Nintendo has yet again issued a series of DMCA takedowns across GitHub that specfically target popular Nintendo Switch emulators. Nintendo's reasoning is to protect its copyrighted IP and prevent unauthorized distribution.

It's common knowledge that most emulators worth their weight do not themselves include any cryptographic keys - with most requiring users provide their own. However, Nintendo has previously insisted that such emulators facilitate copyright infringement rather than claiming them to be illegal as such, and as of now, no court has formally ruled that using or distributing emulators without games violates copyright.

Of course, emulators offer many benefits rather than simply "facilitating piracy". One of the big ones, being of course; game preservation - allowing future generations to experience games that might no longer be available for purchase or that have been delisted. Emulators can also be a great help to users with accessiblity needs, providing alternate input options for those that need it.

What do you think? Is Nintendo justified in its crusade against emulators or should they take a step back?

Source

 

[lwiz]

Eden Repos, both release and nightly are still available in Github, basically meaning:

• The DMCA was originally made by some other party than Nintendo, but pretended to be.
• The DMCA was made by Nintendo, but no action was taken as emulation isn't illegal. Both Yuzu and Ryu were taken down by Nintendo or owners due technicalities, not emulation being illegal per se. (One Yuzu original dev had some shady business and one original Ryu dev was scared off, sold out or just retired due internal drama. No one really knows.)

Basically, armchair lawyering or pointing fingers is pretty pointless, Switch emulation is alive and well.

 

[Renos44]

NIntendo's own Lawyers said the Emulators are Legal...and yet they keep attacking them.
Lawyers Admitting

Why are they so focused on this, every other company has emulators for their consoles and they aren't wasting this much time taking them down.
You don't see Sony attacking ShadPS4, or Microsoft attacking Xenia and Xemu, I mean dang!
There are millions of people in this world that use emulators, and these people either own real Switches, or had no intentions on getting one, you can't micro manage them, hoping to just kill all your games from being played without purchase.

Microsoft is
1 seemingly leaving the console business
2. Xenia and Xemu are OG xbox and 360 emulators. Both these consoles are 20+ years old and no longer making any sort of actual money for MS and most of the games are already on PC in some form anyway.
Had say a competent 360 emulator released in 2008 or Xbox one emulator in 2015 MS would have nuked it

Same with Sony the ps4 is effectively EoL in their eyes and there not pumping out exclusive or relying on hardware sales from it. Most of its games have a pc or PS5 remaster and people are only emulating it for bloodborne a game they have no interest in. Had a ps4 emulator existed in 2015 they would have nuked it.

The switch emulators came out in the peak of the Switch's lifespan. Nintendo entire business model is hardware and exclusives sales. Of course they are going to go after them as the main use case quickly became piracy and a direct threat to sales.
You don't see them actively going after dolphin or the other countless NES through n64 emulators.

 

[Ambers_Crimson_8K]

Microsoft is
1 seemingly leaving the console business
2. Xenia and Xemu are OG xbox and 360 emulators. Both these consoles are 20+ years old and no longer making any sort of actual money for MS and most of the games are already on PC in some form anyway.
Had say a competent 360 emulator released in 2008 or Xbox one emulator in 2015 MS would have nuked it

Same with Sony the ps4 is effectively EoL in their eyes and there not pumping out exclusive or relying on hardware sales from it. Most of its games have a pc or PS5 remaster and people are only emulating it for bloodborne a game they have no interest in. Had a ps4 emulator existed in 2015 they would have nuked it.

The switch emulators came out in the peak of the Switch's lifespan. Nintendo entire business model is hardware and exclusives sales. Of course they are going to go after them as the main use case quickly became piracy and a direct threat to sales.
You don't see them actively going after dolphin or the other countless NES through n64 emulators.

Microsoft allows you to jailbreak their system with directors mode, and even has tutorials on their site, which allows Xenia and Xemu and other emulators to be played on Xbox.

Just saying!

And if we use your logic, trying to make it an old unit issue.

3DS is old and gone, Switch 1 is old, Switch 2 is out now!

Why go after all the 3DS and Switch Emulators?
Make it make sense, because it doesn't!

 

[Renos44]

Microsoft allows you to jailbreak their system with directors mode, and even has tutorials on their site, which allows Xenia and Xemu and other emulators to be played on Xbox.

Just saying!

And if we use your logic, trying to make it an old unit issue.

3DS is old and gone, Switch 1 is old, Switch 2 is out now!

Why go after all the 3DS and Switch Emulators?
Make it make sense, because it doesn't!

Dev mode on the xbox isnt a jailbreak, Its just a heavily sandboxed dev mode that allows you to run UWP apps. But like i mention before MS does not care if your running 360 or OG xbox emulators as its not a financial concern both consoles are dead.


Citra got caught in the crossfire since it was managed by yuzu's dev team.
The switch 1 isnt dead yet according to Nintendo very much still in production and relevant to their business.

 

[Lumstar]

A comparison is hardly fair regardless. Unlike Nintendo, Microsoft learned from their past and implemented some resemblance of COMPETENT security.

Xbox One games have yet to be pirated. During the production lifespan of the console (the important part folks!), not a single instance of playing a retail-mode XB1 game without authorization ever occurred.

 

[ChronosNotashi]

Why go after all the 3DS and Switch Emulators?
Make it make sense, because it doesn't!

Technically, Nintendo hasn't gone after any 3DS emulators at all. At least not directly. There's even one emulator that showed up fairly recently and is still going without any legal issues so far (let's hope the devs do their best to keep it that way).

As was said, Citra wasn't targeted directly by Nintendo, nor was it mentioned in the lawsuit (not to a significant enough degree to matter, anyway, if at all). If anything, Citra shutting down was more of a casualty, as it was developed and managed by Tropic Haze, LCC, a.k.a. the devs of Yuzu, which was the target of the lawsuit. Part of the settlement - and a common ruling by judges in such settlements to prevent future conflicts - was that the devs were banned from messing with any Nintendo hardware at a technical level (they can play games on Nintendo hardware, but they can't dissect it or attempt to reverse-engineer it). And because of that, they could no longer legally manage Citra.

 

[szubiennica]

Please helpus preserving myrient database

 

[alexfree]

Bleem vs Sony set legal precedent around the turn of the century that emulators done right are legal. The reason bleem went out of business is because a mega corp took basically an indie dev to court, not that they were wrong. That’s what they wanted, they weren’t wrong they just weren’t rich enough

 

[Renos44]

Bleem vs Sony set legal precedent around the turn of the century that emulators done right are legal. The reason bleem went out of business is because a mega corp took basically an indie dev to court, not that they were wrong. That’s what they wanted, they weren’t wrong they just weren’t rich enough

Except Bleem vs Sony Didn't actually set a legal precedent for the legality of emulators. That wasnt the actual outcome of the case and people get it mixed in with other court cases.
Per an earlier post

TLDR in the bleem VS sony Sony sued for unfair competition and copyright violation for the use of Sony game screenshots in Bleem advertising

A judge dismissed the unfair competition claim and sony won the copyright violation
Bleem appealed and got the ruling reversed.
Sony sued again for patent infringement over the PS1 bios this never got a ruling as both parties settled and bleem declared bankruptcy. So only precedent set by this case is you can't be sued for screenshots.

 

[ChronosNotashi]

Except Bleem vs Sony Didn't actually set a legal precedent for the legality of emulators. That wasnt the actual outcome of the case and people get it mixed in with other court cases.
Per an earlier post

And even the case people mix up Sony v. Bleem with - Sony v. Connectix - didn't rule emulation as unconditionally legal, either. It ruled that it was legal to, in the specific case, clean-room reverse-engineer the BIOS file for use with an emulator. I believe it was even noted that the fault was on Sony for not having copy protection on Playstation game discs to ensure that they'd only run on legitimate Playstation hardware - something Sony rectified with later systems (with varying levels of success, as was seen with how quickly the PSP's protections were bypassed).

While emulation itself may be considered "legal" (really, it's gray area at best if it's not a 1st-party developed/supported emulator) as far as reverse-engineering a BIOS or OS, circumvention of disc/cartridge copy protection encryption through the emulator, even if the emulator devs themselves don't directly provide the means to circumvent it, is still something that hasn't been strongly tested in court. In fact, there's been more precedent pointing towards third-party emulators that rely on user-provided keys being illegal under the DMCA than legal, simply due to the acquisition of such keys realistically requiring tools that are frequently linked to piracy (ex: NoA v. Gary Bowser in regards to design/creation and sale/distribution of circumvention devices - would include Sony v. Hotz regarding jailbreaking and reverse-engineering the PS3 hardware had it not been settled outside of court).

Only reason the console manufacturers don't target all of them, and only those that become a more direct threat (ex: Connectix, Bleem, Yuzu - Citra doesn't count, since it wasn't targeted directly and was more a casualty), is simply because of the time and money/resources it would require to hit all of them. And long-term, it's best if third-party emulators devs don't give them a reason to.