Yuzu Switch Emulator creator responds to Nintendo lawsuit
Tropic Haze is getting ready to respond to Nintendo following their Yuzu lawsuit
Tropic Haze, the company behind the Yuzu Nintendo Switch emulator, has responded to Nintendo’s lawsuit against them. In their lawsuit, Nintendo has claimed that the Yuzu emulator is “facilitating piracy at a colossal scale”, and accuses the company of “illegally circumventing Nintendo’s software encryption”.
Now, Tropic Haze have enlisted the services of an attorney from Pierce Atwood LLP, and has committed to responding to Nintendo’s motion within the next 60 days.
Nintendo are seeking to shutdown the Yuzu emulator and seeks damages through the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). Nintendo also wants Yuzu’s domain names, URLs, chatrooms, social media accounts, and even the team’s hard drives.
As of now, the Yuzu emulator remains available online, and none of Tropic Haze’s social media channels have publicly commented on the lawsuit. That said, we should expect to see a legal response from the Yuzu team within the next two months.
https://twitter.com/PC_Focus_/status/1763601710314889356
Nintendo sees Yuzu as a piracy platform
In their lawsuit, Nintendo has called Tropic Haze’s emulator a piracy tool. The company states that a leaked copy of The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom was downloaded 1 million times before the game’s release. At the same time, Yuzu’s Patreon support doubled. While Yuzu did not leak Nintendo’s game, or distribute it, Nintendo hopes to link Yuzu with game piracy, and use that to take down the Switch emulator.
Emulation itself is not illegal. Reverse engineering and creating software emulators are legal. That said, piracy is not legal, and this is why emulator developers recommend using personal came backups for emulation.
Last year, Nintendo managed to exert enough pressure to prevent the Dolphin Wii/GameCube emulator from releasing on Steam. This is despite the fact that Nintendo are unable to take down the emulator through legal means.
Nintendo argues that there is no legal way to use Yuzu to play Nintendo Switch games. It remains to be seen if Nintendo can prove this in court. After all, the US Copyright Office allows users to make copies of software for archival/backup purposes. Using personal software backups on an emulator should be legal, something that potentially pokes a hole in Nintendo’s case.
Strangely, Nintendo have not targeted the creators of Ryujinx with a lawsuit. Ryujinx is another Switch emulator, and it very popular. It is unknown why Nintendo are not targeting all currently available Switch emulators. For some reason, Nintendo are specifically targeting Yuzu.
You can join the discussion on Yuzu’s response to Nintendo’s lawsuit on the OC3D Forums.
