I’ll see you in emulation court! — How strong is Nintendos legal case against Switch emulator Yuzu? Nintendo is “basically taking the position that emulation itself is unlawful.”
Kyle Orland – Feb 28, 2024 4:32 am UTC Enlarge / Chopping Yuzu into three parts is not a proposed legal remedy, for now…Yuzu reader comments 83
Nintendo has filed a lawsuit against Tropic Haze LLC, the makers of the popular Yuzu emulator that the Switch-maker says is “facilitating piracy at a colossal scale.”
The federal lawsuitfiled Monday in the District Court of Rhode Island and first reported on by Stephen Totilois the company’s most expansive and significant argument yet against emulation technology that it argues “turns general computing devices into tools for massive intellectual property infringement of Nintendo and others’ copyrighted works.” Nintendo is asking the court to prevent the developers from working on, promoting, or distributing the Yuzu emulator, and requesting significant financial damages under the DMCA.
If successful, the arguments in the case could help overturn years of legal precedent that has protected emulator software itself, even as using those emulators for software piracy has remained illegal.
“Nintendo is still basically taking the position that emulation itself is unlawful,” Foundation Law attorney and digital media specialist Jon Loiterman told Ars. “Though that’s not the core legal theory in this case.” Just follow these (complicated) instructions
The bulk of Nintendo’s legal argument rests on Yuzu’s ability to break the many layers of encryption that protect Switch software from being copied and/or played by unauthorized users. By using so-called “prod.keys” obtained from legitimate Switch hardware, Yuzu can dynamically decrypt an encrypted Switch game ROM at runtime, which Nintendo argues falls afoul of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act’s prohibition against circumvention of software protections.
Further ReadingThe solid legal theory behind Nintendos new emulator takedown effortCrucially, though, the open source Yuzu emulator itself does not contain a copy of those “prod.keys,” which Nintendo’s lawsuit acknowledges that users need to supply themselves. That makes Yuzu different from the Dolphin emulator, which was taken off Steam last yearafter Nintendo pointed out that the software itself contains a copy of the Wii Common Key used to decrypt game files. Enlarge / Just a little light console hacking…Aurich Lawson
Advertisement Further ReadingHow the demonization of emulation devalues gamings heritageAbsent the inherent ability to break DRM, an emulator would generally be covered by decades of legal precedent establishing the right to emulate one piece of hardware on another using reverse engineering techniques. But Yuzu’s “bring your own decryption” design is not necessarily a foolproof defense, either.
Nintendo’s lawsuit makes extensive reference to the Quickstart Guide that Yuzu provides on its own distribution site. That guide gives detailed instructions on how to “start playing commercial games” with Yuzu by hacking your (older) Switch to dump decryption keys and/or game files. That guide also includes links to a number of external tools that directly break console and/or game encryption techniques. “Whether Yuzu can get tagged with [circumvention] simply by providing instructions and guidance and all the rest of it is, I think, the core issue in thiscase.”Attorney Jon Loiterman
Through these instructions, Nintendo argues, “the Yuzu developers brazenly acknowledge that using Yuzu necessitates hacking or breaking into a Nintendo Switch.” Nintendo also points to a Yuzu Discord server where emulator developers and users discuss how to get copyrighted games running on the emulator, as well as publicly released telemetry data that shows the developers were aware of widespread use of their emulator for piracy (as the Yuzu devs wrote in June 2023, “Tears of the Kingdom is by far the most played game on Yuzu”).
While Loiterman says that “instructions and guidance are not circumvention,” he added that “the more layers of indirection between Yuzu’s software and activity and distribution of the keys the safer they are. The detailed instructions, the Discord server, and the knowledge of what all this is used for are at least problematic.”
“Whether Yuzu can get tagged with [circumvention] simply by providing instructions and guidance and all the rest of it is, I think, the core issue in this case,” he continued. Page: 1 2 3 Next → reader comments 83 Kyle Orland Kyle Orland has been the Senior Gaming Editor at Ars Technica since 2012, writing primarily about the business, tech, and culture behind video games. He has journalism and computer science degrees from University of Maryland. He once wrote a whole book about Minesweeper. Advertisement Channel Ars Technica ← Previous story Related Stories Today on Ars
