Nintendo Takes Yuzu Emulator Creators to Court

Nintendo of America has initiated legal proceedings against the developers of Yuzu, a Nintendo Switch emulator. According to a report by Game File's Stephen Totilo, the lawsuit was filed with the US District Court of Rhode Island on February 26. Yuzu, which was launched in 2018 and is owned by Tropic Haze, enables users to play Switch games on Windows, Linux, and Android devices. Nintendo argues that the emulator allows users to play pirated games on non-console devices, thereby infringing on its intellectual property rights and those of other parties. The lawsuit claims that Yuzu's technology violates the Anti-Circumvention and Anti-Trafficking provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which prohibits the circumvention of copyright protection measures. Nintendo also alleges that The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom was playable on Yuzu over a week before its official release and was downloaded from pirate sites over a million times. The company is seeking damages and equitable relief for the alleged unlawful circumvention of copyright protection systems and trafficking in circumvention technology. This is not the first time Nintendo has taken legal action against emulator makers; last year, it sent a cease and desist order to the developers of the Dolphin emulator and issued a DMCA takedown notice for the Lock RCM tool, which allowed Switch users to extract their system's security keys for use in homebrew or emulated software.