by Last week Nintendo filed its lawsuit against Switch emulator Yuzu, blaming the emulator for mass piracy of The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom 2023 and declaring “there is no legal way to use Yuzu to copy Nintendo Switch games play.” The developers of Yuzu have hired a lawyer, and it seems they were setting up the suit for the first legal battle against imitation in over 20 years. But today Yuzu and Nintendo filed a joint motion to settle the suit, and Yuzu developers agreed to pay Nintendo “monetary relief of $2.4 million.”
As a result of the settlement, Yuzu’s development will stop and its distribution will cease.
It’s a dramatic turn for a situation that didn’t seem entirely certain to go in Nintendo’s favor. Sony’s lawsuit in the early 2000s against imitators from Connectix and Bleem! Both went in favor of emulator developers, but advances in technology since then leave a big question mark over how a court would rule on circumvention of the Switch’s encryption, which is generally prohibited by the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Nintendo pointedly claimed that Yuzu is “primarily designed to circumvent technological measures,” a bit of very specific language that suggests the emulator is running afoul of the DMCA.
A judge may rule that the circumvention is not primary school the purpose of the emulator, it’s just a necessary act of reverse engineering to play video games, you know. Such a ruling would be a huge blow to the legality of emulation of modern systems, and a ruling that went Nintendo’s way would threaten many other emulators. A loss could be extremely expensive for Yuzu’s developers—and even a win could lead to years of legal fees as the case went through the trial and appeals process. Apparently the developers of the emulator decided that a quick fix was a safer option.
Today’s joint motion states “Defendant and its members recognize and agree that the award of monetary relief herein bears a reasonable relationship to the range of damages and attorneys’ fees and costs that the parties may expect to be awarded at and after trial. of this action.” As part of the settlement, Yuzu’s developers waive any right to appeal the judgment and are bound by a permanent injunction that essentially marks the death of the imitator, at least in its current form. The permanent injunction puts ban the developers:
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“Offer to the public, provide, market, advertise, promote, sell, test, host, clone, distribute, or otherwise traffic in Yuzu or any source code or features of Yuzu .”
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“Making assignments or transfers, forming new entities or associations, or using any other device to circumvent or otherwise avoid the prohibitions set forth. [above]”
The injunction also requires the defendants to cease using the domain Yuzu-emu.org and transfer it to Nintendo’s control, and “destroy by destroying all circumvention devices, including all copies of Yuzu” and “all circumvention tools used to develop or use Yuzu” to the extent possible. Effectively, Yuzu is about to be erased from the internet – at least officially.
Update: In a post on the Yuzu Discord, lead developer Bunnei announced that “yuzu and yuzu support for Citra is being discontinued, effective immediately.”
The statement continues with language that gives a strong rise ‘we have to say this as part of the legal settlement’ energy:
“…we now see that because our projects can bypass Nintendo’s technology protection measures and allow users to play games outside of authorized hardware, they have led to widespread piracy. In particular, we were very disappointed when users of our software used to leak game content before release and ruined the experience for legitimate buyers and fans.
“We have come to the decision that we cannot continue to allow this to happen. Piracy has never been our intention, and we believe that piracy of video games and video game consoles should end. Effective today, we will pulling our code repositories offline. , terminating our Patreon accounts and Discord servers, and, soon, shutting down our websites. We hope our actions will be a small step towards ending piracy of the works of all creators.”
Of course, it won’t be easy to completely eliminate any piece of software widely used by Yuzu. The source code has been removed from Github, but archives have already been created and shared among the emulator community. Yuzu’s work may be carried forward under a new name by other developers not involved in the project, but the $2.4 million settlement appears to have a chilling effect on any future development that draws Nintendo’s attention.
The question now is whether lawsuits against other imitators, including competitor Yuzu Ryujinx, will result in a decisive victory for Nintendo here. Because Nintendo and Yuzu decided before going to trial, no legal consequences for how future court cases would govern imitation and whether it violates the DMCA. But the settlement could trigger a series of suits against other imitators who can’t afford the cost of a drawn-out legal battle with a billion-dollar company.
