of this story; they have not yet been approved by a judge.
Yuzu has still not publicly commented on the lawsuit at its website, Patreon, or Discord — though a bot is still replying to some Discord users with the following message: “yuzu is legal, we don’t support illegal activities.
It’s not yet clear if this is the end of Yuzu, since copies of both the emulator and its source code are in the wild.
Some online supporters specifically mentioned backing up the code after Nintendo sued two weeks ago.
But now, Nintendo and Tropic Haze are asking a judge to specifically find that Yuzu circumvents its copyright protections by using those keys, even if it doesn’t come with them.
The original article contains 396 words, the summary contains 151 words. Saved 62%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
I’m sorry but how is using the actual keys from a legally purchased system circumventing anything? It’s like saying using the actual key to your own front door counts as breaking and entering.
I’m pretty sure the keys aren’t a part of the actual game/download, it’s a part of your Switch. So if you have an emulator with one of those keys built in, it’s piracy.
I think what they should have done is prompt the user to put it in themselves and then we could just find keys on the internet and avoid this whole situation. But I’m no expert
I think what they should have done is prompt the user to put it in themselves and then we could just find keys on the internet and avoid this whole situation. But I’m no expert
That’s exactly how it is… Yuzu does not distribute those files. They give you a guide on how to dump it yourself from your own Switch.
Oh… Huh, yeah then I’m with you lol, idk how they ended up winning that battle
Yuzu settled. They basically laid down and died. But I don’t blame them. $2.4m is probably nothing compared to what they would have paid in legal fees to actually go to court. Even if they won.
They’re likely not going to win. Nintendo’s legal team is pretty strong as far as I know.
DRM is evil. Laws prohibiting circumventing DRM are also evil.
It shouldn’t be illegal, but it is because the law about it was written by the industry 25 years ago because our lawmakers think the internet and indoor plumbing work the same way.
Hey man, IP, you pee, whatever.
Except of course anyone can manufacture and sell plug compatible pipes.
It isn’t, but when you are a small project the law is inconsequential if a massive corporation goes after you and you don’t have the money for the legal battle.
Nintendo’s angle is more along the lines of:
- We gave our friend Switchy the keys to a lockbox.
- You tricked Switchy into giving you our keys.
- We didn’t authorize you to use those keys.
- Using our keys without our permission is circumventing our DRM.
- Yuzu is a tool that enables you to use our keys.
- It’s illegal to distribute tools to circumvent DRM.
It’s a massive reach, but it’s a plausible argument—or even a good one if the judge is a technologically illiterate luddite. Beyond that, Nintendo is the kind of litigant that will drag out a lawsuit until the other party is forced to settle.
There’s a different kind of judge now than the technologically illiterate?
I can’t quite remember the name, but there is actually at least one U.S. judge that takes the time and effort to learn about the technology in depth before making a ruling.
Then companies must go out of their way to avoid them.
He’s William Alsup, who presided over the Oracle vs Google case about Java API copyrightability.
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Alsup#Notable_cases
Thank you. I need to bookmark this glorious man’s Wikipedia page.
Not sure it will ever get better. Maybe a single person being allowed to decide a case that requires a technical understanding should be consulted by experts in it. I guess a better lawyer probably should have made that happen (shouldn’t have to). But, as the old geezers die off and the younger “tech savvy” people take over, they will no longer be young or tech savvy, technologywill keep progressing and pass us up too. And you don’t want an actual young person as a judge. So… the system is just broken.
A court in Germany has recently decided that reading the code of a software you legally purchased and finding plain text passwords there is illegal hacking.
The person was hired to do a security audit (by a third party) and disclosed the finding to the software developer, not even to his own employer.
The developer decided to sue him instead of fixing the problem.
At this point I have lost all trust in the technological capacities of judges out there.
If I’m not authorized to use those keys, how do I use Switchy?
I guess all Nintendo games are illegal to play by that argument, even with their console
Because you’re using the system outside of its intended purpose to break the law. That’s basically the definition of hacking.
I’m not sure why it being illegal to sell a tool to do that is a hard concept to grasp for so many people.
I’m not against emulation or pirating, but no shit this was going to happen eventually.
Okay, so no, it’s not hacking. It doesn’t fall under hacking laws. It’s not illegal to sell hacking tools. Basically, everything you said is wrong.
In this case, it’s all about copyright and the DMCA, which made it illegal to break the copyright protection systems companies put in place or to make or distribute tools to break copyright protection systems.
So, nothing to do will selling things or hacking. Everything to do with copyright and draconian dot come era laws.
Circumventing copyright protections by using encryption keys in an unauthorized manner is hacking.
This case might not be explicitly about hacking, but profiting off tools that use IP to circumvent protections is illegal.
It’s not hacking. Sorry.
The electronic key I purchased and collected from my own hardware is “hacking” because Nintendo’s doesn’t intend it? Maybe the legality of selling a tool to get the key is a hard concept to grasp because the premise is objectionable. If a Switch makes a good doorstop then it will be doing it’s “intended purpose” if that’s what I intend for my property.
I’m against companies having unjust control over our own computing.
You might own the hardware, but you don’t own the rights to the OS that runs on it. The encryption key is part of that software.
It’s not a hard concept to grasp. If I was openly selling a tool to break the activation lock on Windows, I could expect the same result.
That’s a ridiculous idea. If I buy a computer with an OS that has an encryption key to protect the hard drive, and later I need that key to remove my data to another system, I have an entirely reasonable expectation that I’m allowed to do so, regardless of how much the computer manufacturer doesn’t want me to.
deleted by creator
You didn’t read the article did you?
Whether or not you paid for the game is completely irrelevant to whether Yuzu is designed to circumvent DRM. DRM is designed to prevent making unauthorized copies, which is exactly what Yuzu does, regardless of whether you paid for it or not.
I’m not defending Nintendo, just the English language.
Yes, but the emulator doesn’t circumvent any copy protection. It utilizes the decryption key from your own hardware (assuming you dumped it yourself) to run ROMs which have already had the DRM circumvented by whatever was used to dump them in the first place (which the emulator doesn’t do).
This is generally the same reason why emulators such as Bleem (which works the same way as Yuzu with the decryption keys but for PS1) have been ruled legal in past court cases.
A good analogy would be that you’re using their keys, on their locks, but put in a different door.
Honestly
Because the dmca says so.
Nintendo can count on its games being pirated even more now. Good for me that I never touched a nintendo in my life.
I helped add to that by modding my launch Switch this past weekend. Nice to be able to play Link’s Awakening without that ugly-ass blur!
Wow. Fuck Nintendo. I own 2 switches and ToTK. Of course I emulate it, so I don’t have to play at 20fps. And I can mod the game. Not buying another nintendo product again. I’m done. I’ll just pirate it since it seems I don’t own it anyways. Can’t play it where I want, how I want, so why play by the rules at all.
There is a very special place in hell for all nintendo lawyers.
Money is a weapon in western society. You can’t win just because you’re right
They’re wrong and it is ethical to steal their IP
I have never played any Nintendo games. Idk what people see in them. I feel like people buy them mostly because of nostalgia. First game you ever played and all that, and then they buy switch for their kid.
This is bad news for emulation though.
I don’t care for them anymore, but the SNES, N64 and Gameboy eras were and still are magical.
Different perspectives I guess. That era to me is the era of Apogee software and DOS shareware games, since we never owned a Nintendo system but my Dad did have a decent PC. Many evenings as a preteen were spent trying to cook up my own shitty games in QBasic.
Most of them are good games. Nintendo cares about their games, especially first party ones.
I have bought them because they are fun.
Let this be a lesson: if you try to forcibly pry open the gates of DRM hell and let software be free, you best let it be truly free and only money off it from the donations of your supporters. Don’t be like yuzu and monetize the living hell out of your emulator. Don’t stuff it with telemetry, don’t hide releases behind a patreon paywall.
That all being said, fuck Nintendo.
tbf there was never a paywall. ea = latest yuzu master branch with some work-in-progress-but-almost-ready-for-general-use prs merged in.
anyone could have taken the repo, merged prs from the list and built it, with no need to pay for anything. It’s free software after allThere was actually someone who did that, the repo was called pineapple-src and it was fairly popular
Yeah you’re right, it was brought to my attention that the lawsuit was about decrypting games, especially Tears of the Kingdom, before they were released. The monetization was just to provide earlier access to precompiled binaries
Bleem was a paid and they won, but this was before the anti circumvention addendum. Yuzu wasn’t sued for being an emulator, but because it used the keys file to decrypt games.
Should have let the decryption be fully external, and not just needing the keys
Does a settlement like this set any kind of precedent?
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.
The judge allowing Yuzu to make the statement doesn’t make it legally relevant in any context. It’s not.
AFAIK settlements can’t be used as precedent. IANAL tho.
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?
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.
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?
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.
It’d feel a bit gross if so, considering they were coerced in to saying it by the terms of the settlement.
It doesn’t need to set any kind of precedent. That was set decades ago in this case.
Nintendo isn’t arguing against emulation itself, they’re challenging Yuzu on the anti-circumvention part of the DMCA. There isn’t precedent for going against emulators using that yet AFAICT; Sony v. Bleem is entirely unrelated.
I’m not talking about that. I’m talking about Universal City Studios, Inc. v. Reimerdes/Universal City Studios, Inc. v. Corley and others.
I don’t think that applies in this case since DeCSS was unambiguously and primarily designed to strip DRM (with interoperability as a consequence), while Yuzu was primarily designed to emulate a system (with DRM “circumvention” as a consequence).
They put features into yuzu to specifically decrypt games (if you provide a key), it’s the same thing.
removed by mod
Ryujinx lives on, thankfully, for the moment.
They also have a Patreon. Since Nintendo got away with killing Yuzu, Ryujinx is probably next.
Yup, I don’t think I’m buying any Nintendo products anytime soon
I mean, why would you? Nintendo has been anti-consumer for a long time now.
This is just a drop in the bucket for them, not nearly as bad as trying to extort lets players/streamers into giving over half their income to nintendo and shit like that.
I think some of us (At least TWO! [=P] ) were pretty much already ready to, and this was just the straw that broke the camels back
F you Nintendo.
I wonder how much the “Yuzu is primarily for piracy” thing will hurt yuzu successors off the open sourced code.
The forks were made to use homebrew apps.
Or something else, there’s quite a lot of ways to make this work without the whole games thing
