Emulator Devs Pay $2.4M, Shut Down Yuzu & Citra After Nintendo Lawsuit

Summary





Yuzu and Nintendo have settled the case. Ending Citra and Yuzu, including a 2.4 Million Dollar payment to Nintendo



Quotes

A week ago, Nintendo sued the developers of... Nintendo Switch emulator, Yuzu, for “facilitating piracy at a colossal scale.”... It appears that Yuzu will give up without a fight...And it’ll affect the Nintendo 3DS emulator Citra as well. Tropic Haze has not only agreed to pay $2,400,000 to Nintendo but also says Yuzu is “primarily designed to circumvent and play Nintendo Switch games.” It will surrender the yuzu-emu.org domain name to Nintendo, agree to delete... its copies of Yuzu but also “all circumvention tools used for developing or using Yuzu—such as TegraRcmGUI, Hekate, Atmosphère, Lockpick_RCM, NDDumpTool, nxDumpFuse, and TegraExplorer,” and hand over any “physical circumvention devices” and “modified Nintendo hardware” to Nintendo. It also agrees to not delete any other “evidence” that infringes Nintendo’s IP rights. Yuzu and Citra developer Bunnei confirmed in the Yuzu discord that both the Nintendo Switch and Nintendo 3DS emulators are affected.



Hello yuz-ers and Citra fans: We write today to inform you that yuzu and yuzu’s support of Citra are being discontinued, effective immediately.





yuzu and its team have always been against piracy. We started the projects in good faith, out of passion for Nintendo and its consoles and games, and were not intending to cause harm. But we see now that because our projects can circumvent Nintendo’s technological protection measures and allow users to play games outside of authorized hardware, they have led to extensive piracy. In particular, we have been deeply disappointed when users have used our software to leak game content prior to its release and ruin the experience for legitimate purchasers and fans.





We have come to the decision that we cannot continue to allow this to occur. Piracy was never our intention, and we believe that piracy of video games and on video game consoles should end. Effective today, we will be pulling our code repositories offline, discontinuing our Patreon accounts and Discord servers, and, soon, shutting down our websites. We hope our actions will be a small step toward ending piracy of all creators’ works.





Thank you for your years of support and for understanding our decision.







It's unclear on whether this result could impact other emulators. If Yuzu had fought this lawsuit in court, one of the biggest questions would have been whether Yuzu is actually circumventing Nintendo’s protections since the emulator itself does not contain Nintendo’s keys. (Yuzu is a “bring-your-own-BIOS” emulator.) ...Now, Nintendo and Tropic Haze are asking a judge to specifically find that Yuzu circumvents its copyright protections by using those keys, even if it doesn’t come with them.

 





Specifically:

 





Developing or distributing software, including Yuzu, that in its ordinary course functions only when cryptographic keys are integrated without authorization, violates the Digital Millennium Copyright Act’s prohibition on trafficking in devices that circumvent effective technological measures, because the software is primarily designed for the purpose of circumventing technological measures.







 





My thoughts





It may be over for emulation. You'd have to create entirely new BIOSes from scratch for any device you want to emulate or the legal precedent this may set will likely make it illegal. I feel like Linus Torvalds and his hatred of Nvidia, only at Nintendo at this point. It is a sad day for Emulators.





 





Sources





IGN





The Verge (quote source)





 





[PROPOSED] FINAL JUDGMENT AND PERMANENT INJUNCTION





JOINT MOTION FOR ENTRY OF FINAL JUDGMENT AND PERMANENT INJUNCTION


http://dlvr.it/T3plcX