It’s no secret that Nintendo absolutely loves its own IPs. It will do anything in its power to protect them and has always been ready to drop waves of DMCA requests and litigation on anyone who comes even remotely close to infringing on its properties.
And, now, it’s on a spree again, having issued 400 DMCA takedown notices to various GitHub repositories. As GameSpot reports, Nintendo specifically targeted Switch emulators, such as the Suyu emulator, itself a successor to a previous emulator, Yuzu, which Nintendo also struck down last year. Apparently, 311 repositories of the 401 total were tied to Suyu, as it seems Nintendo really doesn’t want emulators to exist on the market.
While emulation is technically not illegal, what Nintendo is claiming is that emulators such as Suyu allow users to illegally access Nintendo Switch games by bypassing the console’s TPMs and authorization keys.
“Specifically, these Nintendo Switch emulators illegally circumvent Nintendo’s TPMs in order to run illegal copies of Nintendo Switch games,” the company explained.
“Nintendo Switch games are encrypted using proprietary cryptographic keys (prod.keys), which protect against unauthorized access to and copying of the copyrighted games. During operation, the emulators at the reported repositories necessarily use unauthorized copies of these cryptographic keys to decrypt unauthorized copies of Nintendo Switch games, or ROMs, at or immediately before runtime without Nintendo’s authorization,” it added.
So, while it’s not targeting emulation per se, Nintendo has a bone to pick with how the emulators operate, i.e., how they handle prod.keys to decrypt data in Nintendo Switch games.
I’m going to play the devil’s advocate here and just point out that, while Nintendo loves throwing the word “illegal” there, emulation users could very well be using their own, legally owned, bought and paid-for copies of Nintendo Switch games. If ripping the data from them and thus making that data available to be used via an emulator is illegal, then that poses a big question of whether you actually own your physical copy.
If you do, you should be allowed to do with that data anything you want, including decrypting it and running it on alternate hardware. But if you don’t, then that’s a big issue of ownership right there, and it’s not like we haven’t had a lot of those lately.
