FINDINGS OF FACT:

  1. Nintendo of America Inc. markets and distributes electronic video game consoles, games, and accessories developed by Nintendo Co., Ltd. (together, “Nintendo”), including the Nintendo Switch.

  2. The Nintendo Switch and Nintendo Switch video games contain technological measures that effectively control access to copyrighted works and protect rights of copyright owners, including Nintendo (the “Technological Measures”). Nintendo owns valid copyrights in works protected by the Technological Measures, including its video games and the Nintendo Switch operating system.

  3. Yuzu, a video game emulator, circumvents the Technological Measures and allows for the play of encrypted Nintendo Switch games on devices other than a Nintendo Switch. For example, Yuzu executes code that decrypts Nintendo Switch video games (including component files) immediately before and during runtime using unauthorized copies of Nintendo Switch cryptographic keys. Yuzu is primarily designed to circumvent and play Nintendo Switch games. In the ordinary course of its operation with those games, Yuzu requires the Nintendo Switch’s proprietary cryptographic keys to gain access to and play Nintendo Switch games.

  4. Developing or distributing software, including Yuzu, that in its ordinary course functions only when cryptographic keys are integrated without authorization, violates the Digital Millennium Copyright Act’s prohibition on trafficking in devices that circumvent effective technological measures, because the software is primarily designed for the purpose of circumventing technological measures.

NOW THEREFORE, IT IS HEREBY ORDERED that:

  1. Plaintiff is awarded judgment against Defendant in the amount of US$2,400,000.

IT IS HEREBY ORDERED that:

  1. A permanent injunction is entered against Defendant enjoining it and its members, agents, servants, employees, independent contractors, successors, assigns, and all those acting in privity or under its control from:

a. Offering to the public, providing, marketing, advertising, promoting, selling, testing, hosting, cloning, distributing, or otherwise trafficking in Yuzu or any source code or features of Yuzu;

b. Offering to the public, providing, marketing, advertising, promoting, selling, testing, hosting, cloning, distributing, or otherwise trafficking in other software or devices that circumvent Nintendo’s technical protection measures, including without limitation by using unauthorized copies of Nintendo’s proprietary cryptographic keys to decrypt Nintendo’s video games (or component files);

c. Directly or indirectly infringing, or causing, enabling, facilitating, encouraging, promoting, inducing, or participating in the infringement of, any of Nintendo’s copyrights, trademarks, or other intellectual property, whether now in existence or hereafter created, including but not limited to the unauthorized reproduction, display, public performance, or distribution of any of Nintendo’s copyrighted video games or operating systems, which includes the emulation of Nintendo’s video games;

d. Committing any other violation of Nintendo’s intellectual property rights, worldwide, whether now existing or hereafter created; and

e. Effecting assignments or transfers, forming new entities or associations, or using any other device for the purpose of circumventing or otherwise avoiding the prohibitions set forth in subparagraphs (a)-(c).

  1. The Court further enjoins all third parties acting in active concert and participation with Defendant from:

a. Offering to the public, providing, marketing, advertising, promoting, selling, testing, hosting, cloning, distributing, or otherwise trafficking in Yuzu or any source code or features of Yuzu; and

b. Offering to the public, providing, marketing, advertising, promoting, selling, testing, hosting, cloning, distributing, or otherwise trafficking in other software or devices that circumvent Nintendo’s technical protection measures, including without limitation by using unauthorized copies of Nintendo’s proprietary cryptographic keys to decrypt Nintendo’s video games (or component files).

  1. The Court further enjoins Defendant, its members, officers, agents, servants, employees, independent contractors, successors, assigns, and all third parties acting in active concert and participation with Defendant—including but not limited to any domain name registrars or registries holding or listing Defendant’s Website—from supporting or facilitating access to any or all domain names, URLs, websites (including, without limitation, YUZU-EMU.ORG), including any successor websites, chatrooms, and other social media websites or apps through which Defendant or its members trafficked or continue to traffic in circumvention devices or software that circumvent Plaintiff’s technological protection measures, through which Defendant or its members infringed or continue to infringe Plaintiff’s rights under the Copyright Act, or which themselves infringe Plaintiff’s rights under the DMCA or Copyright Act.

  2. The Court further orders that Defendant and its members, officers, agents, servants, employees, independent contractors, successors, assigns, attorneys, and all third parties acting in active concert or participation with Defendant—including but not limited to any domain name registrars or registries holding or listing Defendant’s Website:

a. surrender, and permanently cease to use, the domain name YUZU- EMU.ORG, any variant or successor thereof controlled by Defendant or its members, and any other website or system that Defendant or its members owns or controls, directly or indirectly, that involves or harms Nintendo’s Intellectual Property; and

b. to the extent the domain is under Defendant or its members’ custody or control, or under the control of registrars or registries with notice of this Order, immediately transfer the domain name YUZU-EMU.ORG, any variant or successor thereof controlled by Defendant or its members, and any other website or system that Defendant or its members own or control, directly or indirectly, that involves Nintendo’s Intellectual Property, to Plaintiff’s control.

  1. The Court further orders, pursuant to 17 U.S.C. §§ 503 & 1203, upon Nintendo’s election and to the extent controlled by Defendant or its members, the destruction by deletion of all circumvention devices, including all copies of Yuzu, all circumvention tools used for developing or using Yuzu—such as TegraRcmGUI, Hekate, Atmosphère, Lockpick_RCM, NDDumpTool, nxDumpFuse, and TegraExplorer, and all copies of Nintendo cryptographic keys including the prod.keys, and all other electronic material within Defendant or its members’ custody, possession, or control that violate Nintendo’s rights under the DMCA or infringe copyrights owned or exclusively licensed by Nintendo.

  2. The Court further orders, pursuant to 17 U.S.C. §§ 503 & 1203, upon Nintendo’s election and to the extent controlled by Defendant or its members, the handing over to Nintendo of all physical circumvention devices that circumvent or attempt to circumvent the Technological Measures, and of modified Nintendo hardware, including modified Nintendo Switch consoles.

  3. With the exception of paragraphs 5 and 6 herein, the Court further enjoins Defendant and its members from destroying, transferring, altering, moving, returning, concealing, or in any manner hiding evidence relevant to the matters set forth herein—including any and all video game consoles, video games (or constituent elements thereof, such as video game files), ROMs, and video game emulators (and any digital files comprising the same) that infringe Nintendo’s intellectual property rights, and/or which were used in connection with developing or using Yuzu—unless authorized by Nintendo in writing. Defendant and its members are also enjoined from allowing evidence to be destroyed, altered, or concealed by third parties if the evidence is under Defendant or its members’ possession, custody, or control.

  4. This permanent injunction constitutes a binding court order, and any violations of this order by Defendant or its members will subject them to the full scope of this Court’s contempt authority, including punitive, coercive, and monetary sanctions.

  5. This permanent injunction is binding against Defendant and its members worldwide, without regard to the territorial scope of the specific intellectual property rights asserted in the Complaint of the above-captioned case, and may be enforced in any court of competent jurisdiction wherever Defendant, its members, its assets, or its members’ assets may be found.

  6. This Court shall maintain continuing jurisdiction over this action for the purpose of enforcing this Final Judgment and Permanent Injunction. Plaintiff is not required to post any bond or security in connection with the Final Judgment and Permanent Injunction, and Defendant has permanently, irrevocably, and fully waived any right to request a bond or security.

IT IS FURTHER ORDERED that Judgment be entered in this matter in accordance with the terms set forth above, and that the clerk be, and hereby is, directed to close this matter.

IT IS SO ORDERED.

  • normalmente
    ·
    edit-2
    9 months ago

    To think this all started because of a hardware exploit on older switch models. What a disaster.

    Boycott all forms of nintendo products or you're a lib. Even illegal copies. Enough is enough.

    • TheFinalCapitalist [he/him]
      ·
      9 months ago

      I've only ever pirated nintendo titles, life time nintendo boycotter. i was never going to buy a console to play 4 different game franchises no matter how fun those 4 games might be

    • LibsEatPoop [any]
      hexagon
      ·
      edit-2
      9 months ago

      They got a lawyer. The lawyer looked at their books and their records and recommended they settle asap. Yuzu devs probably had DMs openly talking about piracy of TotK being good for Yuzu, which would come out in discovery. Also, the meat of this case hinged on pretty technical aspects around Yuzu breaking Nintendo’s hardware protections on the Switch. Arguing that they had the right to do so would be possible (unlike what Nintendo and its shills would have you believe) but it would be long and expensive. Coupled with the (probable) DMs of piracy, going to court and losing would be a major risk.

      What this doesn’t mean is that emulation is illegal - because this didn’t go to court. That’s exactly what I was pointing out in this comment, when I was ranting against Twitter geniuses who expected Yuzu to fucking take Nintendo to court and WIN.

      • SuperZutsuki [they/them]
        ·
        9 months ago

        Does this affect Ryujinx as well or are they not doing the same thing Yuzu was?

        • SSJ2Marx
          ·
          edit-2
          9 months ago

          Ryujinx does the same thing so I think they're in danger too - but IIRC they shut down any discussion of TotK when it leaked and at the very least try to maintain a teeny bit of opsec, which should be beneficial if Nintendo comes after them.

          • blakeus12 [they/them, he/him]
            ·
            9 months ago

            this is what I will never get, why the hell didn't the yuzu devs stay 1000000% anon, because nintendo are a bunch of ravenous dogs that ruin people's lives for anything that makes them angry.

      • VILenin [he/him]
        ·
        edit-2
        9 months ago

        Twitter geniuses who expected Yuzu to fucking take Nintendo to court and WIN.

        How exactly did they think that was supposed to happen? They engaged in/enabled piracy (and I'm sure Nintendo would have argued this) - which is illegal - a fact beyond a shadow of a doubt. The only way you win a piracy case is by proving you didn't do it. Did they expect this to make it to the supreme court who would then repeal copyright and antipiracy laws? I can't imagine the naivete required to believe you can one-weird-trick your way out of this slam-dunk case.

      • LeylaLove [she/her, love/loves]
        ·
        9 months ago

        They also had a patreon paywalled version of Yuzu that brought in 30k a month, so the damages of actually losing the case would be nuclear. Last time I heard about a team like this winning was Bleem! back in the 90s. Bleem! went bankrupt and they SWEPT the case that Sony had against them.

    • DayOfDoom [any, any]
      ·
      9 months ago

      How does Yuzu have 2.4 million to pay the settlement but no money or will to pay for lawyers?

      • BountifulEggnog [she/her]
        ·
        9 months ago

        Paying 2.4m to lawyers doesn't guarantee you won't be paying more. Gary Bowser just did web admin stuff (for another project) and is going to be dealing with nintendo forever.

        • DayOfDoom [any, any]
          ·
          9 months ago

          I am not a lawyer, but if you pay me 2.4 million dollars I guarantee to win in any legal case. This is a standing offer to the users of this siteforum.

      • sawne128 [he/him]
        ·
        9 months ago

        Some dude in another thread says they won't have to pay because they're an LLC. I don't know if that's true though.

    • Tankiedesantski [he/him]
      ·
      9 months ago

      Many common law places have a mechanism called a summary judgment. It's an expedited hearing you ask for when you think that your case is so strong and the other side's is so non-existent that you can conceed all the facts (i.e. accept for sake of argument that your opponent's version of events is completely true) and still win.

  • wombat [none/use name]
    ·
    9 months ago

    nintendrones are the most brainwashed corporate bootlickers I've ever encountered

  • YearOfTheCommieDesktop [they/them]
    ·
    9 months ago

    Okay cool so the source is still out there I assume. This will stop nobody. Where's the new site hosted in a less dogshit jurisdiction?

    • doublepepperoni [none/use name]
      ·
      edit-2
      9 months ago

      It will stop anyone who worked on it previously and will make anyone located in international-community-1 international-community-2 consider if they want to get sued by Nintendo

      You're not gonna get nice githubs, wikis, Discords, subreddits and other places were devs, volunteers and users can come together to develop, ask questions and troubleshoot. Any big future Nintendo emulation projects will probably start resembling the game cracking community instead

      • YearOfTheCommieDesktop [they/them]
        ·
        9 months ago

        Eh you'll probably still get wikis and subreddits but you're right, it will be disruptive. I don't think it will go as far underground as cracking, but people will definitely need to practice better opsec and central meeting places/sites will have to be hosted overseas

      • YearOfTheCommieDesktop [they/them]
        ·
        9 months ago

        "but we arent dirty criminals like those russians we're legitimate preservationists with a moral opposition to piracy"

        that seems to be a sizable percentage of the people involved in these projects, or at least they claim such. I guess they might feel like going to russian servers off the bat undermines their "emulators are legal and respectable" argument

  • Infamousblt [any]
    ·
    9 months ago

    So yuzu has its dumb auto update thing. How do I turn that off so that it doesn't reach out to servers that somehow shut it down. The version I've got works fine I don't need to update it ever again

    • DayOfDoom [any, any]
      ·
      9 months ago

      If you have Windows, you could block it via Window's default Firewall by blocking its outward internet connection.

      • Infamousblt [any]
        ·
        edit-2
        9 months ago

        I did try this, and I couldn't find it in the rules. What I did instead was found the folders it uses and zipped them up, that way in the future I've got a snapshot. For now when you launch it, it fails to connect to the servers and it just moves on. If you launch the EXE directly without launching the maintenance tool first or the windows shortcut, it also just launches. So for now it seems OK.

        What I also ended up doing was finding the actual shortcut in Windows, and edited the "Target" from "C:\Users\myname\AppData\Local\yuzu\maintenancetool.exe --launcher "C:\Users\myname\AppData\Local\yuzu\yuzu-windows-msvc/yuzu.exe" to "C:\Users\myname\AppData\Local\yuzu\yuzu-windows-msvc/yuzu.exe" and that also seems to skip the maintenance tool.

    • Tabitha ☢️[she/her]
      ·
      9 months ago

      did they actually make an auto-update thing that disables the copy of the program on the user's device?

      • Infamousblt [any]
        ·
        9 months ago

        They didn't, today the auto updater just reaches out to the now defunct servers, errors, and then moves on. If I was Nintendo though the first thing I would do now that I own those domains is have that callout delete the application, or push some malicious update. So the first thing everyone with Yuzu should do is back up their local copy away from where the updater can reach it, and bypass and/or block the updater entirely.

  • PorkrollPosadist [he/him, they/them]
    ·
    edit-2
    9 months ago

    Looks like I've got the git history of Yuzu up to Dec. 3 2023.

    Update: nabbed a copy from this mirror. Last commit is 4 days old. Get it while it's hot.

    Update: much more extensive archive: https://archive.org/download/github.com_yuzu-emu_bundles_20240304

    Git bundles for all non-empty code and wiki repositories under https://github.com/yuzu-emu as of 2024-03-04 18:20 UTC

      • LibsEatPoop [any]
        hexagon
        ·
        9 months ago

        They released a statement on Twitter that might as well have been written on gunpoint

        We write today to inform you that yuzu and yuzu's support of Citra are being discontinued, effective immediately.

        yuzu and its team have always been against piracy. We started the projects in good faith, out of passion for Nintendo and its consoles and games, and were not intending to cause harm. But we see now that because our projects can circumvent Nintendo's technological protection measures and allow users to play games outside of authorized hardware, they have led to extensive piracy. In particular, we have been deeply disappointed when users have used our software to leak game content prior to its release and ruin the experience for legitimate purchasers and fans.

        We have come to the decision that we cannot continue to allow this to occur. Piracy was never our intention, and we believe that piracy of video games and on video game consoles should end. Effective today, we will be pulling our code repositories offline, discontinuing our Patreon accounts and Discord servers, and, soon, shutting down our websites. We hope our actions will be a small step toward ending piracy of all creators' works.

        • booty [he/him]
          ·
          9 months ago

          ruin the experience for legitimate purchasers and fans

          🙄

          • NephewAlphaBravo [he/him]
            ·
            9 months ago

            I have Dead Cells and Dead Cells (pirated) on my switch and I can confirm that the first one got worse the instant I installed the second one

          • invo_rt [he/him]
            ·
            9 months ago

            What ruins my experience is the only "legal" method of playing Nintendo's nonsense is outdated, midrange mobile processing from literally a decade ago.

        • yuritopia [any]
          ·
          9 months ago

          This definitely reads like a lawyer-written statement but I don't think they're lying about being anti-piracy, I kinda remember them always being cringe like that.

  • Rojo27 [he/him]
    ·
    9 months ago

    Well this sucks. I could have sworn that the precedent before this was that emulators were fine since technically they don't infringe on IP laws be themselves.

    • save_vs_death [they/them]
      ·
      9 months ago

      The emulators themselves are ok, what the problem is is breaking the encryption that nintendo uses for its ROMs.

      • Infamousblt [any]
        ·
        9 months ago

        This emulator was still probably fine, but there's no way a few guys in a garage are going to win against Nintendo in court, even with a good lawyer. They just can't afford it. They can win repeatedly forever but they'll eventually run out of funds as Nintendo just sues and appeals and sues again and appeals again and again and again forever. The court system doesn't care about what's legal, it cares about who can afford to smash the other party into financial oblivion first.

        Anyway I'm sure someone will just pick up the source and carry on.

    • SSJ2Marx
      ·
      edit-2
      9 months ago

      The DMCA was passed after the previous judgement on emulators was passed, and this case used very specific language in order to invoke the DMCA and not reference the law that the previous decision was based on.

  • VILenin [he/him]
    ·
    edit-2
    9 months ago

    I don't know why people keep getting shocked that Nintendo wins in the courts. You're never, ever going to win a piracy case (which this basically would've been) against the company whose shit you pirated (ok, enabled to be). Please stop hosting servers in the west.