One argument I heard for the Yuzu settlement was to avoid discovery. There's speculation that Nintendo had the goods on them, and that discovery would expose them to more than the civil penalties they were facing.
Nintendo has never been friendly to emulation, or most fan content in general, but there are protections for fair-use and this team appears to be building their work behind those, rather than playing fast and loose with them.
My understanding was that they were offering a specially-patched version of Yuzu to their Patreon supporters, that included improvements for games that _weren't released yet_.
*Making money* by helping people run Zelda _before it came out_ was begging for trouble.
Nintendo's approach to fan projects and emulators is ridiculous, don't get me wrong — but Yuzu authors were definitely playing with fire and overstepping what's generally accepted in the community.
This was a widely spread myth, now generally considered incorrect.
Yuzu did not offer improvements before launch day. There were badly patched unofficial versions that were trying. Nintendo does allege though that Yuzu was doing research to develop the patches before launch day.
My impression of the Yuzu team is that they didn't keep a very clean house. While the project didn't officially condone piracy, some members of the team were absolutely willing to help people run pirated games. Add to that the fact that they were emulating a current system, and that they ran a very successful Patreon to pay their team, and I think they eroded their plausible deniability down to nothing.
Consider that Nintendo leaves Dolphin more-or-less alone. I think Nintendo understands where emulation sits legally, and they went after Yuzu because of what was happening around the emulator, and not because of the emulator itself.
There are fair-use protections, but it costs money to defend. Part of why so many Smash tournaments folded in 2022 was because of Nintendo telling people they weren't allowed to host tourneys using their IP. Granted I'm not a lawyer, but people gathering to play a multiplayer game and then streaming the matches doesn't inherently constitute any infringement on Nintendo's rights or ability to make money. Many TOs (tournament organizers) left the scene or stopped featuring Smash as a title over the C&D notice. No one wanted to take on Nintendo in court.
Kind of. Some TOs are calling Nintendo's bluff. Nintendo released a set of guidelines[0] on what kinds of tournaments can be hosted. However, Collision 2024 just happened with attendees and a prize pool surpassing the guidelines.
> people gathering to play a multiplayer game and then streaming the matches doesn't inherently constitute any infringement on Nintendo's rights or ability to make money.
Esports and tourneys in general generate a decent amount of money, are recurring and control a decent chunk of the narrative around games affecting their marketing.
Not trying to defend Nintendo or any other company, but their objective as a profit-driven organisation is to generate maximum profits.
Not really. Fair use does not really legally exist. It exists primarily as a defense after you’ve already been sued - which is also why there is no official codification of what fair use actually is.
Also, as Nintendo can argue, imagine this was a movie. Imagine it was a movie being shown on screen for two hours. That would be case closed. Now imagine it was a movie recutting competition. Again, case closed. So what makes a tourney special? In the eyes of the law, a judge might say, absolutely nothing.
You might argue, “well, there’s skill being applied, whereas a movie is passive.” No dice there - just because you put effort into your copyright violation is meaningless. You might argue a movie is a full work when a video game only displays a subset - but do you think you could publicly perform 30 minutes of The Lord of the Rings and be OK? Of course not.
Interesting way to put it, but I'm still not sure that quite applies. The game is a multiplayer game intended to be played with other people. Commercial endeavors change with movie viewing. It's implied that single entity can own a single copy while charging admission to profit from their single copy of the movie. Meanwhile, movie companies (mostly) don't care if I play _The Lord of the Rings_ in a private setting to a small audience of known people.
I would argue that the competitive nature of tournaments implies that the entrants all have a copy of the game along with hardware to run the game (emulation withstanding). The only thing is streaming the event. Even then, what would be the difference between streaming a tournament and streaming myself or a small group of friends playing? It doesn't seem like that would infringe upon the core purpose of the game.
The law is fairly immune to mental gymnastics and mind games, regardless of what the dramas indicate.
For movies, it’s fairly simple and widely understood you are buying a license for private viewing. While there’s some room for interpretation, it goes without saying that if you are inviting strangers and/or charging admission and/or running advertising, you’re inviting scrutiny.
Also, let’s just be honest, the moment you run advertising for anything, it’s almost impossible to argue this is not a publicly available event. Public is also fairly broad - collages have to license every movie they want to show to a classroom, for example. My college paid over $2000 to Netflix for a single showing to Math Club of one movie for about 7 viewers.
> The game is a multiplayer game intended to be played with other people
The law only cares about copyright. What it is, is irrelevant.
As for your point about how the participants must have bought the game - I don’t think that would work either. Imagine you ran your unapproved Lord of the Rings convention. You also had the movies playing on repeat the whole time. I don’t think arguing that “only people who have bought the movies have any interest in being here” would protect you.
No, it simply clarifies that the DMCA cannot be used to say that fair use does not exist anymore, solely in a potential copyright lawsuit, but that DMCA provision does not apply in a DMCA circumvention lawsuit.
This is also why this carve-out is practically useless and also does not define guidelines for fair use.
Beyond speculation. Nintendo is known to not fuck around, thanks to its leaks.
In one of the various Nintendo leaks in the past few years was a bunch of documentation of "Operation Belgian Waffle", their attempt to "Knock and Talk" with a private investigator, law enforcement, and Nintendo Legal visiting a fairly well-known hacker in the scene. All of this was being spearheaded and commanded by Nintendo of Japan towards the subsidiaries in other countries.
How come Satoshi Nakamoto can remain anonymous in spite of his worth in the billions of dollars, but emulator developers, worth almost nothing, can't hide from Nintendo? Opsec mistakes, or just no opsec at all?
Nintendo has never been friendly to emulation, or most fan content in general, but there are protections for fair-use and this team appears to be building their work behind those, rather than playing fast and loose with them.