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A comment on Nintendo is suing the creators of Switch emulator Yuzu. Parent comment

Re:Nintendo is suing the creators of Switch emulator Yuzu by bitwize on Tuesday February 27, 2024 @05:25PM (#39530991)
It's called contributory copyright infringement. The Supreme Court only ruled that the VCR was legal based on a very narrow use case: if a television broadcast aired once and only once, never to be seen again, and the user could not see it as scheduled, they were legally entitled to use a device to record the broadcast and watch it at a later time -- once, after which they would presumably have to destroy the recording. And there are legal experts who believe even that is a yard too far.

Nintendo's case is a lot more airtight. To play anything on yuzu, you have to defeat the encryption on Switch games, itself a felony DMCA violation (irrespective of how good or bad the encryption is). Therefore, yuzu can only be used to play pirated material, therefore it contributes to copyright infringement.

"But muh homebrew" -- people who want to develop for Switch can get a development license from Nintendo. The fact that this is an option would weaken developing for Switch as a legitimate use for yuzu.

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Re:Nintendo is suing the creators of Switch emulator Yuzu by wtetzner on Wednesday February 28, 2024 @01:56AM (#39534873)
> "But muh homebrew" -- people who want to develop for Switch can get a development license from Nintendo. The fact that this is an option would weaken developing for Switch as a legitimate use for yuzu.

Just because you can get a license from Nintendo doesn't mean the emulator isn't useful for development.

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Re:Nintendo is suing the creators of Switch emulator Yuzu by bentley on Wednesday February 28, 2024 @05:06AM (#39536043)
> It's called contributory copyright infringement. The Supreme Court only ruled that the VCR was legal based on a very narrow use case…

That 1984 Supreme Court decision was a 5–4 ruling. Can you imagine the deleterious effect on the home electronics industry if, in 1984, a single justice had voted the other way, and the VCR had been ruled an inherently infringing device?

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Re:Nintendo is suing the creators of Switch emulator Yuzu by actionfromafar on Wednesday February 28, 2024 @05:26AM (#39536196)
Probably LaserDisc would have won, then.
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Re:Nintendo is suing the creators of Switch emulator Yuzu by 0xcde4c3db on Wednesday February 28, 2024 @10:07AM (#39538889)
> people who want to develop for Switch can get a development license from Nintendo

Licensed development only allows publishing Nintendo-approved games through Nintendo-licensed publishers who sell into Nintendo-approved channels, which the vast majority of stuff in the homebrew scene wouldn't qualify for.

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