Notoriously litigious gaming giant,
Background
Nintendo creates, develops and publishes many popular video games made specifically and exclusively made to play on Nintendo's video game consoles including the Nintendo Switch, Nintendo Switch Lite, and Nintendo Switch OLED consoles (collectively the Nintendo Switch). Nintendo also re-releases certain popular videos games that were popular on its previously designed consoles (illustratively Metroid Prime, popular on the Nintendo GameCube made available in 2002) to play on the Nintendo Switch. Nintendo further offers a paid subscription to users of the Nintendo Switch, which gives access to over 100 legacy games created by Nintendo from previous gaming consoles such as the Game Boy, Game Boy Advance, NES, SNES, Nintendo 64. Currently, the Nintendo Switch is the third most popular video game console of all time having sold over 139 million Nintendo Switch consoles.
An emulator is a hardware or software that enables a computer to behave/ imitate/ simulate like another computer/ system such that the former may run applications/ services designed for the latter. In the context of gaming, a video game emulator is a type of emulator that allows a computer to emulate a video gaming consoles hardware and play its games on the emulating platform. Yuzu allows Nintendo Switch games (which Nintendo authorizes for play solely on Nintendo Switch consoles), to be played on any Windows, Linux, or Android systems.
Therefore, users of Yuzu may play pirated Nintendo Switch games on personal computers and Android devices, which would not otherwise be possible due to the protections that Nintendo has put into place for the Nintendo Switch. Nintendo also claimed that Yuzu not only infringed Nintendo's copyright and circumvented the Nintendo Switch's copyright protection, it also sold the technology used to circumvent such protections. The primary trigger for the lawsuit hinged on the Nintendo Switch game titled "The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom" (Zelda) which was available to emulate on Yuzu before the game was even released.
Nintendo filed a complaint before
Therefore, Nintendo sought for equitable relief and damages for unlawful circumvention of Nintendo's copyright protection systems (technological measures) and unlawful trafficking in circumvention technology in violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, 1998. Nintendo also sought for the transfer of all domain names, URLs, chatrooms, and social media presence and the site Yuzu-Emu.org over to Nintendo and sought the seizure and destruction of all hard drives to help wipe out the Yuzu emulator.
Settlement and Final Judgement
Yuzu agreed to a settlement of
While there is still no legal determination as to whether an emulation company/ site etc. aids in piracy, some developers including the developer of Yuzu have now stepped away from emulation projects and are shutting them down or have left the emulation environment entirely.
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