Yuzu Lost Against Nintendo And Will Have To Pay $2.4M
A week ago, Nintendo filed a lawsuit against Tropic Haze — the company behind the Nintendo Switch emulation software Yuzu — for “facilitating piracy at a colossal scale.” Now, it seems like Yuzu will have to take down its defenses and pay $2,400,000 to Nintendo.
Despite retaining the services of an attorney, Tropic Haze has come forward in favor of Nintendo saying, “Yuzu is primarily designed to circumvent and play Nintendo Switch games.” Additionally, the company also agrees that it will permanently part ways with Yuzu in terms of working, hosting, distributing code or features, promotion, or doing anything that violates Nintendo’s copyright protection.
If that wasn’t enough, the company will also give in the yuzu-emu.org domain name to Nintendo, delete all copies of Yuzu or circumvention tools used for developing it such as Hekate, TegraRcmGUI, Atmosphere, Lockpick_RCM, NDDumpTool, nxDumpFuse, and Tegra Explorer.
Apart from the digital tools, Nintendo has also asked to hand over physical circumvention devices and modified Nintendo hardware of any kind. There’s a lot more to it and if you want you can read the entire proposed final judgment and permanent injunction, but they are still waiting for approval from a judge.
We still don’t know whether Yuzu is actually circumventing Nintendo’s protections since it doesn’t contain Nintendo’s keys and is a “bring-your-own-BIOS” emulator. However, Nintendo and Tropic Haze are asking a federal judge to acknowledge that Yuzu’s functionality involves circumventing Nintendo’s copyright safeguards, regardless of whether the encryption keys are used with the software or not.
Developing or distributing software, including Yuzu, that in its ordinary course functions only when cryptographic keys are integrated without authorization, violates the Digital Millennium Copyright Act’s prohibition on trafficking in devices that circumvent effective technological measures, because the software is primarily designed for the purpose of circumventing technological measures.
As Yuzu is an open-source emulator, it’s not easy to put a nail in its coffin as copies of both the emulator and its source code are still out there. Some users have also mentioned backing up the code after hearing about the legal case two weeks ago.
That’s all we have for now, let us know your thoughts below about the future of Yuzu and whether this result could impact other emulators!
Yuzu is Shutting Down
Bunnei from the Yuzu team has now confirmed that both Nintendo Switch and Nintendo 3DS emulators will be shutting down; “Yuzu and Yuzu’s support of Citra are being discontinued, effective immediately.”
While Yuzu never intended to promote piracy in any way, their projects can circumvent Nintendo’s copyright protection measures and allow users to play games outside of authorized hardware, leading to extensive piracy. Yuzu has also said that they will be shutting down their code repositories and will be discontinuing their Patreon accounts, Discord servers, and website.
