this post was submitted on 04 Mar 2025
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What gives them the right to take down emulators? It's just code someone wrote that happens to be able to interpret bytes from a switch cartridge?
Why wouldn't they take down a company like analogue for example for making a hardware level gameboy emulator?
Just legal bullying. Good luck fighting an army of lawyers that are also lobbying the system. That being said all of that would be civil suits so if emulator creators don't earn money they don't have much to lose but the ability to continue the work.
Nintendo got one guy's paychecks garnished for the rest of his life. So even if you have no money there is a lot to lose.
They threaten a crap ton to scare devs into not entering court, but tbf I'm pretty sure the guy they got was for actual piracy, and the court ordered the millions in alleged damages to be paid in $40 installments to Nintendo per month for the rest of his life.
Edit:
It was set at 20-30% of his salary so yeah I guess that's still a pretty hefty chunk of change.
The patents on the Game Boy hardware expired years ago, so that's what gives Analogue the right to do what they do. As for these Switch emulators, I have no idea, but I'll guess it's just Nintendo trying to scare people without their own legal departments into complying.
IIRC, part of the argument is that Switch games are encrypted, and the emulator uses real Switch keys to read the games. So Nintendo claims that by using official Nintendo Switch keys, it is violating Nintendo’s copyright and is subject to DMCA claims.
The argument is shaky at best. But the problem with DMCA is that combating it actually requires taking the claimant to court. So that’s a prohibitively long and difficult process, just to be able to go “hey Nintendo doesn’t actually have any claim here. Restore my repo.” Especially when Nintendo has a known history of drawing out long legal battles to exhaust defendants’ time+resources.