this post was submitted on 15 Oct 2024
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You see...
It's okay when THEY do it.
It's not okay when YOU do it.
That's how they function.
Well yeah, as the owners they have the exclusive right to determine what's okay. They're just following the rules as they've been laid out by centuries of corporate lobbying for more exploitable copyright laws. Those are what we need to focus on if we want more fair use of intellectual property that the rights holder has already sufficiently profited from - the thing that such protections were initially meant to ensure to a much more reasonable extent.
They aren't the owners of most of the games though, did they ask, in writing, all of the rightsholders for the games they made?
Did they ask the artists if it was ok to re-use their work in a 'new title'? (according to Nintendo, emulation is transformative)
Would you want to enter a legal battle with Nintendo? This system is broken in a lot of different ways, one of which is the incredible expense of legal fees even if you're in such an open-and-shut case as someone clearly using your intellectual property without your consent. The one with deeper pockets wins regardless of what the law says.
You had me in the first half ngl (more like first sentence but close enough)
But they DO have the exclusive right. People want to be told the world is different - that it's better - but if we want to change it we need to see it for what it is. If we say "They don't have the right!" before we've done the work necessary to strip them of the right, then we'll never even understand how to start fixing this broken system.
I completely agree with that take, I was just making a joke about how the first sentence reads like the start of a comment that's about to defend Nintendo
Well, you know, the games are theirs to begin with.
I see what you mean, and you are correct, but I think it's more about the games that are being emulated than emulation in itself right?
It would be, if they didn't target the emulators and only targeted the roms/game data.
The only time the emulators are targeted is when the creators try to profit off them, or am I mistaken?
That's definitely not the case for Switch emulators.
Yuzu was charging for early access to their emulator, which is what prompted Nintendo action.
Ryujinx doesn't seem like any legal action was taken, sounds like the creator was given a chunk of cash by Nintendo to take it down.
I hate Nintendo, but you gotta keep the facts straight
I don't think they paid him off, I think it was more along the lines of "We won't do anything to you if you stop now"
They also shut down Yuzu forks using the DMCA. If they paid Ryujinx's dev it was the equivalent of the Mafia bribing a judge while waving a picture of his family.
Totally the same /s
That, and when Nintendo's code is used in some way to develop the project. Japan has very strict laws on reverse engineering any software, which Nintendo is always set to capitalize on.
Which is still a legal thing to do.
I don't disagree they are their games, but is it their emulator, or did they just download one of the many online? Really doesn't matter, just love to see companies bitch about something, then turn around and do it themselves.
What about the fan games that were made of pure passion for the IP that they've taken down?
To name a few:
Pokemon Uranium
Pokemon Prism
Mario Maker 64
Another Metroid 2 Remake
Zelda Maker
Ocarina of Time 2D
Zelda 30
There are countless others I'm sure.
FUCK Nintendo.
They have to protect their IPs, it is what they have to do by law if they don't want to lose then.
https://www.varnumlaw.com/insights/enforce-your-intellectual-property-or-risk-losing-it/
So it is not really Nintendo's fault that the IP laws are the way they are.
I understand needing to protect your IP, in some sense, but what I'm getting at is that when a fan game is made, it is a homage to a beloved franchise that fosters love for the IP. If you were a smart company, you would foster this love for your franchise, to entrench the fans you already have, and to gather more fans because you are seen as the company that "does no wrong", which in turn also increases your profits. Imagine if instead of taking these love letters to your franchise down (which makes you look like an absolute fucking ass to most), you made a feature of it on an official channel. Look at Scott Cawthon and his Five Nights at Freddy's franchise. He encourages people to make fan games using his original ideas and that encourages people to not only love his own games, but to go out and start developing their own little games that include ideas that Scott may not have even thought about including before. I guess what I'm trying to say is that there is a good way of protecting your IP by taking down blatant rip offs of your game that want to steal money from your fans, and cause confusion to new fans. Then there is the bad way, which is taking down these passionate love letters to your franchise that encourage others to look at the original source and see why they even decided to take the time to create the fan game in the first place. IF the fan game is trying to monetize, then by all means, send a warning. Tell them to not monetize it, and they are free to continue. If they continue, Cease and Desist. Hopefully that makes sense.
If they would carte blanche allow fan games of their IPs then that would weaken the IPs, which could lead to them loosing the IPs completly. For that it is irrelevant if the games are monetized or not.
Nintendo would need to implement some kind of process for developers of fan games to get them officially licensed. But for that to be effective as a tool to protect the IP they could not just give such a limited fan game license to everyone who request it, so a complex request process with multiple steps would be needed, and they would need to deny lots if not even most of the requests.
And this gets even more complicated when the very complex japan software patent system is added to the mix.
Could Nintendo be less shitty? Oh yes they could, but they decided to go the Cobra Kai way and strike first, strike hard, no merci!
Wait are we arguing that the owner of something isn't entitled more than someone who stole it?
If Nintendo were only showcasing games developed AND published by Nintendo, that might be the argument.
They're not though, some of the games they're showing they didn't develop or publish.
Nintendo says emulation is transformative, that due to the recompiler, it's a new work. Do they have permission from all the rightsholders for third party games to make a transformative work?
Do they even have the permissions from artists who might have licensed their work to Nintendo for X game, but not for the newly emulated 'Y'
FTFY. The problem is not with Nintendo being against emulators because of piracy, they're against emulators even if you own the game and the hardware but want to preserve the hardware (just like they do in the museum).
And if the counter-argument is that you don't own the game when you buy it, then by that same logic you don't steal it when you pirate it.
A) Yes, if you buy a game you don't own the game. Only a license to use the software (in this case the game) was bought. This was, in general, even the case back then when games were sold on cartridges or discs. And it is for sure the case now with digital distribution.
B) Also yes, pirating a game is most of the time not theft but it is still against the law to use a unlicensed copy of any software.
Nintendo has never been against emulation. They've only been against people playing without paying.
Yes they have. They've just recently nuked on the Switch emulator.
And you can bet that if they could, Nintendo would go out of their way to sue any other emulator developer that emulates their games. The only things saving some of those emulators is technicalities like open-source.
I'm not going to check the whole archive, but going back to at least 2005, Nintendo was asking users to ...
https://web.archive.org/web/20051124194318/http://www.nintendo.com/corp/faqs/legal.html
Here's some more quotes from the same page where Nintendo is viciously anti-emulation:
Nintendo's been openly emulating their own games since about that time. IIRC, the SNES Virtual Console on the Wii had code from SNES9X in it.
The distinction (which seems nobody cares about) is that Nintendo's going after copyright infringers. If your emulator doesn't use any of Nintendo's code, they ain't doing shit about it; they're just gonna steal it, if anything.
Somebody has fed you or you have invented bad information. Neither Yuzu nor Ryujinx, the two Switch emulators which recently ceased development due to intervention from Nintendo, included Nintendo's code. The Yuzu settlement required those developers to acknowledge that
There was never any mention of them stealing Nintendo code.
Ryujinx, we know even less about, because the agreement went down privately, but there's literally zero indication of any stolen code. We know that Nintendo contacted the developer proposing that they cease offering Ryujinx and they did.
Obviously, Nintendo was bothered in both of these cases because the emulators do facilitate piracy, but that's not the same as them having infringed on Nintendo's copyright by using their code which you are claiming. Both of these emulators were developed open-source; if they were built using stolen Nintendo code there would be receipts all over the place. That was never the problem.
Yuzu supported unreleased games. To do that required using Nintendo's code, and getting that code through unauthorized channels. Nintendo's code may not have been distributed through Yuzu, but it was used in a way that was not permitted in order to engineer a way to circumvent the copy protection of those games. That was how Nintendo was able to go after them.
Dude why are you digging this hole even deeper. They are going after emulators. That's a proven fact. You can try to handwave it however you wish, but that won't change reality. Nintendo goes after emulators, after modders, after content creators playing those mods. An emulator can play games, that's what it's there for. I don't see how an emulator would work otherwise.
Because the distinction is important. Why do you think Yuzu was shut down but PJ64 still exists?
Because Yuzu emulated the Switch, while PJ64 emulates a long gone platform they don't care about anymore. They'll release a sloppy emulated game on switch for games from that era and call it a day, and get barely any sales. For switch they think that removing an emulator cuts their sale numbers in half which is insane. Nintendo hates community projects in all aspects. They don't want emulators. They don't want mods. They want people to buy their console, go to their store, buy a game from them and end it there. Buying a game from the store and playing on PC is unacceptable for them.
No. PJ64 was around when Nintendo was still actively making money on N64 titles.
PJ64 never got shut down because they made sure to always keep their project legal. Nintendo could never do shit to them, and it's been over 20 years now.
Nintendo couldn't do shit to Ryu either, except overwhelm them with lawsuits.
How much are they paying you to blatantly lie? Just because a corporation has billions to throw at frivolous cases doesn't mean that they're right, it simply means our court systems are fucked beyond repair.
Neither Ryu or any switch emulator has used Nintendo code. One of then simply boasted about a leak which got them in a lot of trouble.
You sure do seen to love a company that hates you. I mean, go try and post a video of you enjoying Mario kart on a switch, see how long it takes for it to be removed. Any game company that cared about its customers would let you have fun.
To be clear, fuck Nintendo, but I wouldn't be surprised in the least bit to find out that Yuzu was using proprietary information to make so much progress so quickly. In fact, I've long assumed that they did. Many details of these suits will never come to light, but it would easily explain how Nintendo was able to take down forks like Suyu so quickly as well, if they can prove that it wasn't clean room reverse engineered.
If you saw any of what I wrote as a defense of Nintendo, then you're not reading.
I kinda get that they'll do whatever than can to shut down an emulator for a console still selling and available on the shelves though. Not that there aren't legitimate cases for it (homebrew software and games), but that's not what Nintendo is concerned about.
But screw that for legacy consoles, game preservation is important too.
If I hadn't downloaded Yuzu and BOTW, Nintendo would've probably missed out on several hundreds euros my brother spent on buying a Switch, several games, controllers and supplies, albeit some of the supplies are 3rd party so Nintendo probably didn't make profit off them.
Piracy definitely increases sales. I would have never bought a Switch in the situation I was in some years back, but having downloaded it and gotten very into it, my brother wanted to as well and he didn't care to pirate, and had actual uses for Switch's properties that you don't get on emulators, like online play and the portability of the console itself.
It's just that it's hard to actually quantify, so the shareholders will prefer to go with enforcement that forces people to buy the games and console than taking a risk on hypotheticals.
Personally, I never bought a Wii U/Switch and played my fair share of games through emulation only.
Because it was being used for piracy. As in, had support in the emulator's code for unreleased games. Nintendo rarely goes after emulator devs that don't use their code.
Supporting unreleased games does not mean they used Nintendo code. The whole point of an emulator is to perfectly reproduce the original system. That means working on any switch game, regardless of whether said game has been released or even thought of. In practice it isn't that simple because they are attempting to replicate a very complex system, so there will usually be patches whenever giant games come out that use the system in different ways. However, that doesn't mean Nintendo code is being used at all.
Right, but Yuzu did, tho. That's how Nintendo shut them down. Yuzu overstepped and handed Nintendo their own noose. They probably would've been just fine if they hadn't given out builds with those tools built-in.
AFAIK the Yuzu accusations of containing code from the Nintendo SDK haven't been proven and also didn't come out until well after Yuzu had already shut down (it was drama surrounding the Suyu "devs" that tried to succeed them). The whole case was about them profiting off of their patreon and optimizing their emulator for a game that hadn't been released yet.
It's not that Yuzu used stolen code, it's that they released updates that optimized for the leaked copies of Tears of the Kingdom, and charged money for it. If they waited to release builds until after the release, or if they had been doing it for free, they probably wouldn't have been shut down. You might think this is a small difference, but it really isn't because having the binary file of a game is not the same as having the code that made the binary. Realistically, if you are good enough at reverse engineering binaries that you can figure out the code well enough to make optimizations for it in the 2 weeks that the game was leaked for before it came out, you are probably getting paid enough that steaking your income on a community-driven emulator would be unthinkable.
Either way, Ryujinx, which didn't profit like Yuzu did (and is written in a completely different programming language from Yuzu, with a completely different set of developers) still got shut down. Nintendo isn't doing it because of stolen code, they're doing it because it's an emulator that exists.
They didn't use any code. Any keys were dumped from an existing Switch. Yuzu got taken down not as a result of a lawsuit, but because of the threat of one. Famously Bleem won their emulator lawsuit from PlayStation, but still went bankrupt anyway, so most emulator projects don't even try to fight any legal battles.
Please stop slobbering over Nintendick.
I'm not defending Nintendo, dude. I'm explaining how they're able to shut down emulators. It's possible to make legal emulators, and Nintendo won't touch them.
Just curious - what size rock do you live under? Is it room sized or as large as a house? How do you decorate? Is it climate controlled?