this post was submitted on 04 Mar 2024
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Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ
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So this defensive strategy was planned from the beginning. The L in LLC stands for limited. It means Nintendo won't get any money. Tropic Haze LLC declares bankruptcy and tells Nintendo "our assets are two rolls of toilet paper and this empty can of coke, GL with getting your millions". Certainly cheaper than fighting a top lawyer team with unlimited funding
Yeah the LLC structure always seemed weird to people. After what happened to Bowser serving prison sentence and having his future earnings garnished for the rest of his life, this might have been the smart play. Yuzu group will never be able to pay the 2 mil. Company goes under and owners walk away from this escaping real harm.
Is that really how it works? Good for them in that case.
It's complicated. I'm no lawyer so take this with a grain of salt, but LLCs don't offer blanket protection. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piercing_the_corporate_veil
It is possible to go after people directly, and side step the LLC protection in certain cases. Depends how much Nintendo wants to screw these guys.
I think Nintendo is gonna chill out because they got what they wanted. AFAIK in the super blatant piracy lawsuits, they won huge sums of money but required stupidly low payments of $50 monthly. Part of me thinks that they don't actually care about piracy itself, but they do care about how it affects their ownership of their properties.
A big reason why I say that is because of a legal theory made by Moon Channel on YouTube. Nintendo as a young company was sued by Universal because Donkey Kong violated the King Kong trademark. Nintendo won that case by arguing that Universal lost said trademark because it was loosely enforced, and they probably feared that another company could do the same to them if they weren't careful. This could be why they are only suing big targets that are profiting from emulation/piracy and not "non-profits" or smaller sites.
That being said, Nintendo wants to create legal precedent by denying a specific principle in the DMCA that was legally ambiguous. Previously, it was assumed that you could bypass copy protections by supplying your own keys, but now, providing instructions on how to do so may not be allowed.