The latest Nintendo Switch piracy lawsuit has officially come to a close, which will provide Nintendo of America with $4.5 million in damages. We previously heard that James Williams, also known as Archbox, was in hot water over selling pirated titles. The lawsuit said Williams “engaged in the infringing and unlawful reproduction and distribution of hundreds or thousands of copyrighted...
  • missingno@fedia.io
    35·
    17 days ago

    The article says he wasn’t just distributing pirated games, he was selling them, and was running a pretty large network of sites for it.

    Regardless of how you feel about Nintendo, regardless of how you feel about what the law currently says, this is a pretty clear cut case of fucking around and finding out.

    • danAEnglish
      7·
      16 days ago

      This is the major reason Yuzu’s developers were sued by Nintendo. The lawsuit barely touched on the emulation aspect, as emulation itself is legal as long as it’s developed using clean room techniques. Instead, the lawsuit’s focus was that:

      • The developers were making a lot of money off it. IIRC their Patreon received several thousand dollars per month.
      • They ran pirated games themselves, demonstrated by them posting screenshots of a leaked build of Tears of the Kingdom running in Yuzu (obviously pirated as there was no official release yet)
      • They helped users extract the encryption key from their Switch consoles - this is the part that actually violates DMCA

      There was some discussion about Yuzu being able to decrypt games given the encryption key, as bypassing encryption violates the DMCA. That’s easily avoidable by requiring users to provide decrypted ROMs, and not providing decryption instructions (users have to figure it out themselves). This was the approach taken by 3DS emulators for example.