from the nintendon’t dept
And here we go. Fresh after Nintendo got a pie in its face when, by intent or by confused retailers, Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom leaked early, you just knew that the company would completely wig out. At first the company took the sort of useless actions it always takes in the face of leaks: DMCA the leaks, DMCA the listings for the game, and DMCA to hell anyone that streamed any content from the unreleased game. That’s the normal playbook, despite none of it really working all that well. Once the leak is out, it’s out and bottling up the leak on the internet is an exercise in futility.
But I didn’t necessarily think that the leak of this particular game would lead Nintendo into war with every possible component of Switch emulation and the tools used to pull it off.
Simon Aarons maintained a forked repository of Lockpick, a tool (along with Lockpick_RCM) that grabbed the encryption keys from a Nintendo Switch and allowed it to run officially licensed games. Aarons tweeted on Thursday night that Nintendo had issued DMCA takedown requests to GitHub, asking Lockpick, Lockpick_RCM, and nearly 80 forks and derivations to be taken down under section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which largely makes illegal the circumvention of technological protection measures that safeguard copyrighted material.
Seeing Nintendo’s move on Lockpick, a popular Switch emulator on Android, Skyline, called it quits over the weekend, at least as a public-facing tool you can easily download to your phone. In a Discord post[Edit, 5pm Eastern: Previously described as removed, but now linked], developer “Mark” wrote that “the risks associated with a potential legal case are too high for us to ignore, and we cannot continue knowing that we may be in violation of copyright law.”
These are tools. They are not files or software that directly infringe Nintendo’s copyright. They may violate section 1201, but that’s different than saying these tools directly infringe anyone’s copyright. Instead, for instance, they allow a Switch owner to emulate their Switch on a PC to play games he or she legally owns. That may violate anti-circumvention, but not copyright. To that point, Skyline has already stated that it believed its tool was legal for that reason… but has voluntarily shut itself down anyway out of fear.
And just with its prior DMCA efforts to bottle up the initial leak, there is very little Nintendo is going to get out of all this.
Every time Nintendo clamps down on the tools used to enable piracy, it also disrupts the ecosystems that produce Linux installations, homebrew games and tools, and emulators for legally purchased games. That said, Tears of the Kingdom is rather easy to find online at the moment, as are exhaustive guides to getting the game running in PC emulation tools. The cat seems entirely out of the bag, but this cat also requires hours of effort to get running smoothly on even the most upgraded PC and requires lots of downloads from sites that push ad blockers to their limits.
In other words, Nintendo is tossing some minor roadblocks in the way for those who would want to pirate the game to begin with. All while kneecapping the homebrew Switch scene that it clearly doesn’t care about.
Wouldn’t it be more productive to treat its fans better and build up some loyalty with the public?
Filed Under: dmca, dmca 1201, emulation, nintendo switch, switch, zelda
Companies: nintendo
