IANAL, but from what I read regarding Yuzu / the title and prod keys / etc., is Nintendo’s argument is three-fold – the only way to obtain those keys is to use a tool that itself is a violation of the DMCA, use of those keys by an emulator to decrypt Nintendo’s protected content in a method outside of Nintendo’s authorized use is a violation of DMCA even if the keys aren’t provided in the emulator, and there is no legitimate use of those keys except to circumvent controls intended to protect copyright.
Therefore, by their argument, any emulator that can use those keys would effectively be subject to DMCA even if you had to bring your own keys, because unless the emulator only ran homebrew or completely decrypted content and had absolutely no decryption capabilities, you’d still be using the prod keys and title keys to decrypt content in violation of the DMCA in order to execute it. So, the tool that dumps the keys is a DMCA violation and any emulator that uses those keys to decrypt protected content in order to execute it is a DMCA violation, and Nintendo has a strong case that the actual keys themselves are only useful for making unauthorized copies of content that bypass the encryption that exists to prevent it.
It stands to reason that a clean-room developed Switch emulator that required all content it ran to be decrypted prior to being able to run it may be able to exist without Nintendo shitting it into non-existance, since Nintendo couldn’t make any argument that the primary use was a DMCA violation as no encryption would be being bypassed by the emulator. They’d probably then go after whoever made the tool to dump the games, but they’d probably be less successful.
On the other hand, the pragmatist in me says that unless I was 500% sure of my online anonymity, I wouldn’t want to pick a fight with Nintendo – even if I thought I was right. They have enough money to lock someone up in legal battles for a very long time and most independent developers wouldn’t have anywhere near the finances required to bankroll appropriate defense counsel. Can’t say I’d blame people for not wanting to invite that hellscape into their lives.
Uh huh. Speaking as someone who (stupidly) bought Star Wars Jedi Survivor at launch and expected a 12900KF and a 4090 to be able to play it stably – the game ran like absolute shit until the patch where they announced they removed Denuvo. They’d done all manner of patching to that point which made absolutely no difference for the majority of people, but miraculously, when they removed Denuvo the performance across the board was exponentially higher. Traversal stutter is still there, but it’s extremely minor and is aligned now with every other UE4 game’s traversal stutter.
But yeah, I guess that was just a surprising coincidence that the performance issues almost entirely resolved themselves the moment Denuvo was removed, and that they didn’t in the previous 8 patches.
Fuck Denuvo.