Nintendo Switch emulator, Yuzu, developers settling lawsuit from Nintendo with $2.4M payout, handing over its domains, and agreeing "Yuzu [is] primarily designed to circumvent [DRM]".
They are asking a federal judge to say yes to this, specifically:
Developing or distributing software, including Yuzu, that in its ordinary course functions only when cryptographic keys are integrated without authorization, violates the Digital Millennium Copyright Act’s prohibition on trafficking in devices that circumvent effective technological measures, because the software is primarily designed for the purpose of circumventing technological measures.
So I think they're definitely intending to set precedent with this case, though this settlement hasn't been accepted by the court yet.
Maybe precedent isn't the right term, I worry a statement from an emulator author basically saying "emulators are DRM circumvention devices", could be used as evidence in future though?
Lawyer here, and generally no. At best, the judgment could be persuasive to other courts in the First Circuit--and of course that's what Nintendo wants, hence the effort to craft language that could be easily ported to other sympathetic courts--but the legal theory is absolutely not binding on other parties until/unless the finding/rationale is adopted by a higher court.
Do you think it's possible that Nintendo is having the devs agree to that statement is a way for them to prevent others from forking Yuzu and continuing development? If someone stripped out the ROM decryption code, it would be harder to claim the fork falls under 17 U.S.C. 1201 as a circumvention tool. By having the original creators state it is, would it open up derivative works to being classified as one in future lawsuits regardless of whether it still contains the questionable code?
It's already a tragedy if original developers will no longer work on it. They also worked on citra. Generally speaking, I think human resource is crucial and emu devs aren't doing enough to protect themselves.
Nintendo isn't arguing against emulation itself, they're challenging Yuzu on the anti-circumvention part of the DMCA. There isn't precedent for going against emulators using that yet AFAICT; Sony v. Bleem is entirely unrelated.
I don't think that applies in this case since DeCSS was unambiguously and primarily designed to strip DRM (with interoperability as a consequence), while Yuzu was primarily designed to emulate a system (with DRM "circumvention" as a consequence).