DISCLAIMER
The contents below do not create and are not meant to offer any legal advice but merely a legal minded expression of fact or opinion, meant for public consideration.
What does it mean to sign up as a Nintendo Developer
The things you should know, before and after applying
A non-disclosure agreement (NDA), is a legal contract through which the parties agree not to disclose information covered by the agreement. An NDA creates a confidential relationship between the parties to protect any type of confidential and proprietary information or trade secrets. As such, an NDA protects non-public business information.
What Nintendo makes you sign is an unilateral NDA:
only one party (the disclosing party, Nintendo) anticipates disclosing certain information to the other party (you or your oganization) and requires that the information be protected from further disclosure for some reason, when that information has been directly supplied by the disclosing party.
Can I still contribute to open source homebrew after signing?
Partially.
The NDA imposes no obligation upon towards confidential information that was in your possession before receipt from Nintendo (3dbrew, ctrulib, etc), or when written records establish that it was independently developed by you without a breach of the agreement. After signing the agreement, you accept to never reverse engineer any Nintendo hardware, software, or development kit, making it impossible to legally contribute to ctrulib or 3dbrew.
If I do nothing wrong, nothing can happen to my license, right?
Nintendo can suspend or terminate an account (thus terminating or suspending your license) to their own discretion. They may use cookies, complete logs of your browsing activity on the portal, IP addresses, http referer to prevent potentially illegal or offensive activities. Your license can be revoked for inactivity.
What happens if I don't respect the terms imposed by the agreement?
As the agreement states, "any breach of or default under this Agreement by you would cause irreparable harm to Nintendo, the extent of which would be difficult to ascertain".
Nintendo can then proceed in any way, "without the necessity of showing actual damages or posting a bond or other security".
What may Nintendo do if they identify illegal activity on my end?
The common legal practice is to send a cease and desist letter. If you fail to comply, further legal action will be pursued, with a temporary restraining order being filed right away. You can get away with it if the secret information is already in the public domain.
As the NDA itself states, Nintendo would go through an injunctive relief.
TL; DR: after signing, you must not
- leak any of the tools or documents
- contribute to open source projects like citra or ctrulib after signing (you are prohibited to reverse engineer any Nintendo material
- share an application developed with the official tools, not even with other registered developers, unless they are officially your partners on a registered application in the dev portal
- disclose any information present on the portal, like devkit prices, lotcheck requirements, answers in the dev forum
- sell any development hardware
Signing is discouraged unless you really intend to publish an application.
Signing with fake information is as bad as violating the agreement.
All of this is intended for business, not to play around.
