We’d like to ask the big N if, in the future, when the Nintendo Switch is a relic: wouldn’t it be more appropriate to emulate its games instead of struggling to run them on real hardware.

After the hacking of the Switch and the fact that Gary Bowser, the website owner behind it, is going to have part of his earnings taken away for the rest of his life with a fine of unpayable size for the average person (while his small income from prison was also taken, even though Bowser was in a dangerous state in jail!), and after the company’s action against the multiplayer mod for The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, Nintendo has taken another unfair step.

This time, the Japanese company has taken action against Lockpick. It’s a homebrew project that allows users to dump the keys to their games, so they don’t have to play their games on the Nintendo Switch but can run their backup copies on a PC (if it’s powerful enough and doesn’t crash on startup…), like Yuzu or Ryujinx. The developer of one of the forks (branching in program code), Simon Aarons, was contacted by the Japanese company. He reported it on Twitter.

He received a copyright claim from Nintendo and published the document he received from them. According to the big N, Lockpick allows users to circumvent the Switch’s protection measures, resulting in copyright infringement. Pirated versions of Switch games can be made to run on modded consoles and possibly other platforms. Lockpick, which is still available on Github (who knows for how long), is currently the only legal way to emulate the Switch so that many users will be driven towards piracy by this move.

And the developers of the Skyline Switch emulator on Android are shutting down development because of Nintendo. The developers posted this on Discord: “It is with great sadness that we bring you this news. Recently, Nintendo has issued a DMCA takedown notice against Lockpick RCM, which will likely come into effect on Monday. Lockpick is a core part of legally dumping keys from the Switch. They claim it circumvents their copy protection (TPMs) and violates their copyright. We find ourselves in a position where we are potentially violating their copyright by continuing to develop our project, Skyline, by dumping keys from our Switches.”

The timing is clear: The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom has leaked (released on Friday) and can now be emulated on sufficiently powerful machines. But Lockpick has been around for years. The Yuzu developers have yet to respond to the matter, and the Ryujinx team has said they will continue to work on it. Until then, Nintendo might be able to interpret the term backup copy. No infringement occurs if the users don’t share them with anyone else. However, for Nintendo, this scenario seems to be impossible to understand…

Source: WCCFTech