Nintendo of America Requests Removal of Multiple Nintendo Switch Emulator Projects

TapTechNews July 11th news, Nintendo of America has requested the removal of multiple open-source emulator projects used for simulating Nintendo Switch games, including Suyu, Nzu, Uzuy, Torzu, Sudachi and Yuzu-vanced, etc. These emulators are all accused of containing codes that bypass Nintendo's copyright protection technology.

It is worth noting that these emulator projects that have been requested to be removed are all follow-up projects of the well-known emulator Yuzu that was previously sued for similar reasons. Nintendo stated that the emulators that have been requested to be taken down contain codes from Yuzu that are suspected of illegally bypassing Nintendo's copyright protection technology and may lead users to commit infringement acts.

Yuzu is an open-source emulator project that can run Switch games on PCs and other devices. However, this project was sued by Nintendo for allegedly violating the bypass countermeasure clause of the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). Eventually, the developer of Yuzu lost the lawsuit and agreed to pay Nintendo $2.4 million (TapTechNews note: currently about 17.49 million Chinese yuan) in damages, while closing Yuzu's GitHub repository and handing over the relevant domain names.

After Yuzu was taken down, a project named Suyu emerged. Suyu claimed to have taken over Yuzu's code and completely removed the infringing part, but this project was soon removed from GitLab and its Discord server was also quickly shut down at the request of Discord.

Since then, projects such as yuzu-build, Torzu, yuzu_compressed, Sudachi, Uzuy and SUYU-EMU have successively appeared. These projects are all branches or similar projects of Yuzu. But because they still contain Yuzu codes suspected of bypassing copyright protection, these projects have also received DMCA takedown notices one after another, and their GitHub repositories have been disabled.

However, according to GitHub's regulations, developers can appeal against the takedown notice.