Nintendo has deleted over 8,500 Yuzu clones or backupsthe Nintendo Switch emulator, with a single DMCA request sent to GitHub.
According to a statement from the platform, Nintendo’s request involved more than 100 repositories (GitHub’s digital archives). However, given that most of the forks (a project that starts from the source code of another already existing one) linked to them were also infringing to the same extent as the originals, a total of 8,535 repositories were deleted in one fell swoop.
“Because the reported network containing the allegedly infringing content was larger than one hundred repositories, and the reporting author (Nintendo) claimed that all or most forks violated the same extent as the main repository, GitHub has Takedown notice applied against the entire network of 8,535 repositoriesincluding the main repository,” reads the GitHub statement.
“The reported repositories offer e provide access to the Yuzu emulator or code based on the Yuzu emulator“, wrote a Nintendo representative in the takedown request. “The Yuzu emulator is primarily designed for playing Nintendo Switch games. In particular, it illegally circumvents Nintendo’s technological protection measures and makes illegal copies of Nintendo Switch games.”
Nintendo’s fight against Yuzu’s emulators continues
This move by Nintendo is a direct consequence of end of Yuzu. The company sued Tropical Haze in February, claiming they were “facilitating piracy on a colossal scale.” Finally, the authors of this Nintendo Switch emulator decided to settle and pay 2.4 million dollars in damages, with Yuzu definitively closing its doors.
Shortly thereafter, several appeared online Yuzu’s spiritual heirssuch as Sudachi and Suyu, derived from the same open source source code, while on GitHub a series of variants, clones or backups of the emulator were becoming popular, at least until today.
