New documents filed Monday, February 26 reveal that videogame giant Nintendo is taking action against the creators of the popular emulator tool Yuzu.
The copyright infringement filing, from Nintendo of America, states that the Yuzu tool (from developer Tropic Haze LLC) illegally circumvents the software encryption and copyright protection systems of Nintendo Switch titles, and thus facilitates piracy and infringes copyright under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA).
Nintendo alleges that Tropic Haze’s free Yuzu emulator tool unlawfully allows pirated Switch games to be played on PCs and other devices, bypassing Nintendo’s protection measures.
The official Yuzu website suggests that the tool is to be used with software you yourself own: “You are legally required to dump your games from your Nintendo Switch” — but it’s common knowledge, that this is not how these tools are primarily used.
From what I understood, is that the team’s Patreon page is a means of making financial gains of emulating the Switch. This could be the reason why Nintendo is suing.
Vanced NFT memories.
Well Vanced was a lot different, they were actually redistributing code from YouTube. They were asking to be sued and they got off really easy.
Whereas here, no code is being used afaik. They don’t even include the keys for the decryption for the console. So the only thing this can do is: decrypt game files once provided keys and then run an emulated graphics pipeline and logic process for said game.
Now I can see an argument about how Yuzu is specifically built to emulate the Switch which is a current product. Which makes this sketchy. But also it’s an emulator. What’s better is that breaking the law is not required to use the emulator. You can get your own rom rips and keys and use them with the emulator which gives it a legal purpose as a 3rd party application.
This is Nintendo just trying to scare them Id bet. Not a zero chance that Yuzu could lose though.