Comment by apetresc
2 years ago
A private settlement of paying Nintendo $2.4M. How is that not a perfect example of "we all saw how that went"?
2 years ago
A private settlement of paying Nintendo $2.4M. How is that not a perfect example of "we all saw how that went"?
A lot of these settlements involve announcing a fake value of money to be paid as part of the agreement, then agreeing to waive the settlement value if some undisclosed imposed contractual obligations are met.
Arguably this is likely the case with this situation (and nintendo benefits by our not knowing for sure), not that being forced into such an agreement with no trial is not worrisome in itself.
The first part of the sentence is "the DMCA is strongly in favor of copyright holders". Well no that's my point, the DMCA hasn't been used in this case. Nobody knows if the DMCA would have been enough to take down Yuzu because that hasn't been judged.
If you read the lawsuit, Nintendo cited the DMCA laws regarding the breaking of "technological protection measures" extensively. The DMCA is broader than just takedowns.
Even if Yuzu succeeded in overturning the takedown, Nintendo could prevail in the court of law on the merits of the DMCA. Overturning a takedown is easy - just file a counter notice. Expect to be seen in court if you do that, though.
Edit: For the "On the technological protection measures, it hasn't been judged," look at Apple vs Psystar. A case where breaking TPMs came up, which actually was fought to the point of where a SCOTUS appeal was the last step remaining. Psystar was annihilated - and let me tell you, emulating macOS on non-Mac hardware sounds a lot like emulating Video Games on non-Nintendo hardware.
Nintendo can say all they want, they aren't judges.
On the technological protection measures, it hasn't been judged and it's kind of a gray area since Yuzu didn't came with any in it to my knowledge at least.
That's also maybe why the settlement is there.
Edit: for your edit, Psystar wasn't emulating anything, they were actively modifying software. That's closer to a software crack on how it works than emulation.
Apple vs Corelium is closer to the concept since Corelium was emulating the hardware.
Psystar wasn't emulating Mac OS X, they were running native code. They broke it's security measures to allow it to run on non-Apple hardware.
These two cases have very little to do with each other outside of the cryptographic portion.
I was referring to the DMCA takedown process, which is what Nintendo expressly used in this example. The actual lawsuit relies on elements of the DMCA for the case but they didn’t use the takedown procedure.