Nintendo has launched legal action against the developers of Yuzu, a well-known Switch emulator that allows users to play games made for the system on Android and PC platforms. The business claimed that Yuzu breaches the Digital Millennium Copyright Act’s (DMCA) anti-circumvention and anti-trafficking clauses in the lawsuit provided by Stephen Totilo of Game File.
Nintendo clarified that in order to stop people from playing illegal copies of its games, it employs encryption and other security measures. Yuzu is capable of cracking the security codes and decrypting Nintendo titles. The company said in its complaint that “unauthorized copies of games could not be played on PCs or Android devices without Yuzu’s decryption of Nintendo’s encryption.”
It’s illegal to “circumvent technological measures put into place by copyright owners to protect against unlawful access to and copying of copyrighted works” under the DMCA, Nintendo continued. And distributing “software primarily designed to circumvent technological measures” also constitutes unlawful trafficking. The defendants are, thus, “facilitating piracy at a colossal scale,” the lawsuit argued. This case could set a precedent for future lawsuits against emulators, which aren’t illegal in and of them themselves. As Ars Technica notes, Nintendo’s arguments are calling their very nature unlawful.
To illustrate how much Yuzu has affected its business, Nintendo revealed in its complaint that The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom was illegally distributed a week and a half before its official release. It was apparently downloaded over a million times from pirated websites, which specifically noted that people can play the game file through Yuzu. The company also mentioned that Yuzu’s creators are making money from their emulator. They’re getting around $30,000 a month from their Patreon supporters and have earned around $50,000 from the paid version of their software on Google Play, so far.
Nintendo is asking the court to stop Yuzu’s creators from promoting and distributing the software. It’s also asking for an unspecified amount in “equitable relief and damages.”
