this post was submitted on 04 Mar 2024
646 points (98.2% liked)
Technology
59374 readers
3463 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
AFAIK settlements can't be used as precedent. IANAL tho.
Maybe precedent isn't the right term, I worry a statement from an emulator author basically saying "emulators are DRM circumvention devices", could be used as evidence in future though?
Lawyer here, and generally no. At best, the judgment could be persuasive to other courts in the First Circuit--and of course that's what Nintendo wants, hence the effort to craft language that could be easily ported to other sympathetic courts--but the legal theory is absolutely not binding on other parties until/unless the finding/rationale is adopted by a higher court.
Do you think it's possible that Nintendo is having the devs agree to that statement is a way for them to prevent others from forking Yuzu and continuing development? If someone stripped out the ROM decryption code, it would be harder to claim the fork falls under 17 U.S.C. 1201 as a circumvention tool. By having the original creators state it is, would it open up derivative works to being classified as one in future lawsuits regardless of whether it still contains the questionable code?
It's already a tragedy if original developers will no longer work on it. They also worked on citra. Generally speaking, I think human resource is crucial and emu devs aren't doing enough to protect themselves.
It'd feel a bit gross if so, considering they were coerced in to saying it by the terms of the settlement.