If you’ve ever seen a Steam Deck playing a Legend of Zelda game, chances are you were seeing the Yuzu emulator at work.
It also wants to take away its domain names, URLs, chatrooms, and social media presence; hand yuzu-emu.org over to Nintendo; and even seize and destroy its hard drives to help wipe out the emulator.
While there’s legal precedent that suggests it’s okay to reverse engineer a console and develop an emulator that uses none of the company’s source code, those cases are roughly a quarter of a century old or more — it gets trickier when we’re talking about multiple layers of modern encryption and the copyrighted BIOSes that Yuzu and other modern emulators require to run.
DMCA Section 1201(a)(2) bans products “primarily designed or produced for the purpose of circumventing a technological measure that effectively controls access” to a copyrighted work.
“The important thing is that Nintendo is bringing the case as a DMCA circumvention claim,” says Richard Hoeg, a business attorney who hosts the Virtual Legality podcast.
Many small bands of developers have axed their projects after being approached by Nintendo, and it wouldn’t be surprising if Yuzu settled.
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