New documents filed Monday, February 26 reveal that videogame giant Nintendo is taking action against the creators of the popular emulator tool Yuzu.
The copyright infringement filing, from Nintendo of America, states that the Yuzu tool (from developer Tropic Haze LLC) illegally circumvents the software encryption and copyright protection systems of Nintendo Switch titles, and thus facilitates piracy and infringes copyright under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA).
Nintendo alleges that Tropic Haze’s free Yuzu emulator tool unlawfully allows pirated Switch games to be played on PCs and other devices, bypassing Nintendo’s protection measures.
The official Yuzu website suggests that the tool is to be used with software you yourself own: “You are legally required to dump your games from your Nintendo Switch” — but it’s common knowledge, that this is not how these tools are primarily used.
If you read the lawsuit Nintendo is suing because Yuzu acknowledges their software can’t run without the Switch’s decryption keys. Yuzu also has instructions to extract the decryption keys on their website. So Yuzu is not completely reverse engineering how the Switch runs games.
The keys aren’t something you can reverse engineer, they are a “security” feature and make shure that people can only use it when they own a switch and the game…
That’s a failure on the DMCA, not on Yuzu.
The law clearly establishes the protection by which you are allowed to make a personal backup copy. Yuzy thus should by design allow you to play this backup copy, as would any other emulator that actually did its job. If you need to break DRM in order to get your own keys to play your personal copy in the first place, it’s not Yuzu’s fault, it’s a DMCA provision that has been put n place without forethought on how it clashes against the use provision.