Nintendo DMCA takedown wipes over 8,500 Yuzu emulator copies

Nintendo DMCA takedown wipes over 8,500 Yuzu emulator copies

After slamming the Switch emulator Yuzu with a $2.4 million lawsuit that caused it to shut down, Nintendo is now taking aim at its copies. The gaming giant submitted a total of 8,535 takedown notices for Yuzu emulator forks on GitHub, as spotted earlier by TorrentFreak and PCGamer.

When news of Nintendo’s lawsuit against Yuzu first broke, users began preserving the emulator’s code by making copies and uploading it to places like GitHub. But now, a copy of Nintendo’s Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) takedown request says GitHub took action “against the entire network of 8,535 repositories, inclusive of the parent repository.”

The request says the repositories in question “offer and provide access to the yuzu emulator or code,” adding that “yuzu illegally circumvents Nintendo’s technological protection measures and runs illegal copies of Nintendo Switch games.” Nintendo argues that Yuzu uses “unauthorized” versions of the cryptographic keys required to run Switch games.

Some Yuzu copycats, such as Suyu, attempted to get around Nintendo’s complaints by requiring users to provide their own cryptographic keys from their Switch. However, GitLab later took down Suyu’s repository following a DMCA takedown notice from a “rightsholder.”

Nintendo’s legal team has been very busy over the past few months. In addition to taking down Yuzu and its clones, the company has also targeted the physics sandbox game Garry’s Mod. The game’s developer confirmed in April that it received takedown notices from Nintendo, resulting in the removal of 20 years’ worth of Nintendo-related add-ons.

Retro Nintendo console emulators, like those now available on iOS, have largely avoided Nintendo’s wrath — likely because they’re not emulating the console Nintendo is currently selling.