Isnt this just setting a precedent.

Not a legal precident, it was settled which means there was no ruling.

It's good news in the sense that this won't be setting a new legal precedent surrounding emulation. Nintendo's case argued that the means by which cryptographic keys were obtained was in violation of the DMCA, which is an untested angle that could have dire legal ramifications for many other emulators if it were upheld in court.

On top of this, the Yuzu devs were a bit too brazen with their attitude towards piracy, and after consulting their lawyers they must have realized they have no legal ground to stand on. Any other emulator that runs a tighter ship in regard to copyrighted material (like most do) wouldn't be in such trouble. Nintendo wouldn't have a case with almost all other emulators, Yuzu in particular was giving them a lot to work with.

Nintendo had a clear path to victory in this case, it wasn't a new idea that needed to be tested in court.

The yuzu devs really fucked up by adding in decryption to it. Without that, the emulator was totally safe, and likely why nintendo didn't try and do this years ago.

If you're making an emulator, or anything dealing with copywritten work. Don't add things that break the copyright protection, nintendo can come for you then. It's that simple.

2.4 mil to settle, or paying your lawyers potentially for years to fight the lawsuit and maybe lose?

It’s because Yuzu was profiting off of their development with a Patreon. Keep emulators FOSS and there’s no profits to claim.

Also, because it’s a settlement and not a ruling, it’s not setting a precedent for future lawsuits. Courts historically put a lot of weight on legal precedent, to help make rulings consistent. If one court interprets a new case in a certain way, similar cases in the future will likely look to that first case’s ruling for guidance.

So if one ruling had decided that emulation is illegal, then subsequent lawsuits would have been much much easier for Nintendo. Because Nintendo could basically argue “we already proved emulation is illegal in that previous case, so now we don’t need to do that part again.”

I mean, small developers who set up a money-making pateron based on an emulator for a currently sold system, without providing a way to pull your own system info or games from carts (and is therefore heavily reliant on piracy of things currently being sold by the parent company to run) is basically screwed, but this isn't news, and pretty much every other emu dev would run away screaming from such a setup.

They really put themselves in this boat, but since that money-making pateron is a thing, they're probably wiping those tears with dollar bills.

Nintendo went after a emu dev team that was actively (and demonstratively) enabling piracy for something they are currently selling. On top of that, the dev team is making significant money off of that work, to the tune of 30k/mo. Every other dev is probably thinking "finally, the other shoe drops on this obvious outcome", most avoid making money off it, and also avoid current systems, both for just this reason. The relieving part is Nintendo's argument isn't about the emulator specifically, there's nothing in the injunction stopping yuzu from continuing, and a settlement means no legal precedent.

Edit: Read more, the settlement includes stopping development.

My thoughts too, quite the opposite.

got $2.4 millions out of it

Did they really? I doubt their LLC had that much money. But honestly I don't even know what or how much money they would have there, I guess it was used for the webpage and similar, maybe pay themselves from the Patreon... but I guess that would be gone monthly... Idk.... Maybe they rented some office space??? Idk...

They will declare it bankrupt and that's the end of it....and unless they owned something with it which I doubt there isn't much assets if any to give Nintendo or sell.

Someone mentioned this on Reddit, but I wonder how poorly discovery would have gone for Yuzu if the lawsuit had continued.

I can't imagine they were super careful about not bringing up the piracy side of things in various internal and even external communications. I can't help but wonder if they basically talked about or even bragged about how much money they get from adding support for games like TotK.

This is bad.

Interesting. Wonder what that means in terms of github. Yuzu isn't technically distributing the source, is Nintendo taking ownership of it? What stops someone from forking the repo? Who is "yuzu" that's paying this bill?

I believe they take subscriptions for early release builds of the emulator.

Nowhere? They will be bankrupt and shutdown the LLC. Whatever their LLC accounts has will go to Nintendo, and any other asset the same. But I doubt they had pretty much anything, maybe the latest Patreon payment and maybe some extra money to pay websites and maybe any office or similar if they rented anything.

Already gone.

Yes.