Just last week, on Tuesday, February 26th, 2024, news broke out about the Yuzu emulator team being sued by none other than Nintendo themselves, with Nintendo claiming that the emulator apparently allowed users to play certain games early (due to street dates being broken) and also allowing...
Not really. I run a smaller emulation project (based out of Canada and have paid my fair share in preemptive lawyers who have all told me despite taking literally zero donations, the not for profit I set up can be can be sued for $$$ per player/download I get
Well yeah but the existence of a not-for-profit means that there's some kind of benefit being provided to some class of people. If someone elses IP is involved in that and you're not paying for it then they might give you a cease and desist even if there's no money.
I don't care very much. You're the one telling the story but not providing any information.
The existence of a not-for-profit implies there's some value somewhere. If there's no value then you don't need the structure.
Tell any lawyer or CPA that you have a not-for-profit involved in intellectual property infringement and they will tell you the NFP is liable on that basis.
Thanks again for your inaccurate comment. I'm not sure why you insist on telling me to ask lawyers about things I literally said I paid lawyers for in my parent comment.
I've talked with lawyers who helped me navigate the subject, and spent over 1,000$ in fees to do so. What you said again, is false. Having a not for profit means neither myself nor my contributors can be easily punished directly for our work (excluding some logic about piercing the corporate veil, which is highly unlikely). The whole idea of legal entities is so they can take the legal risk and fall for risky business activities. The not for profit may fold and go bankrupt if sued, but that outcome is hundreds of times better than me being personally sued.
It's how legality in regards to something like emulators works. Emulation is not illegal, but profiteering from games being ripped and played without a legal license is. Which Yuzu did.
No, that's also not how it works. Reverse engineering and making a profit from your clone is legal. Breaking DRM for compatibility reasons is in fact exempted and legal too. Nintendos argument is that they broke DRM for piracy, but the tools can still be legal and legal precedence supports that
Bleem was also paid software. I think people are forgetting that, at the time, downloading software over the Internet wasn’t super common. Software was distributed with discs. In a box. At the store. Which sold things. For money.