Don’t get me wrong: Nintendo deserves no sympathy here. They could do many things to make their games more accessible, but they chose not to.
That’s not to say asshats like this deserves any either, though. The homebrew community and emulator developers step in to make Switch software interoperable, and they end up being the ones getting screwed over by both Nintendo and the people who provoked Nintendo.
I don’t normally victim-blame, but streaming an unreleased game is really asking for it.
It’s one thing to pirate a game for yourself. That’s just called being poor or being someone who doesn’t believe in copyright. The only party who can argue they’re being harmed is the developer, who may or may not have received a sale otherwise.
It’s another thing to pirate an unreleased game and stream it for others. If you do that and receive ad revenue or donations, you’re profiting off of someone else’s work. Not only that, but you’re also harming the console modding community by incentivizing the publisher to go after homebrew developers and emulator developers. It wasn’t a coincidence that shortly after some asshat streamed an unreleased Zelda game being played on Yuzu, Nintendo decided to finally come down on the emulator with an iron fist.
In conclusion, between pirating a game to enjoy yourself and pirating a game to play on a for-profit streaming platform, one of those two things is morally gray and the other is someone being a selfish fuck.
It’s pretty disheartening to help someone find old media and they show a giant box of USB sticks and hard drives.
Equally disheartening is knowing that both of those have a shelf-life. Old USB flash drives are more durable than the TLC/QLC cells we use today, but 15 years sitting unpowered in a box doesn’t have very good prospects.
When it comes to compliance and regulations, anything with the literal blast radius of a nuclear reactor should not be trusted to LLM unless double or triple checked by another party familiar with said regulations. Regulations were written in blood, and an LLM hallucinating a safety procedure or operating protocol is a disaster waiting to happen.
I have less qualms about using it for menial paperwork, but if the LLM adds an extra round-trip to a form, it’s not just wasting the submitter’s time, but other people’s as well.
"If you feel like your government is not representing your needs as a citizen, your best course of action would be to vote for a different political party."
I should vote for Democrats?
I'm sorry, I misunderstood your question. If your government is not representing your needs as a citizen, you should contact your local representative. Here is the email address: representative@localhost
More importantly, with what money? Mega corporations can afford to draw out lawsuits until the end of time (or until the judge gets annoyed), but individuals can’t.
> FAA prevents SpaceX from launching more rockets
> Musk guts the FAA
> FAA no longer stopping rockets
> Musk decries nobody will stop other people’s rockets
Unfortunately, it’s not that straightforward anymore. Emulation of modern consoles exists in a legal gray area that may or may not be illegal under the DMCA.
With something like the Switch, the ROMs are encrypted in a way that they can only be unencrypted with keys that are derived from data baked into the console itself. Yuzu for example is still protected as an emulator for some hardware/software platform, but it wouldn’t be able to run retail games without being able to decrypt the ROMs.
And that’s kind of the problem. Creating tools for preservation and interoperability is permitted by the DMCA, but tools that are made in part or whole to bypass DRM measures is explicitly not. That conflict hasn’t been tested in court either, so the first ruling is going to be the one that sets the precedent.
My argument isnt that they’re entitled to crack down on emulation because of piracy. My argument is that people blatantly and publicly using emulators to play pirated, unreleased games emboldens Nintendo.
I believe Nintendo isn’t willing to test that gray area in court without having something to support their anti-emulation position. What they want to do is bully devs into settling because it’s a low-risk way to kill development on the emulator without opening up that can of worms that could make Switch emulators unambiguously legal. But, the more evidence Nintendo gets to support their argument, the more confident they become in thinking they would end up winning if they don’t get that settlement.
Keep in mind that when they did finally go after Yuzu’s devs, they went after them for creating software to circumvent the Switch’s DRM (that gray area I mentioned) and not for creating an emulator. If they were actually confident in thinking the legal answer to “is an emulator that decrypts ROMs illegal” was “yes,” they would’ve just went after Yuzu a long time ago instead of waiting 7 years into the console lifestyle.