Yuzu knew, that's why they made an LLC to eat the cost and to bankrupt

Becoming a Nintendo developer and using their SDK is free. It's just the hardware that costs money.

There's no legal precedent, it was settled out of court

The repository removal was voluntary and done by the Yuzu team. GitHub doesn't have to do anything and won't do anything. Even when they receive a DMCA takedown, they only block forks made through GitHub's "fork" button.

Oh there will be forks across the git-verse. There's no way there wouldn't be.

Also does this create precedent? - they settled, its not like it actually went to court.

There isn't a legal precedent. Unless I misunderstood, this is a settlement and settlements aren't! Legal precedent. Which is why big e.g. pharma likes them, because then they don't have the legal precedent for the next case.

It would be better to "git clone" a repo under threat of removal than fork it in Github. That way an entire copy of its history is preserved. It's possible the forks still exist for now, even if Yuzu removes their official repo, but if Nintendo serves Github the legal paperwork then the forks will get blasted.

That said if someone clones the repo, they probably ought to think twice before putting it back in the cloud without sanitizing / reconstructing the branches & history absent of the bits that got Yuzu into trouble in the first place.

It would be possible to create a dummy "salt" commit and rebase every the branch onto it. The content would effectively be the same, but each commit hash would differ.

It may have also been the fact that they linked to instruction on how to rip prod.keys and system firmwares. Also their instructions on enabling running copyrighted ROMs - despite the fact that Ripping game ROMs and firmware is not (unfortunately arguably, due to licencing models and jurisdiction - you will own nothing and like it.) illegal so long as it's for personal use.

They should've advertised it primarily as a testing and homebrew platform, and made sure not to make too much mention of the fact it can be used to play backups. Then they can at least play the ignorance card with more confidence.

Even then though, multi-billion yen company Nintendo probably would still pull this shit and drag, drag, drag the lawsuit out for forever and a day- draining lawyers fees of money. That being the case, settling is unfortunately the only option.

I do wonder if this is specifically what got them, would probably take a lemmy lawyer to unpack it, but I would have to imagine if they didn't have a patreon and basically a company, it would have been much harder for Nintendo to do anything about them. And I would also imagine in retrospect whatever money they got was not worth it when it ends like this.

I always assume when people operate services like this, that they host it in a country like Russia that's less likely to care about takedowns by western corpos and done anonymously as possible. Even though it's just an emulator, you would think they wouldn't be so brazen as to have a patreon which I'm sure requires someone's identity/billing info. They probably still could have been tracked down if they took crypto donations or something like that, but you would think that would be the first choice over putting a giant target on their backs. Patreon is obviously just gonna hand over whatever info they are asked to give when served a warrent, and so is Discord for that matter if they had any personal info on there too.

I think the difference with Dolphin is that it now emulates an extinct system(s), so it cannot possibly compete with the actual thing. They did have a close call last year, if I remember, and they pretty quickly went into "jettison all illegal shit out of the code base NOW." -mode.

Tbh I think they were smart to incorporate. It might have drawn a larger target on their backs (though patreon's target probably dwarfed it), but it also meant that individually they were financially protected from Nintendo. They'll probably still have to pay Nintendo whatever their corporation currently has even if they declare bankruptcy, but at least the devs aren't having their wages garnished until the end of time.

If they do attempt to declare bankruptcy, let's hope Nintendo doesn't try and sue them again to pierce the corporate veil.

Nintendo has too much money anyways

Yuzu claims to have earned 30k from patreon, where they give their most recent builds with the most bug-fixes & optimizations.

The switch has been out for 7 years. Most they could've earned then would be 210k, and even doubling it wouldn't get close to 2 million

Likely not even close to that amount.