2nd July 2024, 9:34 AM
ABF, it doesn't matter if it's legal or not. In the real world, Nintendo is a giant corporation willing to spend as much money as it takes, and these modders are only individuals making a simple living wage. In America, there is no protection clause that states the loser must pay the winner's legal fees, so the poor effectively can only fight in court until they're out of money. That's what Sony did to Bleem back in the day too, if you recall. They simply kept the lawsuit going and appealed and appealed until the smaller Bleem company went bankrupt.
That's what Nintendo has been doing for the past decade. They are suing modders and fan game makers and emulator makers, not for a legal remedy, but make them stop by threat of financial ruin. If you see "settled out of court" in a lot of these cases, that's exactly what was happening. The Switch emulator case is an outlier, where they stopped work on the emulator because they made the rather stupid decision to ALSO directly promote piracy of Switch games and provide links and so on on their chat server.
That's what Nintendo has been doing for the past decade. They are suing modders and fan game makers and emulator makers, not for a legal remedy, but make them stop by threat of financial ruin. If you see "settled out of court" in a lot of these cases, that's exactly what was happening. The Switch emulator case is an outlier, where they stopped work on the emulator because they made the rather stupid decision to ALSO directly promote piracy of Switch games and provide links and so on on their chat server.
"On two occasions, I have been asked [by members of Parliament], 'Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?' I am not able to rightly apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question." ~ Charles Babbage (1791-1871)