Nintendo’s latest DMCA takedown notice eliminates 8,535 Yuzu emulator copies in one go

A little under a month after Nintendo successfully brought an end to open-source Switch emulator Yuzu, the company has managed to wipe out 8,535 Yuzu GitHub repositories – containing code from the original emulator – all at once with a single DMCA takedown notice.

As reported by TorrentFreak, the culling occured after Nintendo filed a DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) notice with GitHub earlier this week, in which the company specifically targeted a number of repositories it claimed “provide access to the Yuzu emulator or code based on the yuzu emulator [which] illegally circumvents Nintendo’s technological protection measures and runs illegal copies of Nintendo Switch games”.

And that single takedown notice has had a domino affect. As GitHub explained in its public response to Nintendo’s DMCA submission, “Because the reported network that contained the allegedly infringing content was larger that one hundred repositories, and the submitter alleged that all or most of the forks were infringing to the same extent as the parent repository, GitHub processed the takedown notice against the entire network of 8,535 repositories, including of the parent repository.”

GitHub’s notice added that all parent repository owners had been contacted to give them an opportunity to make changes, to instruct them on how to file a DMCA Counter Notice, and to offer legal resources if required.

Nintendo’s GitHub wipeout comes just under a month after the developer of Yuzu, Tropic Haze, agreed to pay the company $2.4m in damages and cease all operations in response to Nintendo’s recent lawsuit. Tropic Haze also faced a permanent injunction preventing it from “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”, as well as “other software or devices that circumvent Nintendo’s technical protection measures”. That meant the Yuzu team’s 3DS emulator, Citra, was also impacted by the settlement.

Nintendo emulators have, of course, been enjoying a bit of a boom with the wider public of late, thanks to recent changes to Apple’s iOS App Store policy allowing video game emulator apps onto its storefront for the first time.