#mod yuzu | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

prettycottonmouthlamia · 9 months ago

Text

I shouldn't have to make this post but Nintendo fans are trying extremely desperately to position the company whose cock they love the taste of in a good light and are generally doing this by spreading misinformation about the legalities of emulation so let's go over a number of the fabrications shall we?

Emulation is illegal to monetize This has so far been one of the really big ones that's taken traction, usually partnered with the sister lie that yuzu was paywalling access to early access builds. These are both lies, and are untrue. yuzu is far from the only modern emulator to be monetizing itself, plenty of mobile emulators do it, but developing an emulator for money is entirely legal. We have pretty much all of our emulation precedent set thanks to a series of lawsuits in the very early 2000s thanks to Sony suing an emulator called Bleem. There's a lot to say about Bleem, but Bleem was a commercial emulator. You could buy Bleem, in stores. At no point was there ever a court decision that Bleem was wrong to do so (despite Sony's best efforts).

Emulating current generation software or hardware is illegal. This is also wrong, and kind of fundamentally misunderstands a lot when it comes to emulation. Once again, Bleem was at the time emulating current generation software. It was a generation in its twilight, but Bleem first released in March of 1999: the Playstation 2 was not out yet. The reason why current generation software does not tend to be emulated is because we do not really have the tech or processing power to do it yet. The Switch's lower specs are entirely the reason it has had an emulator developed well ahead of the PS4 or the Xbone.

Yuzu's early access build allowed people to play Tears of the Kingdom ahead of release date This one is a couple of different statements packed together, and while I'm given to believe there's a chance other games may have been playable ahead of release, this specific statement is a lie, and maybe the funniest one on the list because it's a lie that's not even backed up by the lawsuit.

The lawsuit is extremely clear in its language that it was modded instances of Yuzu that could play Tears of the Kingdom ahead of release date, not publicly accessible builds of Yuzu. Nintendo's argument here lies in Yuzu being open source: part of the lawsuit alleges that Yuzu is responsible for any and all acts of piracy done by its users, whether or not they used official or modded builds of Yuzu. This is, of course, a fundamentally fucking insane position to argue from. It is not a particularly uncharitable reading of this as an attack on open source software to begin with, as this precedent would make any developer liable for ANY illegal action taken by someone who modified their code. Supporting this, in my opinion, makes you an asshole and liable to be clocked in the fucking mouth.

4. Literally anything involving this screenshot.

I've seen this screenshot maybe three or four times with different takes on what exactly Illegal is happening here and I'm pretty content to just call it vibes at this point. Whether this is an intelligent screenshot is a different matter, but no one has been able to point to anything actually illegal being done here. There is already precedent in allowing one to make their own back-ups of software they own, even if decryption or bypassing copy protection to do so, which is a large majority of software. Switch games are not the only games that are either encrypted or have copy protection, and this is both not the earliest generation to do it AND its not the only industry that does it.

The only point of interest here is the date, which I've seen literally no one bring up, but this correlates into another point: personal piracy is still not something Yuzu is liable for. It's a dumb thing to broadcast, but it doesn't change anything material about the software.

5. Yuzu folded because Nintendo had a smoking gun

I, I just, I'm sorry this one isn't just a lie its a really naive and incompetent view of the faults of our legal system. If anything, the settlement seems to indicate the opposite. If Nintendo was sure they had Yuzu dead the rights, they wouldn't have fucking settled. Both parties need to agree to settle! Nintendo is actively interested in trying to set legal precedent that emulation is illegal, because Nintendo is great at saying obviously wrong things with a straight face.

This could be a reason, but remember, this was a civil lawsuit, not a criminal one. Civil lawsuits have a difference in how evidence is handled, and it's pretty likely that Nintendo just has more evidence than user does on account of being able to afford a larger legal team and having planned for this lawsuit in advance, regardless of how strong that evidence actually is. It's why most of the arguments in the lawsuit read kind of insane. Civil lawsuits are not handled "beyond a reasonable doubt".

There's also the fact that legal cases can be extremely expensive, even when you know you are absolutely in the fucking right. I want to link this video by James Stephanie Sterling as evidence of this. They were completely in the fucking right, and the lawsuit still took an incredible amount of time and monetary expense to argue, and that's against an opponent who you could reasonably confuse with a scarecrow. This is ultimately how Sony eventually "won" against Bleem. Bleem never lost any of its lawsuits against Sony, in fact Sony ballsed it up twice against Bleem, but Sony continued to file lawsuits against Bleem and its company over and over, until Bleem literally could not afford it and went bankrupt.

There's also the matter of precedent. If Yuzu had taken this court, and lost, it would be really bad. There's a lot in this court case that you don't want precedent leaning towards, and due to, uh, America's current political climate and judicial regime, there's a fair chance the judge would have just sided with Nintendo anyways. Settling the lawsuit, while to be entirely clear, sucks complete ass for Yuzu as they were basically eliminated, protects the sphere of emulation as a whole.

So what was the salient parts of Nintendo's case?

The parts of Nintendo's case that hold the most weight have to do specifically with the encryption keys used to de-encrypt Switch games, and how those keys interact with the DMCA. There's no legal precedence to back this up, this is thoroughly untested grounds. This is actually where the buck stops with the Bleem cases: this one never went to a judgment for Bleem and hence never established precedent.

There's a pretty reasonable chance that Nintendo had a chance to win the lawsuit off of the back of this point. This doesn't make it a guarantee, but it's the part of the lawsuit that's actually important.

What happened with the settlement?

Well Nintendo got to legally extort the Yuzu devs and their parent company for $2.4 million. This is, strictly speaking, chump change to Nintendo but I in particular hate this part of lawsuits with a passion. In addition, as per the conditions of the agreement, all copies of Yuzu that were released and in development under the purvey of the company must be destroyed, the company and its devs can no longer work on Yuzu in any way possible, and they cannot work on any other emulation software. This is why Citra also closed down by the way: it was an unfortunate emulator in the cross fire. This in and of itself, is a tragedy, since this is basically court mandated brain drain. Undoubtedly Yuzu will be forked and someone will continue development on "Zuyu", but the loss is still felt.

Why should I care? Piracy is illegal.

This is where I'm going to wax philosophical for a moment, but Frankie my dear, I do not give a damn. Nintendo could have had full legal rights to do this, and I would still be of the opinion that Nintendo's legal team are ghouls and shouldn't feel safe showing their faces. This is how I felt when Nintendo shut down Emuparadise. Whether something is illegal does not impact whether it is right. Laws exist in a state of being able to be both just, unjust, or both.

Emulation is extremely important in the preservation of gaming as an artform, something that the game industry is extremely against in all forms. There's money to be made after all, and attempts at making sure that games are available to play are often attacked and criticized. This is part of the reason I'm so against the existence of copyright law. It doesn't matter what the intent of a system is, but it does matter what the system does, and it's transferred an overwhelming amount of power into the hands of large corporations while largely screwing small creators over.

I do not believe art has a price tag to it. I do not believe that art can and should only be enjoyed by the people a company has decided to sell it too. I do not believe that companies like Nintendo should be able to throw their legal weight around and ruin people's lives. You should be able to play Mother 3 and Shin Megami Tensei without having to wait for their parent companies to decide they actually want to sell it to you.

Piracy does not inflict meaningful damages to Nintendo. Despite Nintendo's whinging, Tears of the Kingdom sold over 20 million copies in half a years time, something that we can estimate to have made Nintendo about $1.4 billion in revenue. We live in a game industry which does not care about its game devs: it's perfectly willing to underpay them, to overwork them, and to eventually let them go. Nintendo is not innocent here. They have a history of mistreating their contract workers, and I personally know that these are not the only allegations that hold water.

In short, fuck Nintendo. Pirate all Switch games until the end of time.

118 notes · View notes