Nintendo Nintendo sues Switch emulator Yuzu for ‘facilitating piracy at a colossal scale’

[idrankyourbeer]

Nintendo sues Switch emulator Yuzu for ‘facilitating piracy at a colossal scale’​

Nintendo blames Yuzu for pirated copies of The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom being played early

If you’ve ever seen a Steam Deck playing a Legend of Zelda game, chances are you were seeing the Yuzu emulator at work. Now, Nintendo has sued the developers of Yuzu in US federal court, with the intent of squashing Yuzu for good.

In the lawsuit, spotted by Stephen Totilo, Nintendo alleges that Yuzu violates the anti-circumvention and anti-trafficking provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) as well as accusing the creators of copyright infringement. It alleges Yuzu is “primarily designed” to circumvent several layers of Nintendo Switch encryption so its users can play copyrighted Nintendo games.

The company’s not only asking for the courts to stop Yuzu in its tracks with a permanent injunction. It also wants to take away its domain names, URLs, chatrooms, and social media presence; hand yuzu-emu.org over to Nintendo; and even seize and destroy its hard drives to help wipe out the emulator. Oh, and Nintendo wants lots of money in damages as well.

Aren’t emulators legal? Well... yes and no. While there’s legal precedent that suggests it’s okay to reverse engineer a console and develop an emulator that uses none of the company’s source code, those cases are roughly a quarter of a century old or more — it gets trickier when we’re talking about multiple layers of modern encryption and the copyrighted BIOSes that Yuzu and other modern emulators require to run.

The Dolphin Emulator for Nintendo Wii and GameCube got in enough hot water to abandon its plan to launch on Steam, when it was revealed that Dolphin ships with Nintendo’s Wii common key to help circumvent the copyright protection on Wii games. (Dolphin maintains that including that key is legal.)

Nintendo doesn’t allege that Yuzu includes any such keys, though. Yuzu takes a bring-your-own-BIOS approach, expecting users to either lift their own BIOSes and keys off a hacked Nintendo Switch (using a loophole that Nintendo eliminated in newer models), or more likely download a pirated one.

So instead, Nintendo’s arguing that Yuzu is knowingly “facilitating piracy at a colossal scale.”

As you’ll see in the full complaint below, Nintendo suggests that Yuzu is facilitating that piracy in myriad ways, including providing “detailed instructions” on how to “get it running with unlawful copies of Nintendo Switch games,” testing thousands of official Nintendo Switch games to verify their compatibility, and linking to websites that help users “obtain and further distribute the prod.keys.” Nintendo also says the developers have clearly extracted Nintendo Switch games themselves, bypassing encryption, in order to test their own emulator.

If Nintendo can prove that Yuzu is “primarily designed” to give people access to official Nintendo Switch games and has no other real use, Yuzu would indeed be in trouble. DMCA Section 1201(a)(2) bans products “primarily designed or produced for the purpose of circumventing a technological measure that effectively controls access” to a copyrighted work. It’s the same provision that game archivists have struggled with for years.

“The important thing is that Nintendo is bringing the case as a DMCA circumvention claim,” says Richard Hoeg, a business attorney who hosts the Virtual Legality podcast. He tells me that that while emulators are broadly legal if engineered “correctly,” the DMCA also lets Nintendo focus on whether the emulator was only designed to break Nintendo’s control over its games.

“There is a real chance for them to win as the court ‘tests’ things like the effectiveness of the measure and just how the emulator was created,” Hoeg says.
Nintendo suggests in its complaint that it may have actually been damaged by Yuzu, too, alleging that The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom was illegally downloaded over a million times in early May 2023, while Yuzu’s Patreon membership doubled during that same period.

Legal emulation or no, Yuzu may not want to risk finding out in a court of law. Many small bands of developers have axed their projects after being approached by Nintendo, and it wouldn’t be surprising if Yuzu settled. “I’d say the claim here is enough to get a reasonable emulator company to cease, desist, and settle claims,” says Hoeg. “But remember that this is only one side of the story at present.”

Yuzu didn’t immediately respond to requests for its side of the story on Discord and via email. The team released Yuzu for Android last May.

Nintendo sues Switch emulator Yuzu for ‘facilitating piracy at a colossal scale’

Will developers give up or go to court?

www.theverge.com

the complaint that was filed can be found here:






well damn i dont think emulators are illegal. i wonder what becomes of this? i mean nintendo is sue-happy and they do have plenty of lawyer money. i wonder if they'll try to push for an end to emulation?

not gonna lie, i was one of the many who was playing TOTK before it officially launched and yuzu was my friend. not that my actions costed nintendo a single penny of profit seeing how i don't even have a switch to play the game on so i wouldnt have bought the game even if i wanted to. but i kinda feel for the people who bought the game legit and then had issues trying to download and install the game after it went live and it crashed the nintendo servers from all the people trying to download. i was already playing that shit for the whole week lol.

 

[My Spot]

So they're going after the inferior Switch emulator?

 

[idrankyourbeer]

So they're going after the inferior Switch emulator?

let yuzu be the fall-boy. ryujinx will stand tall.

 

[My Spot]

let yuzu be the fall-boy. ryujinx will stand tall.

I assume they're going after Yuzu because that's what everyone seems to use on Steam Deck.
I just don't see how Nintendo can win since Yuzu doesn't include firmware or system keys.

 

[Satsui Ryu]

I assume they're going after Yuzu because that's what everyone seems to use on Steam Deck.
I just don't see how Nintendo can win since Yuzu doesn't include firmware or system keys.

I think they're basing this on the fact that although Yuzu does not include any code from the hardware, from what I have heard they do provide instructions on how to circumvent copy protection. Dolphin otoh actually has the decryption keys in the app which is a huge no no and got them hit pretty hard.

 

[My Spot]

I think they're basing this on the fact that although Yuzu does not include any code from the hardware, from what I have heard they do provide instructions on how to circumvent copy protection. Dolphin otoh actually has the decryption keys in the app which is a huge no no and got them hit pretty hard.

Yeah that got Dolphin kicked off Steam but it's still the same on PC.
The precedent was set though years ago when Sony sued Bleem, it's not "illegal" as long as you aren't directly providing the BIOS/firmware/keys/etc. Even if it's just intimidation and they want to drown the Yuzu team in legal fees it's open source.

 

[rikwebb]

Yuzu's gonna pay $2.4m to settle the lawsuit and the emulator will be shut down

 

[GtehMVP]

Yuzu's gonna pay $2.4m to settle the lawsuit and the emulator will be shut down

Thx for the update.

I'm all for emulation, its the best way to ensure old games remain available, but I never liked the idea of doing it for a current system. I'm surprised it took them this long to go after them.

I'm really mixed on Yuzu, as I openly pirate pc games (VPN aside lol) I mainly do it to see if I like the game before buying, so I don't have to deal with Steam's limitation on refunds. As great as it, 2 hours often isn't enough, and they've warned me about too many refunds in the past, despite having around 800 games in my library, probably half bought at full price.

Regarding Yuzu, they should have just waited until the follow up came out. Regardless, it's open source, so it can continue. I'm just glad it didn't go to court and no new legal precedent has been set.

EmuDeck (Steam Deck) is the greatest thing to come from gaming since the actual Deck. It's never been easier, or on a better platform.

 

[Uncommon Valor]

I suppose it's only a matter of time before they go after Ryujinx. I wonder if they'll touch Dolphin and Cemu.

 

[idrankyourbeer]

Thx for the update.

I'm all for emulation, its the best way to ensure old games remain available, but I never liked the idea of doing it for a current system. I'm surprised it took them this long to go after them.

I'm really mixed on Yuzu, as I openly pirate pc games (VPN aside lol) I mainly do it to see if I like the game before buying, so I don't have to deal with Steam's limitation on refunds. As great as it, 2 hours often isn't enough, and they've warned me about too many refunds in the past, despite having around 800 games in my library, probably half bought at full price.

Regarding Yuzu, they should have just waited until the follow up came out. Regardless, it's open source, so it can continue. I'm just glad it didn't go to court and no new legal precedent has been set.

EmuDeck (Steam Deck) is the greatest thing to come from gaming since the actual Deck. It's never been easier, or on a better platform.

settling it out of court was probably the right thing to do. no way they could afford to take on nintendo's lawyers.

 

[idrankyourbeer]

Yuzu's gonna pay $2.4m to settle the lawsuit and the emulator will be shut down

they can shut it down all they want but good luck deleting it off the face of the internet lol.

i guess that will effect work on support for future roms and stuff though.

 

[rikwebb]

Looks like Citra is being shutdown too from their discord:

Hello yuz-ers and Citra fans:

We write today to inform you that yuzu and yuzu's support of Citra are being discontinued, effective immediately.

yuzu and its team have always been against piracy. We started the projects in good faith, out of passion for Nintendo and its consoles and games, and were not intending to cause harm. But we see now that because our projects can circumvent Nintendo's technological protection measures and allow users to play games outside of authorized hardware, they have led to extensive piracy. In particular, we have been deeply disappointed when users have used our software to leak game content prior to its release and ruin the experience for legitimate purchasers and fans.

We have come to the decision that we cannot continue to allow this to occur. Piracy was never our intention, and we believe that piracy of video games and on video game consoles should end. Effective today, we will be pulling our code repositories offline, discontinuing our Patreon accounts and Discord servers, and, soon, shutting down our websites. We hope our actions will be a small step toward ending piracy of all creators' works.

Thank you for your years of support and for understanding our decision.

 

[KidBaize]

I suppose it's only a matter of time before they go after Ryujinx. I wonder if they'll touch Dolphin and Cemu.

I wonder if Sony will ever go after theirs. I use RPCS3 for the OG Demon Souls and PS4 emulation might be my only hope for Bloodborne 60fps so those mfers better not.

 

[Uncommon Valor]

I wonder if Sony will ever go after theirs. I use RPCS3 for the OG Demon Souls and PS4 emulation might be my only hope for Bloodborne 60fps so those mfers better not.

I'd imagine they don't want to take the risk given the fact that they tried years ago to stop emulation and failed (Bleem). Plus, there's the fact hat you can download bios from the Sony site. And although it's not particularly the same case, Atlas attempted to shut down RPSC3 (which had a Patreon page as well) and failed. With that being said, I find out strange how Nintendo has allowed multiple apps on the Play Store for years, despite the fact you have to pay to use them.

 

[Chubz]

I'm all for emulation, its the best way to ensure old games remain available, but I never liked the idea of doing it for a current system. I'm surprised it took them this long to go after them.

Yeah, I feel the same way. Emulation for NES/SNES/Genesis is one thing, and even for "dead" systems like the Gamecube and PS2 it's perfectly understandable (because let's face it, who in 2024 has a fucking Gamecube still hooked up and ready to go?), but when people start pulling this shit with systems that are still on store shelves, still selling like crazy, and still have massive titles releasing year in and year out, it's crossing a very fine line and will no doubt draw all the worst kind of attention from the "powers that be."

The goofballs playing the "software preservation" card in response to this are seriously reaching to say the least, and we all know that's merely a smokescreen for their true intentions. When you lean on emulation purely for the purpose of pirating major titles that are still available on store shelves, you're just taking the piss.

 

[My Spot]

If this is true then Yuzu done goof'd.

 

[Uncommon Valor]

Apparently Ryujinx is in Brazil, so I’d imagine they’re safe for the time being.