Nintendo Files Lawsuit Against Yuzu Over Early Pirated Copies of The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom Game

Nintendo has filed a lawsuit against Yuzu for pirated copies of The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom being played early.

Yuzu is an open-source Nintendo Switch emulator, and the lawsuit against it was filed in a Rhode Island court on Monday.

Nintendo, in its lawsuit, has accused Yuzu of violating the anti-circumvention and anti-trafficking provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), as well as copyright infringement.

It alleged that Yuzu was created to circumvent several layers of Nintendo Switch encryption, so its users can play copyrighted Nintendo games.

Legal Action by Nintendo Against Yuzu for Early Zelda Game Piracy

The lawsuit, which runs into 41 pages, was filed against the parent company of Yuzu, named Tropic Haze.

As already stated, Yuzu is an open-source Nintendo Switch emulator and was introduced in 2018, months after the Nintendo Switch originally launched.

The company had also made Citra, a Nintendo 3DS emulator, which enables players to play Nintendo Switch games on Windows PC, Linux, and Android devices.

Emulators cannot be deemed illegal, but pirating games that can be played on them is illegal.

The lawsuit alleges that Yuzu executes codes that negate Nintendo’s security measures, including decryption using “an illegally obtained copy of prod.keys.”

Nintendo also alleges that the release of The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom led to damages and was released two weeks earlier than the official release of the game on May 12.

The game spread quickly, and it is alleged that the game was downloaded more than 1 million times. 20% of the download links pointed to Yuzu.

Although Yuzu does not distribute the pirated copies of the games, it is alleged that most ROM sites point people toward Yuzu to play whatever games they’ve downloaded.

Nintendo also said that it spent enormous resources to prevent illegal copying, marketing, sale, and distribution of its Nintendo Switch games.

It also alleged that Yuzu helped the teams make hefty profits to the tune of $30,000 per month on its Patreon from more than 7,000 patrons, and the company itself made $50,000 in paid Yuzu downloads.

Yuzu’s Patreon also doubled its paid members between May 1 and May 12 when Tears of the Kingdom was released.

The lawsuit asked the courts to shut down the emulator and for damages.

This is not the first time that Nintendo has taken the legal route to tackle a problem.

It also went after an alleged Nintendo Switch hacker named Gary Bowser, who was arrested and charged for selling Switch hacks.

He still owes Nintendo $10 million in damages.

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