Nintendo sues Nintendo Switch emulator 'Yuzu'



Nintendo of America, the American subsidiary of Nintendo, has sued the development team of `` Yuzu '', an open source emulator for Nintendo Switch, for copyright infringement.

Nintendo of America Inc. v. Tropic Haze LLC, 1_24-Cv-00082, No. 1 (DRI Feb. 26, 2024) | PDF | Copyright Infringement | Digital Millennium Copyright Act
https://www.scribd.com/document/709016504/Nintendo-of-America-Inc-v-Tropic-Haze-LLC-1-24-Cv-00082-No-1-DRI-Feb-26-2024



Nintendo sues Switch emulator Yuzu for 'facilitating piracy at a colossal scale' - The Verge
https://www.theverge.com/2024/2/27/24085075/nintendo-switch-emulator-yuzu-lawsuit



Game-related news writer Stephen Totillo reported on X (formerly Twitter) that he had discovered a complaint filed by Nintendo in the federal court for the District of Rhode Island.



Yuzu is an open source Nintendo Switch emulator. The development community communicates on the online chat tool Discord, and most of the development takes place on GitHub.

A comparison movie of emulators 'yuzu' and 'Ryujinx' that allows you to play Nintendo Switch games on your PC is now available - GIGAZINE



Nintendo claims that Yuzu violates the anti-circumvention regulations of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) and accuses it of copyright infringement. Article 120 of the DMCA prohibits the design or manufacture of 'products whose primary purpose is to circumvent technological measures that effectively control access to copyrighted works,' and Nintendo claims that Yuzu violates this. That's what I'm pointing out.

Whether the emulator itself is an illegal tool is a very difficult question. There is some precedent that says reverse engineering a game console is legally acceptable if it is an emulator that does not use any of the original source code, but in recent years game consoles have incorporated mechanisms to decrypt encryption to protect copyrights. , so you will need to bypass this to develop an emulator.

In the past, there was a case where the open source GameCube and Wii emulator 'Dolphin Emulator' was scheduled to be released on Steam, but the store page was suddenly deleted and the release was cancelled. This was because the ``common key necessary to decrypt the game'' installed in the chip of the game console itself was incorporated into the Dolphin Emulator in its entirety.

Why was the release of 'Dolphin Emulator', a GameCube and Wii emulator, canceled on Steam? The development team talks about the process - GIGAZINE



In the case of Yuzu, it is said that ``the user extracts the BIOS and common key from the Nintendo Switch he/she owns and uses it,'' and Yuzu itself is less illegal than Dolphin Emulator. Masu. However, Nintendo claims in its complaint that Yuzu was designed to be able to circumvent the Nintendo Switch's encryption and play copyrighted Nintendo games, intentionally infringing copyright. He claimed to be promoting it.

In addition, Nintendo is requesting the court for a permanent injunction against the development of Yuzu, the URL ``yuzu-emu.org,'' chat rooms, and all social media accounts. Nintendo claims that threads on Yuzu's official website and the online bulletin board site Reddit 'commit copyright infringement in a myriad of ways, including by providing detailed instructions on how to run pirated software on the Nintendo Switch.' 'Link to a website that explains how to obtain and distribute it.'



Nintendo points out that The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom , which was released in May 2023, has been illegally downloaded more than 1 million times, and the number of supporters of Yuzu's development project has doubled during the same period. This suggests that Yuzu may have been a victim of copyright infringement.



'Importantly, Nintendo is making this case as a DMCA circumvention argument,' said attorney Richard Hogue. 'Emulators are legal in principle, but only if they are properly designed. 'It allows Nintendo to focus on whether emulators are designed solely to circumvent Nintendo's control of games.'

Of course, there is a good chance that Yuzu will cancel the development project in response to this lawsuit and reach a settlement with Nintendo. The Verge, an IT news site, asked Yuzu's developers about this lawsuit, but they did not receive any comment.

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in Software,   Game, Posted by log1i_yk