Don’t panic — Emulation community expresses defiance in wake of Nintendos Yuzu lawsuit “EmuDev” coders cite precautions, legal differences they say will offer protection.
Kyle Orland – Feb 29, 2024 11:43 pm UTC Enlarge / Power (glove) to the people.Aurich Lawson reader comments 49
Further ReadingHow strong is Nintendos legal case against Switch-emulator Yuzu?Nintendo’s recent lawsuit against Switch emulator maker Yuzu seems written like it was designed to strike fear into the heart of the entire emulation community. But despite legal arguments that sometimes cut at the very idea of emulation itself, members of the emulation development community I talked to didn’t seem very worried about coming under a Yuzu-style legal threat from Nintendo or other console makers. Indeed, those developers told me they’ve long taken numerous precautions against that very outcome and said they feel they have good reasons to believe they can avoid Yuzu’s fate. Protect yourself
“I can assure [you], experienced emulator developers are very aware of copyright issues,” said Lycoder, who has worked on emulators for consoles ranging from the NES to the Dreamcast. “I’ve personally always maintained strict rules about how I deal with copyrighted content in my projects, and most other people I know from the emulation scene do the same thing.”
“This lawsuit is not introducing any new element that people in the emulation community have not known of for a long time,” said Parsifal, a hobbyist developer who has written emulators for the Apple II, Space Invaders, and the CHIP-8 virtual machine. “Emulation is fine as long as you don’t infringe on copyright and trademarks.”
Other hobbyist emulator makers take more serious precautions to protect themselves legally. “I always had some fear of Nintendo’s lawyers coming after my work, which is part of the reason I still keep it private,” said StrikerX3 of his work on a Nintendo DS emulator. “I’ve only released the emulator’s binaries to a handful of people, and only two others have access to the source code besides me.” Enlarge / Just a little light console hacking…Aurich Lawson
And others feel operating internationally protects them from the worst of the DMCA and other US copyright laws. “I have written an NES emulator and I am working on a Game Boy emulator… anyway I’m not a US citizen and Nintendo can kiss my ass,” said emulator developer ZJoyKiller, who didn’t provide his specific country of residence. Advertisement Stick to the old stuff
Some of those potential legal precautions might seem a little insufficient on further inspectiona lack of copyrighted code in the emulator wasn’t enough to protect Yuzu from Nintendo’s legal sights, after all. Still, other emulator developers pointed out a number of differences in their projects that they felt set them apart.
Chief among those differences is the fact that Yuzu emulates a Switch console that is still actively selling millions of hardware and software units every year. Most current emulator development focuses on older, discontinued consoles that the developers I talked to seemed convinced were much less liable to draw legal fire.
“There is a difference between emulating a 30-year-old system vs. a current one that’s actively making money,” Parsifal said.
In a response on the Yuzu Discord, the development team wrote, “We do not know anything other than the public filing, and we are not able to discuss the matter at this time.” Multiple developers who work on Ryujinx, another prominent Switch emulator, have yet to respond to a request for comment from Ars Technica.
“The consoles I’ve worked on [such as the Nintendo 3DS] don’t really generate much revenue anymore,” developer peach.bot said. “It would be a waste of time to sue like they did Yuzu.” “There is a difference between emulating a 30-year-old system vs. a current one that’s actively makingmoney.”Emulator developer Parsifal
Systems from before the turn of the millennium also often fall into something of a different legal category, developers pointed out, if their software and/or hardware was not protected by any encryption. That means emulators for those older systems don’t have to worry about falling afoul of the strict anti-circumvention portions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Developers have also reverse-engineered open source BIOS and BootROM files for some classic systems, eliminating the need to distribute that copyrighted code or even ask users to provide it.
“For most [older] emulators, users don’t have to break copyright [or encryption], at all,” Lycoder pointed out. “A lot of talented people have worked on methods to dump [copyrighted] BootROMs, firmware, etc. out of original hardware, any user that owns an original system should be able to dump these files themselves.”
Legal differences aside, emulator developers also pointed out some major philosophical differences in working on consoles that are no longer being actively marketed. “In my opinion, emulating the Switch at the moment has nothing to do with preservation,” one anonymous developer told me. “The developers might be enthusiasts and passionate but they need to be very naive to think it’ll be used for lawful preservation and use.” Page: 1 2 Next → reader comments 49 Kyle Orland Kyle Orland has been the Senior Gaming Editor at Ars Technica since 2012, writing primarily about the business, tech, and culture behind video games. He has journalism and computer science degrees from University of Maryland. He once wrote a whole book about Minesweeper. Advertisement Promoted Comments Xkeeper The TotK release date thing is exactly why the wiki I co-run, The Cutting Room Floor, has a very strict policy that even if a game leaks before its street date, do not post about it. Rule 1 of dealing with Nintendo is Don’t Do Things That Attract Nintendo’s Attention.
Nintendo has been known to use fan emulation for their own benefit; Wario Ware: Smooth Moves has a (cropped) screenshot from VirtuaNES.
I, personally, do not care that they made an LLC or a Patreon out of it. Part of that is because (disclaimer) I have a Patreon for said wiki, but also just that software preservation is an actual job. Someone, that isn’t Nintendo, is going to have to reverse-engineer, debug, and emulate everything the Switch and its games do. The console is eventually going to go out of print, they will break, etc. Nintendo is 100% not going to provide any sort of backup or end-user-level emulation capacity; thus it falls to normal people. And that shit is long, hard, and time-consuming. I see no reason why that work should not be rewarded as work is — financially.
The big problem is that Nintendo has infinite dollars and the people they bully don’t. Even if this lawsuit goes nowhere, it’s going to be expensive, take forever, and scare everyone else. Everyone is going to have to worry about "what if we’re next". Lest we already forget that this is the same company that was stalking a jailbreak dev.
Nintendo is a bully and the DMCA is its power.
"There is a difference between emulating a 30-year-old system vs. a current one tha’s actively making money."
It’s worth noting that the Game Boy Color and especially Game Boy Advance, DS, and Wii were consoles that had very active emulation scenes while those consoles were still actively being produced/developed. March 1, 2024 at 12:48 am Marlor_AU I don’t think Nintendo winning this suit (or settling in a way that destroys Yuzu permanently) will affect emulation writ large. The Yuzu devs made a bunch of dumb, greedy mistakes that most emulator developers have learned decades ago not to make.This is my worry. I’ve been an emulation enthusiast for decades (I had Zophar’s Domain set as my homepage for most of the late 90s and early 2000s), and this really seems like the biggest fuss over emulation since the turn of the millennium. However, back then, there certainly wasn’t such a potent combination of publicity and irresponsibility.
Around 1999 and 2000, there was a huge fuss over PSX and N64 emulation, with court cases and legal threats flying around, but the circumstances were very different. The big PSX emulators (Bleem! and Connectix) were careful, and did their best to legally cover themselves. They ended up shutting down anyway, either due to legal costs or being bought out. UltraHLE caused a big buzz, but as soon as the legal threats arrived, RealityMan and Epsilon went underground and development stopped.
After those events, a set of unwritten rules and practices were adopted right across the community: distance yourself from piracy, focus on the educational and preservation aspects of the scene, and shut down any forum conversations that mention downloading ROMs or ISOs.
This has mostly worked, with few exceptions. Dolphin sailed a bit close to the wind by insisting on bundling the Wii Common Key with the emulator (a decision I disagree with), but at the very least, it has an overt focus on preservation, and its forums have a very strict anti-piracy policy. You mention "downloading an ISO", and you’re getting shut down.
Yuzu just seems to have forgotten all this, or at least that’s what its Discord channel suggests. The community didn’t hold back in discussion of piracy. In fact, plenty of users went further. There seemed to be a not-uncommon sentiment within the Yuzu community that the "Switch is underpowered, Nintendo sucks and they’re not getting any money from me". Yet Nintendo’s games were good enough to pirate and enjoy (prior to release date). This grated with me, because it’s not the norm in the emulation scene. Usually the community has a passion and deep affection for the hardware it’s emulating – that’s why it’s trying to keep the platform alive.
Quite possibly, most of its devs and users are young enough that they didn’t live through the mess of the late 90s that created the unwritten rules of the emulation scene. So the lesson needs to be learned all over again. But there’s still a risk that the rest of the community, doing the right thing, gets impacted by the fallout from all this. March 1, 2024 at 1:31 am Channel Ars Technica ← Previous story Next story → Related Stories Today on Ars
