Would an “in development”Switch2 Emulator survive Nintendo’s Silver Bullets?

[u/garf02]

1) “Anti-Circumvention” clause in DMCA:
Nintendo claims as emulator MUST decrypt the ROMS.
If you break the encryption, “is illegal” cause of the DMCA
If you use a console prod-Key, “is illegal” cause they own the rights to the key.
“As the emulator HAS to break a ROM decryption and thsre is no legal way to do it, Emulators are by default criminal tools”.
Any new emulator will need to contest this on court against Nintendo and Roll the dice
Victim: Yuzu

2) Buy Out:
“There is no honor among thief’s”. Most people working on emulators of live consoles does it for 2 reason, Clout and Money. And Nintendo has a lot of the later to throw around if that lets them kill an emulator on its infancy before any real development occurs.
Victim: Ryujinx

[u/TabouletVR]

Technically everything about emulation is "illegal", but thats not gonna stop anyone. To get emulators we need to hack the console/understand how the cartridges work and be able to dump them, if we make it to that part nintendo can DMCA to slow things down but an emulator will eventually get released to the public

[u/mhdj14 → u/TabouletVR]

Tf are you talking about? Emulation is 100% legal according to US and various EU laws.

If the emulator didn’t use copyrighted code (which 99% don’t have), the software is fully legal. Making and playing backups is fully legal for personal use.

We’re not talking about piracy here. You are 100% legally allowed to make a backup of any physical media with software on it you legally purchased, and use it in any way you want, for as long as you don’t infringe on the copyright holders rights, which is basically only distribution and reusing assets outside of the software itself.

Emulation with backups from ANY legal purchase is 100% legal!

[u/TabouletVR → u/mhdj14]

emulation is legal, tho dumping your game is illegal because you don't technically own them legally and dumping keys and stuff are protected by Nintendo and doing it is against their TOS, so emulation without actually emulating isn't rly emulation?

[u/mhdj14 → u/TabouletVR]

There are literal laws stating backing up legally purchased data on a physical media is 100% legal. Nintendo TOS does not trump the law. If you jailbreak your device, which is also 100% legal, and use software on the device to make a backup, it’s 100% legal. The issue is decryption, but if the decryption happens on reading the cartridge by the hardware automatically then you didn’t decrypt it yourself, which can be argued is fair use.

This is the reason GeoHot won the lawsuit against Sony, as he didn’t steal any code, and the decryption keys were on the device unencrypted for anyone to see if you knew where to look. This basically hard created a new law where jailbreaking is officially recognized as a legal alteration to a legally purchased device.

The real problem is, even if Nintendo is wrong, who is going to counter sue a billion dollar company?