Nintendo goes to war against emulators and pirates over Tears of the Kingdom Leak
Nintendo goes to war against emulators and pirates over Tears of the Kingdom Leak
by Commercial-Let-3927
34 Comments
Nearby-Tumbleweed-88
I wonder if they’ll go after news sites like Kotaku who have clearly pirated it so they could “report” on it.
UnWiseDefenses
I’m so tired of these clickbait headlines. I am NOT a fan of how Nintendo treats its community, but they are making it sound like Nintendo is paving the road for making all emulators and emulation illegal, which is not the case.
Rand_Altreides
“company that invented a thing is going after people that shamelessly stole that thing” what a shocker. And before anyone starts at the tired old shit, no this has nothing to do with PrEsErVaTiOn if the game hasn’t even come out yet.
AlteredStateReality
~~The console was built off a flavour of Linux, which is the greatest form of open -source software. You run the risk of emulators when going this path. Not that I am choosing a side, just pointing this out.~~
Nintendo fully built its OS. The more you know.
[deleted]
[deleted]
froggyjm9
Good for them.
BCProgramming
So, just as a summary of this.
“Lockpick” is a tool that you can install on a hacked switch which uses brute force algorithms and a few similar techniques to figure out a variety of encryption keys that are on the switch device.
The tool is useful for emulation because emulators require those keys in order to run retail titles.
The repository received a DMCA takedown from Nintendo. It’s unlikely that it can be fought, because because reverse engineering and brute forcing encryption keys used to protect intellectual property is quite clearly a violation of the DMCA. A number of forks, unsurprisingly, also got taken down.
Emulators themselves aren’t directly affected. As they do not contain code that violates the DMCA.
After the Lockpick takedown, An experimental Android Switch emulator decided to cease development, “due to legal concerns”. Though they received no takedown or legal documentation from Nintendo, so the “legal concerns” really shouldn’t be any different than before.
Saying this is “Nintendo going to war” against emulators is very much misleading, because they haven’t actually done anything that actually affects emulators directly. It affects the tools used to extract cryptography keys from switch devices.
if Nintendo was “going to war” we’d know. They’d be doing a lot more than taking down one little switch tool, that’s for sure.
Keeko_ca
I mean, all for emulation when there’s no other way, so to speak. But when people push the practice to leaking their Summer hit weeks in advance, WTF do you expect them to do?
SouthUniform7
Isn’t the common argument that buying the game digitally or physically legally means you own your own license key? People also say that buying the cartridge means you permanently legally own that copy of the binary code of the games’s version 1.0.0 that’s permanently etched onto the cartridge. I can’t confirm this but this is just usually the argument I hear, it may or may not be the case.
But if (and only if) that conjecture is true, then wouldn’t you would legally be fully allowed to do anything (other than redistributing) that you want with your own legally owned license keys or copy of the binary code scraped from the cartridge?
So like the GitHub projects that were taken down, if (and only if) they don’t use nintendo code to do it, they could be perfectly legal to scrape the binary off the cartridge as well as the license key that you bought the right to use as in the EULA of the game.
Idk if they used nintendo code or not, but if they didn’t then I’m confused what justification nintendo used to say the projects violated copyright. Of course if they did use nintendo code then that’s redistributing copyrighted code from nintendo, but otherwise nintendo wouldn’t own any part of those projects thus there wouldn’t be any copyrighted material in either of the projects.
And then the projects wouldn’t have any copyrighted code, and the users according to the EULA would technically OWN their license keys AND a copy of the binary code of version 1.0.0. Meaning that the git repos and projects to scrape the binary code and license keys would be legal due to no copyrighted code, AND the users would be fully allowed to scrape the keys and cartridge’s binary code.
Right? Or is there something I’m like very confused on.
And granted, I haven’t read the EULA and never claimed to, I just made conjectures about what would be the case IF the EULA says users own the license keys when they purchase the game, which is how I IMAGINE most license key purchases operate. If the EULA says users don’t own the keys, then even if lockpick doesn’t use Nintendo asset code it still can’t be used even if the project itself isn’t illegal.
Digibutter64
Good. Stealing is never a good thing. I say throw them in jail.
Jonmordi
Well, maybe if Nintendo could give us a console that can actually run their games at playable framerates, I wouldn’t have to consider pirating their games. I played botw on a switch, and it could barely hold 25 fps. I downloaded it on my pc years later and played again at 1440p 120 fps and had a significantly better experience. When pirating yields a better experience, the company is at fault, in my opinion. Imagine if Nintendo just released their games on other platforms, so the people who don’t want to buy a dedicated “Nintendo device” could still play their games without the need for pirating/emulating.
raphanum
Hasn’t it been established that people that pirate a game were likely never gonna buy it in the first place? Therefore, no lost revenue.
UltramanOrigin
Good
Morricorne
We will se. What you people say. When they decide to close eshop for Nintendo Switch . When new switch is out. Remember Nintendo DS/3ds shop?
Emulators are bad , blah, blah blah.
Nintendo don’t want my money for older games. Fine i emulate what i want.
fuzzynavel34
It’s a battle they are never going to win lol
Censorship_of_fools
Blah blah blah. Street date system needs to go.
je1992
Great thing about piracy is that the assholes at nintendo can and will never win.
Lockpicks repository has already been rehosted elsewhere.
The emulator was simply removed from the play store, any half wit dummy can find an apk online.
Piracy is irreversible. You kill one piracy website, 20 spruce back in it’s ashes.
globehound
This better not affect my Steam Deck enjoyment.
94CM
Lol. Good luck Nintendo.
^(They may win some battles, but they) *^(will)* ^(lose the war.)
OGMagicConch
> We knew that the Tears of the Kingdom leak was going to set the internet on fire, and boy did it ever. It’s now available for download in the darkest corners of the web, and the pirates are having a field day with it.
> > darkest corners of the web
My editor in Christ, it’s on MegaUpload
DonnyDerecho
Unpopular opinion, Nintendo deserves to get paid just like every other game studio people are pirating from.
CYEHERE
The leaker(s) is obviously an employee of Nintendo
pwnage765
As they should. It’s one thing to emulate old stuff that you can’t get anymore, but it’s another thing when it’s a new release on a still supported console. “Oh, but emulation is completely legal!” Oh yeah, I’m sure everyone is backing up their own legally obtained copies of TotK, ffs. I swear, none of the people defending this crap care about emulation or game preservation, they just want to justify getting crap for free because they’re just that entitled.
Gogo726
Streamers aren’t the brightest bunch, are they? Gee, I wonder what happens if I stream this highly anticipated game that isn’t out yet using a pirated copy.
witwebolte41
Y’all brought this on yourselves
Derpikyu
Nintendo once again can legally not go after emulators, regardless of what they want
JollyFault546
Tbh, I’m against emulators for the most part. Old games you can’t really get anymore? Fine. Fair. Games on sale or available otherwise? That’s wrong.
Strawberrychampion
I think it was stupid to leak one of the biggest most anticipated game before it comes out.
linuxares
There is more news that this isnt Nintendo but possibly a troll taking down stuff in Nintendo’s name.
Lockpick is legal even if Nintendo doesn’t like it / allow it. Nintendo doesn’t own it and it can’t file a patent for a code library it hasn’t created… In their pursuit against piracy, Nintendo has become the most stupid horse from the entire stables. No one can take Nintendo seriously anymore.
stephyforepphy
Maybe if the hardware they charge 400 dollars for could run their own games at 60 fps a la every other modern gen system people wouldn’t be inclined to try to play retail titles on their pcs
jdemack
If I have to pay, I hope everyone stealing gets their consoles bricked.
69deathflame410
Why would anyone want to pirate games, though?
Just get physical copies, so that you can trade it in in the future, or maybe it becomes a collectible, like how NES games are worth hundreds, if not thousands, now.
Thombias
I keep wondering what’s even to point of emulating recent games on consoles that are readily available? Like, isn’t the whole point of emulation to make games long lost on discontinued hardware easily accessible for everyone to play?
I seriously don’t get it and i have no sympathy towards any Switch Emulator developers, they brought these DMCA takedowns and legal action upon themselves. Should’ve sticked to older hardware that Nintendo or any other console maker no longer officially sells or even cares about. I am totally behind Wii U, 3DS, Xbox 360 and PS3 emulation because you can no longer get those systems in stores, but anything past that? Hell no.
34 Comments
I wonder if they’ll go after news sites like Kotaku who have clearly pirated it so they could “report” on it.
I’m so tired of these clickbait headlines. I am NOT a fan of how Nintendo treats its community, but they are making it sound like Nintendo is paving the road for making all emulators and emulation illegal, which is not the case.
“company that invented a thing is going after people that shamelessly stole that thing” what a shocker. And before anyone starts at the tired old shit, no this has nothing to do with PrEsErVaTiOn if the game hasn’t even come out yet.
~~The console was built off a flavour of Linux, which is the greatest form of open -source software. You run the risk of emulators when going this path. Not that I am choosing a side, just pointing this out.~~
Nintendo fully built its OS. The more you know.
[deleted]
Good for them.
So, just as a summary of this.
“Lockpick” is a tool that you can install on a hacked switch which uses brute force algorithms and a few similar techniques to figure out a variety of encryption keys that are on the switch device.
The tool is useful for emulation because emulators require those keys in order to run retail titles.
The repository received a DMCA takedown from Nintendo. It’s unlikely that it can be fought, because because reverse engineering and brute forcing encryption keys used to protect intellectual property is quite clearly a violation of the DMCA. A number of forks, unsurprisingly, also got taken down.
Emulators themselves aren’t directly affected. As they do not contain code that violates the DMCA.
After the Lockpick takedown, An experimental Android Switch emulator decided to cease development, “due to legal concerns”. Though they received no takedown or legal documentation from Nintendo, so the “legal concerns” really shouldn’t be any different than before.
Saying this is “Nintendo going to war” against emulators is very much misleading, because they haven’t actually done anything that actually affects emulators directly. It affects the tools used to extract cryptography keys from switch devices.
if Nintendo was “going to war” we’d know. They’d be doing a lot more than taking down one little switch tool, that’s for sure.
I mean, all for emulation when there’s no other way, so to speak. But when people push the practice to leaking their Summer hit weeks in advance, WTF do you expect them to do?
Isn’t the common argument that buying the game digitally or physically legally means you own your own license key? People also say that buying the cartridge means you permanently legally own that copy of the binary code of the games’s version 1.0.0 that’s permanently etched onto the cartridge. I can’t confirm this but this is just usually the argument I hear, it may or may not be the case.
But if (and only if) that conjecture is true, then wouldn’t you would legally be fully allowed to do anything (other than redistributing) that you want with your own legally owned license keys or copy of the binary code scraped from the cartridge?
So like the GitHub projects that were taken down, if (and only if) they don’t use nintendo code to do it, they could be perfectly legal to scrape the binary off the cartridge as well as the license key that you bought the right to use as in the EULA of the game.
Idk if they used nintendo code or not, but if they didn’t then I’m confused what justification nintendo used to say the projects violated copyright. Of course if they did use nintendo code then that’s redistributing copyrighted code from nintendo, but otherwise nintendo wouldn’t own any part of those projects thus there wouldn’t be any copyrighted material in either of the projects.
And then the projects wouldn’t have any copyrighted code, and the users according to the EULA would technically OWN their license keys AND a copy of the binary code of version 1.0.0. Meaning that the git repos and projects to scrape the binary code and license keys would be legal due to no copyrighted code, AND the users would be fully allowed to scrape the keys and cartridge’s binary code.
Right? Or is there something I’m like very confused on.
And granted, I haven’t read the EULA and never claimed to, I just made conjectures about what would be the case IF the EULA says users own the license keys when they purchase the game, which is how I IMAGINE most license key purchases operate. If the EULA says users don’t own the keys, then even if lockpick doesn’t use Nintendo asset code it still can’t be used even if the project itself isn’t illegal.
Good. Stealing is never a good thing. I say throw them in jail.
Well, maybe if Nintendo could give us a console that can actually run their games at playable framerates, I wouldn’t have to consider pirating their games. I played botw on a switch, and it could barely hold 25 fps. I downloaded it on my pc years later and played again at 1440p 120 fps and had a significantly better experience. When pirating yields a better experience, the company is at fault, in my opinion. Imagine if Nintendo just released their games on other platforms, so the people who don’t want to buy a dedicated “Nintendo device” could still play their games without the need for pirating/emulating.
Hasn’t it been established that people that pirate a game were likely never gonna buy it in the first place? Therefore, no lost revenue.
Good
We will se. What you people say. When they decide to close eshop for Nintendo Switch . When new switch is out. Remember Nintendo DS/3ds shop?
Emulators are bad , blah, blah blah.
Nintendo don’t want my money for older games. Fine i emulate what i want.
It’s a battle they are never going to win lol
Blah blah blah. Street date system needs to go.
Great thing about piracy is that the assholes at nintendo can and will never win.
Lockpicks repository has already been rehosted elsewhere.
The emulator was simply removed from the play store, any half wit dummy can find an apk online.
Piracy is irreversible. You kill one piracy website, 20 spruce back in it’s ashes.
This better not affect my Steam Deck enjoyment.
Lol. Good luck Nintendo.
^(They may win some battles, but they) *^(will)* ^(lose the war.)
> We knew that the Tears of the Kingdom leak was going to set the internet on fire, and boy did it ever. It’s now available for download in the darkest corners of the web, and the pirates are having a field day with it.
> > darkest corners of the web
My editor in Christ, it’s on MegaUpload
Unpopular opinion, Nintendo deserves to get paid just like every other game studio people are pirating from.
The leaker(s) is obviously an employee of Nintendo
As they should. It’s one thing to emulate old stuff that you can’t get anymore, but it’s another thing when it’s a new release on a still supported console. “Oh, but emulation is completely legal!” Oh yeah, I’m sure everyone is backing up their own legally obtained copies of TotK, ffs. I swear, none of the people defending this crap care about emulation or game preservation, they just want to justify getting crap for free because they’re just that entitled.
Streamers aren’t the brightest bunch, are they? Gee, I wonder what happens if I stream this highly anticipated game that isn’t out yet using a pirated copy.
Y’all brought this on yourselves
Nintendo once again can legally not go after emulators, regardless of what they want
Tbh, I’m against emulators for the most part. Old games you can’t really get anymore? Fine. Fair. Games on sale or available otherwise? That’s wrong.
I think it was stupid to leak one of the biggest most anticipated game before it comes out.
There is more news that this isnt Nintendo but possibly a troll taking down stuff in Nintendo’s name.
https://twitter.com/ItsSimonTime/status/1655724075376058369
Lockpick is legal even if Nintendo doesn’t like it / allow it. Nintendo doesn’t own it and it can’t file a patent for a code library it hasn’t created… In their pursuit against piracy, Nintendo has become the most stupid horse from the entire stables. No one can take Nintendo seriously anymore.
Maybe if the hardware they charge 400 dollars for could run their own games at 60 fps a la every other modern gen system people wouldn’t be inclined to try to play retail titles on their pcs
If I have to pay, I hope everyone stealing gets their consoles bricked.
Why would anyone want to pirate games, though?
Just get physical copies, so that you can trade it in in the future, or maybe it becomes a collectible, like how NES games are worth hundreds, if not thousands, now.
I keep wondering what’s even to point of emulating recent games on consoles that are readily available? Like, isn’t the whole point of emulation to make games long lost on discontinued hardware easily accessible for everyone to play?
I seriously don’t get it and i have no sympathy towards any Switch Emulator developers, they brought these DMCA takedowns and legal action upon themselves. Should’ve sticked to older hardware that Nintendo or any other console maker no longer officially sells or even cares about. I am totally behind Wii U, 3DS, Xbox 360 and PS3 emulation because you can no longer get those systems in stores, but anything past that? Hell no.