Nintendo takes down more than 8,500 clones of Switch emulator Yuzu with a single DMCA notice

Nintendo has taken down more than 8,500 clones of Switch emulator Yuzu with a single DMCA notice.

As reported by TorrentFreak, the company issued a DMCA notice at GitHub this week, which led to GitHub removing 8,535 repositories containing versions of the emulator.

In a statement made on GitHub’s page, the site explained that since Nintendo had pointed out more than 100 repositories that it alleged were offering the emulator, GitHub applied the same action to all of them.

“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,” it stated.

The speed and size of the takedowns appear to have been affected by Nintendo’s decision to sue Tropic Haze, the creator of Yuzu, in February.

Nintendo had claimed that Yuzu was “facilitating piracy at a colossal scale”, and Tropic Haze settled the lawsuit just weeks later, agreeing to pay $2.4 million in damages.

As part of the judgment by the US District Court of Rhode Island, Tropic Haze was issued with a permanent injunction preventing it from offering or marketing Yuzu or any of its source code in the future.

Other users have seemingly taken it upon themselves to redistribute variations of the emulator via GitHub, hence this week’s mass takedown.

In its initial lawsuit documents, Nintendo claimed that last year’s biggest Switch release, The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, was pirated over one million times in the week and a half before its release in May 2023.

“With Yuzu in hand, nothing stops a user from obtaining and playing unlawful copies of virtually any game made for the Nintendo Switch, all without paying a dime to Nintendo or to any of the hundreds of other game developers and publishers making and selling games for