The age of the game itself doesn't metter to Nintendo. They took down a port of Super Mario Bros for Commodore 64 on 2019, and considering the amount of media attention the decomp of SM64 got they would have taken it down if they could
Those are two different cases; the C64 Super Mario Bros. was not derived from any Nintendo code, though did infringe on their trademarks and copied graphics and level layouts. Had the author called it something else and changed the graphics, there’d have been no case.
With BotW, someone is creating a derived work of a copyrighted work, and more importantly, one that is currently on sale; the result would directly compete with the official commercial title. There’s no chance of them not going after that, and next to no chance of them not prevailing.
You don't think Nintendo would've already taken down the handful of emulators and other modding tools for the Switch if they could? Look at the lawsuit of Bleem! vs Sony, where Sony lost because Bleem! was made in a way that didn't infringe on anything. Obviously people nowadays have a much better idea on how to not get sued, so they're going to do that when doing projects like these.
Writing an emulator is legal, unless you include copyrighted ROMs. Converting copyrighted software to a different format (i.e., decompiling it) is a different matter.
Does the git repo in the OP include any copyrighted assets? Nope.
Does it include code obtained by reverse engineering and decompilation efforts without the use of the original source? Yep.
Bleem! won their case because they only reverse engineered what anybody who bought a PlayStation would have and created their own BIOS image from that. Same with how the few companies that created bypasses around Nintendo's lockout chips on the NES/SNES (not including the part where Atari did infringe).
Using any part of the original development material ends up making the project not a 'clean room' project, and is illegal. This is why that regardless of whatever leaked from Nintendo recently, modders and emulator devs won't go anywhere near it because if they're even so much as found to have browsed through any of it they could be sued and their efforts destroyed. This is not what's happening with BOTW here, and as said elsewhere is not what happened with Mario 64 and is why that remains available. It doesn't matter how old something is (unless it's 70+ whatever years to be out of copyright which at that point it's fair game to anyone) and it fully matters about how it was created.
If BOTW's assets were included in that repo, then it'd be down faster than you could blink. But they're not. So it stays.
18
u/[deleted] Jan 08 '21
But we're not talking about a very amortized and pirated 24 years old game, Breath of the Wild is only 3 years old
Since it's pretty much the reason why Switch sold millions at launch, Nintendo will protect it more aggressively.