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.

  • @[email protected]English
    9•9 months ago

    So what purpose does an emulator server legally speaking? And I don’t think anyone uses their car for accidents.

      • DranEnglish
        33•9 months ago

        especially true for when manufacturers stop supporting the console you invested into, stops making replacement parts, issuing security patches, etc. Having the ability to make, repair and use copies of the games you purchase is critical to digital preservation.

      • @[email protected]English
        4•9 months ago

        But let’s be real though. Getting a car and driving it a crowd on purpose is an extraordinarily small percentage of car users. You can’t say the same about emulation. A torrent site I frequent has 28000 downloads of Smash Bros Ultimate. I don’t believe for a second there are 28000 broken copies people are trying to replace.

        Don’t get me wrong, I love emulation. It has huge benefits! Access to out of print games, higher framerates and resolutions. But I’m not going to pretend piracy isn’t a massive component of it, particularly on current gen systems.

        • littleblue✨English
          11•9 months ago

          You’re either missing the crux of the argument entirely somehow, or your rebuttal is complete shit on purpose.

          None of your points are the fault of Yuzu’s creators.

          Just like: gun manufacturers cannot be sued for school shootings, Salinger couldn’t be held liable for the frequency his seminal work was found in psychopaths’ belongings, and Oscar Meyer isn’t at fault when you lost a non-zero amount of their meat products up your ass. Just sayin’.

    • 520
      6•9 months ago

      So what purpose does an emulator server legally speaking?

      They provide compatibility for software made to run on one platform to work on another.

      Providing compatibility is one of the most protected use cases of reverse engineering in US law.

      And I don’t think anyone uses their car for accidents.

      Lots of terrorist groups do.

    • @[email protected]English
      3•9 months ago

      Increased user accessibility, backing up and ensuring continued usability of purchased software, democratizing hardware choice, allowing for continued community support for software that has been abandoned, teaching people how software works in relation to different hardware…

    • monotremata
      2•9 months ago

      In addition to “format shifting,” which is a well-recognized use case, and game preservation, which is a huge and under-recognized public interest in emulator development, emulators are also used for the development of homebrew software. E.g., there’s a port of Moonlight for the Switch, which lets you play Steam games streamed from a PC using your Switch, letting it serve many of the purposes of a Steam Deck. That’s huge! It would be way less practical to develop this kind of software if you could only test on real hardware. Testing on real hardware is also essential, of course, but testing on an emulator is vastly faster for rapid iteration.

    • PlasterAnalyst
      1•9 months ago

      Legally, you’re allowed to make copies of games that you own and use them in an emulator. You can download mods, play multiplayer across the Internet when servers get shut down and also take advantage of better hardware and get better resolution and framerates, then there are quality of life improvements like savestates.

    • @[email protected]English
      1•9 months ago

      I don’t see anyone else bringing up that, in the case of the Switch, emulation actually plays better than on original hardware. Higher framerate, resolution, and graphics settings. And no broken JoyCons.

      Emulation also opens up save states, speed up/slow mo, romhacks, widescreen mods, ultra widescreen mods, save file editing, cheats, and lots of other legitimate uses. Speed runners often use emulation to practice the hardest sections using save states before doing their line run on OG hardware.

      Some of those use cases are also possible on flash carts (romhacks, save file editing, and some forms of cheats), but a lot really on emulation.