The Japanese company says that “there is no legal way to use Yuzu”, but this is wrong!
Although the Yuzu emulator already existed in 2018 (the other popular solution is called Ryujinx), it was The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom that finally led to a lawsuit from Nintendo’s US subsidiary, because the emulator’s developers proudly stated a day after the game’s release that it ran at full speed on most hardware without requiring any hacks.
Nintendo’s lawsuit describes the emulator as “a piece of software that allows users to illegally play pirated video games released only for a specific console on a general-purpose computing device. As an example, the big N cited The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, despite the fact that Yuzu has openly asked everyone on its Discord server to ignore piracy on several occasions. Still, Nintendo points the finger at the emulator: “Infringing copies of the game that were circulating online could be played in Yuzu, and those copies were successfully downloaded from pirate sites over a million times before the game was released and made available for legitimate purchase by Nintendo. Many of the pirate sites specifically noted the ability to play the game file in Yuzu.”
In 1999, Sony sued Connectix, makers of the PS1 emulator Virtual Game Station, for copyright infringement and violation of the company’s intellectual property, but Sony lost the case. The court said, in part, that “Sony understandably seeks to control the market for devices that play games that Sony produces or licenses,” but ruled that copyright law “does not grant such a monopoly.”
According to the lawsuit, the damage caused to Nintendo by Yuzu is “manifest and irreparable,” but it’s seeking redress, including a permanent injunction against the emulator and the forfeiture of the yuzu-emu.org website, as well as monetary damages, which could be extremely steep: Nintendo is seeking statutory damages of $2,500 per violation of the DMCA’s anti-circumvention and anti-trafficking provisions, and $150,000 per violation of Nintendo’s copyright, although it may opt for actual damages to be determined at trial. So they want a TON of money.
However, we come back to the fact that Nintendo says that Yuzu cannot legally be used to run Switch games, and the Japanese company has no idea that in the US, the law allows backup copies for personal use. So if someone bought the Zelda game in question to run it on their PC, they’re NOT VIOLATING ANY RIGHTS. So that’s a refutation of Nintendo’s statement. It’s pointless for the company to be upset that spoilers were leaked online because of the leak of the game, but that was in the past. There’s no point in dwelling on it now…
The bottom line is that if Nintendo wins, emulation is dead.
