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Nintendo sues Switch emulator Yuzu for ‘facilitating piracy at a colossal scale’ (www.theverge.com)

submitted 8 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 15 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (1 children)

Unfortunately, it's more of a gray area than most people think.

17 USC §1201 (f)(1)

Notwithstanding the provisions of subsection (a)(1)(A), a person who has lawfully obtained the right to use a copy of a computer program may circumvent a technological measure that effectively controls access to a particular portion of that program for the sole purpose of identifying and analyzing those elements of the program that are necessary to achieve interoperability of an independently created computer program with other programs, and that have not previously been readily available to the person engaging in the circumvention, to the extent any such acts of identification and analysis do not constitute infringement under this title.

Ok, and that applies to...

17 USC §1201 (a)(1)(A)

No person shall circumvent a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title.

And a technological measure is:

17 USC §1201 (a)(3)

to “circumvent a technological measure” means to descramble a scrambled work, to decrypt an encrypted work, or otherwise to avoid, bypass, remove, deactivate, or impair a technological measure, without the authority of the copyright owner; and

Perfect! Right?

17 USC §1201 (a)(2)

No person shall manufacture, import, offer to the public, provide, or otherwise traffic in any technology, product, service, device, component, or part thereof, that—

(A) is primarily designed or produced for the purpose of circumventing a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title;

(B) has only limited commercially significant purpose or use other than to circumvent a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title; or

(C) is marketed by that person or another acting in concert with that person with that person’s knowledge for use in circumventing a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title.

And unfortunately, Yuzu is capable of and needs console keys to decrypt games and system firmware files.

The reverse engineering for interoperability exception, (f)(1), only explicitly exempts (a)(1)(A) for research purposes. If Yuzu—as a software product—is found to have the primary purpose of circumventing Nintendo's DRM, it will be in violation of (a)(2) and the developers are not protected.

This is something that will need to be tested in court, but the only way they would be entirely in the clear is if they stripped out all encryption/decryption code and forced users to use some other tool to fully decrypt the firmware, NAND filesystem, and game image filesystems during dumping. They'll likely argue that the primary purpose is preservation, and Nintendo will use the fact that the Switch is still sold in retail as a counterargument to suggest that their development of the emulator was unnecessary and not in good faith. If they instead argue that it was created as a development or debugging tool, Nintendo could point to their low barrier of entry for developers to obtain a devkit (as evidenced by the crapton of shovelware and asset flips in the E-Shop).

If they don't settle, it's going to be an expensive mess to sort out.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Thanks for providing all that info, I was aware of some but not all of that. Is my understanding that just providing the emulator without keys correct? Besides the keys themselves and the switch OS, there’s nothing that bypasses copyright. It does seem like from the other comments here that the devs may not have kept a clean separation which will now bite them.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (1 children)

Almost. The technical stuff is going to be a bit butched, but I'll drop the legal speak and be more human for a minute:

What makes this unique isn't that Nintendo is going after them for providing the keys, but for actually using them. Yuzu asks the user to dump or acquire prod.keys on their own, and then it uses that to read encrypted data. The fact that it does that, regardless of whether the keys were obtained legitimately or not, is where the argument that it's a DRM circumvention tool lays. Yuzu itself is supposedly "circumventing" Nintendo's DRM process by using the keys in a way that bypasses all of the protections that Nintendo put into place to prevent the games from being loaded on non-Switch hardware.

The Yuzu devs' willingness to have FAQs and a quick start guide explaining the requirements and steps to emulate commercial games on Yuzu is definitely going to bite them and undermine any defense they had for not knowingly marketing it as a circumvention tool. Another criterion is that Yuzu has to have some commercial significance if it were to lose its ability to circumvent DRM. And, as we know, it's an emulator...

The best chances they have is to convince the judge that Yuzu isn't primarily designed as a circumvention tool (which, once again, isn't helped by their guide on how to run commercial games) or that it falls under the accessibility exemption added recently.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 8 months ago

Thanks, that all makes a lot of sense.

To me just asking for the key alone seems fine (I'm not a lawyer, but other tools like open transport tycoon and other tools do that), but advertising how to get those keys as you said will probably over the line, and advertising it as posting Nintendo titles more so.