Nintendo has managed to take down 8,535 GitHub repositories containing code from Switch emulator Yuzu with a single DMCA notice. Yup, after reaching a settlement with Tropic Haze, the company behind the emulator, the process of totally scrubbing any clones or copies of it from the net is in full swing.
If you’re out of the loop the company behind that plumber and the little pink blob’s decision to sue Yuzu’s creators in court earlier this year quickly resulted in a decision in Nintendo’s favour that meant Tropic Haze had to pay the publisher $2.4 million of “monetary relief”. It was also barred from offering or promoting Yuzu or its source code going forwards – leading to the emulator being “discontinued, effectively immediately”.
Now, as reported by TorrentFreak, Nintendo lodged a DMCA notice with GitHub – a platform that allows lots of developers to store and share code – eariler this week, and it’s resulted in a lot of Yuzu respositories being taken down.
The notice originally picked out over 100-ish respositories that Nintendo suggested were providing access to either Yuzu or code based on it, with the company arguing that emulator “circumvents Nintendo’s technological protection measures and runs illegal copies of Nintendo Switch games” – much like it did in the lawsuit. However, the notice ended up affecting more respositiories than were singled out.
“Because the reported network that contained the allegedly infringing content was larger than one hundred (100) 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, inclusive of the parent repository,” the platform outlined in its response.
So, a pretty efficient zapping then. GitHub does suggest that it’s reached out to all of the respository owners affected, to provide them info on how to submit a DMCA Counter Notice and offered to connect them with legal resources.
In similar news, Discord seemingly banned some developers of other Nintendo Switch emulators last month.