After a copyright lawsuit from Nintendo's US subsidiary, developer Tropical Haze has taken the Switch emulator Yuzu and the 3DS emulator Citra out of circulation. Tropical Haze has removed Yuzu's code repositories from Github and closed the site. In an out-of-court settlement, the company also agrees to pay Nintendo damages of $2.4 million (€2.2 million).
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This emerges from an out-of-court settlement that the opponents filed with the US Federal Court for Rhode Island. Tropical Haze also agrees to submit the cease and desist declaration required by Nintendo for the further distribution of Yuzu as well as an acknowledgment of guilt. The court still has to formally approve the agreement, which also affects the 3DS emulator Citra, and issue an order (Case No. 1:24-CV-00082-JJM, US District Court Rhode Island).
Nobody could have guessed that
“Yuzu and the team have always been against piracy,” the emulator's website now says. “We started this project in good faith, out of love for Nintendo, its consoles and games, and we do not want to cause any harm. But now we see that widespread piracy has occurred because our projects bypass Nintendo's technical protection measures and users can play games without authorized hardware.” Nintendo's lawyers may have helped with the wording.
Nintendo USA filed its lawsuit against Tropical Haze last week. The emulator allows third parties to play the software available for the Switch bypassing security functions and is therefore secondarily liable for copyright infringements, the company argues and demands injunctive relief and damages.
Yuzu, which was first introduced in 2018, emulates the Switch's hardware, but contains neither the firmware nor the cryptographic keys. In theory, you have to jailbreak the firmware and keys from your console and games. In practice, this data is also easily available online.
An emulator that is offered without protected firmware and cryptographic keys is currently considered legal under US law. Downloading firmware from the Internet is also legal in the USA, as long as you own the appropriate hardware. This also applies to game ROMs. However, the legal basis for this is older cases from the 1990s and noughties.
Liability for interference, US version
In its lawsuit, Nintendo did not attack the emulator itself, but rather argued in the direction of what we in Germany call disruptive liability: Yuzu enables “piracy on a colossal scale” – and knowingly so.
Tropical Haze apparently did not want to take the risk of a long legal dispute with a potentially very expensive outcome. Even if a court ultimately has to approve and order the agreement, it has no direct impact on the legal situation.
It's not the first strike Nintendo has struck against emulators or hacking tools. Last year, the gaming giant took action against the distribution of various tools on Github. Nintendo also prevented the release of the Dolphin emulator on Steam.
(vbr)