Piracy protection is things like encryption, firmware checks, pairing systems, unique game identifiers per instance of game, unique console id’s, … Basically any system put in place to make, or identify, a game/console to be genuine or make sure a genuine game running on genuine hardware and nothing else.
These are all systems the switch had btw.
Switch emulation bypassed or faked all of those, which counts as piracy protection circumvention.

Here in Denmark, it’s legal to circumvent piracy protection, if the purpose is to legally use the product.

The example that was used in the media when this was new, is when you buy a DVD and want to play it on a PC instead of a DVD player. Usually piracy protection would stop it from working on a PC. Of course the circumvention also makes it easy to make and distribute a pirate copy.

So the ability to use the product in the way the customer choose (within reason), is weighted higher than stopping piracy a little.

Subverting copy protection had always been a vuage notion because they sell you encrypted content, but they still have to sell you something with the decryption keys as well.

Now, using the key to remove the encryption falls under “subverting” but if you use the key to play the encrypted media directly, why does it matter what hardware it is happening on?

When it came to switch emulation you didn’t really circumvent the copy protection, you exported the keys from a switch. The game images are basically dumped as is.

Yes, you could find the keys elsewhere, but if you dumped your own it wouldn’t really be considered subverting. Especially with the jig you put the switch into a state built into the switch hardware. It’s not even a exploit like jailbreak usually are. The recovery boot mode is an intended service feature.

The only illegal thing would be getting copies of games and keys from other people.