Notoriously litigious gaming giant, Nintendo Co. Ltd., through its wholly owned subsidiary Nintendo of America Inc. (collectively Nintendo) clashed and then settled a dispute with Tropic Haze LLC, with respect to their video game emulator for the Nintendo Switch named 'Yuzu' (Yuzu). This legal saga has caught the attention of the gaming community in general and has started raising the pertinent questions regarding the fine line between emulation and copyright infringement.
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 the United States of America
District Court, District of Rhode Island. Nintendo's complaint
alleges that Yuzu unlawfully circumvented the piracy measures by
executing code that decrypts Nintendo Switch games "using an
illegally obtained copy of cryptographic keys". The complaint
further alleged that Yuzu's website provided detailed
instructions for its users to unlawfully hack their own Nintendo
Switch and how to make unauthorized copies of Nintendo games.
Nintendo alleged that Yuzu facilitated piracy in a myriad of ways,
including providing detailed instructions on how to get it running
with unlawful copies of Nintendo Switch games, testing thousands of
official Nintendo Switch games to verify their compatibility and
linking to websites that help users obtain and further distribute
the "prod.keys", that are used to decrypt and play the
Nintendo Switch games. As stated by Nintendo, the emulation of
Nintendo's games was only possible due to Yuzu's decryption
of Nintendo's encryption. Nintendo accused Tropic Haze LLC of
violating the anti-circumvention and anti-trafficking provisions of
the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, 1998 and accused the creators
of copyright infringement. It alleged that Yuzu was "primarily
designed" to circumvent several layers of Nintendo Switch
encryption so its users can play copyrighted Nintendo games.
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 US$2,400,000.00 (calculated basis
Nintendo's claim that over 1 (one) million copies of Zelda were
emulated on Yuzu) in favour of Nintendo and the District Court
granted the permanent injunction and inter alia ordered the payment
of the Settlement Amount to Nintendo, granted the permanent
injunction preventing the advertising, selling or otherwise
trafficking in Yuzu (or any other such software) or any source code
or features of Yuzu, permanent closure of the domain name
Yuzu.Emu.org, the destruction by deletion of all circumvention
devices including all copies of Yuzu, the handing over to Nintendo
of all physical circumvention devices that circumvent or attempt to
circumvent the technological measures, and of modified Nintendo
hardware, including modified Nintendo Switch consoles.
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.
The content of this article is intended to provide a general guide to the subject matter. Specialist advice should be sought about your specific circumstances.
