Nintendo has yet again issued a series of DMCA takedowns across GitHub that specfically target popular Nintendo Switch emulators. Nintendo's reasoning is to protect its copyrighted IP and prevent unauthorized distribution.

It's common knowledge that most emulators worth their weight do not themselves include any cryptographic keys - with most requiring users provide their own. However, Nintendo has previously insisted that such emulators facilitate copyright infringement rather than claiming them to be illegal as such, and as of now, no court has formally ruled that using or distributing emulators without games violates copyright.

Of course, emulators offer many benefits rather than simply "facilitating piracy". One of the big ones, being of course; game preservation - allowing future generations to experience games that might no longer be available for purchase or that have been delisted. Emulators can also be a great help to users with accessiblity needs, providing alternate input options for those that need it.

What do you think? Is Nintendo justified in its crusade against emulators or should they take a step back?

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[smilodon]

But my free games...

 

[AndorfRequissa]

the flaw here is your failed attempt to refute. "If a company is as popular as Nintendo, shouldn't it be scrutinized more, not less?"

No excuses. I can isolate down to helping one specific person out of well over three hundred I meet with in person daily, with zero backup. That includes years where I work at least twenty-three and a half hours per day.

I also address every concern, every parent, and every student, etc. in the education business I own. And I had no problems keeping it open during Covid, whereas larger organizations that had far more revenue (due to extortion) went under.

If Nintendo can afford to make money, it can afford one-on-one services. Even corrupt educational centers, which have far less revenue than Nintendo and over a hundred thousand, and even close to half a million more students than faculty, can afford that and must provide in-depth support to each, in person, _all_ of the time, by law. But, Nintendo failed, just like your argument.

That's why I can distinguish between the near one hundred percent majority opinion that tkd is for foot-tag, and even the AI that gathers those results internationally, versus what I know _is_ True about Tae-Kwon-Do being the best way to learn how to punch effectively, by far:

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I can also distinguish, across the entire world, Who is a born-again Believer, and who is not, in an instant. Thus I knew you were addicted to profanity and sensed it in The Spirit before I even read your message; We sense each other in The Spirit. Nintendo does things the way of men: _that_ is their intentional flaw, as well as yours:

"But Jesus beheld them, and said unto them, With men this is impossible; but with God all things are possible."


Speaking of how the cookie crumbles, my ability to one-shot all of the best combat sports champions of all time is _because_ I make no excuses. If you wish to whine about me outpunching the coach of world boxing champion Aaron Pryor and karate association world champion Jerry Trimble, and his four best adult students, at the same time in a very tight space, using only Tae-Kwon-Do punches, and holding back on them severely even under the effects of a brown recluse bite, and having a six hundred million dollar contract offer, and _still_ refusing what you are incapable of being offered in the first place, it is because you felt too lazy to put in the effort; that's just how the Boxing gloves crumble from the inside when I use them and how the bags fly: by me doing things God's Way, rather than man's way.

"profanity is reserved for the uneducated and undisciplined" - A Believing Nineteen Sixties Green Beret, Chemist, and Medical Physicist that looks about forty years old right now, and says Tae-Kwon-Do is the best strictly because it is the most obedient one to God out of all Martial Arts, and has himself taken them all _except_ Tae-Kwon-Do/tae-kwon-do and applied them to hand-to-hand combat training with the U.S. military for Vietnam Tunnel Rat Warfare.

i always appreciate your open honest opinions. i learned greco-roman wrestling as a kid and the differences between freestyle wrestling techniques. unless it is a sanctioned sports battle when u get into a fight if ur defense is good enough to get close to someone and control their limbs and points of center then punches and kicks become worthless.

when i was in high school one of my friends was an instructor in a tae-kwon-do gym. he didnt have a fighters mentality but knew the moves and had put in years a practice and had a decent amount of trophies to back his tae-kwon-do skills. one day he said something to me that didnt quite sit well and i told him id beat his ass. he got into his stance and i took him down and humiliated him. a couple months later i saw the same thing happen to him from another wrestler who had the fighters instinct. just knowing how to fight doesnt mean as much as having the fighters mentality imo. from a far it is easy to judge sometimes who has it and who doesnt.

i went on a business trip to el salvedore some years back and the day i got there the country went into martial law over some bombings and gang warfare that was going on. everyone told me not to go out and stay in the hotel that the president of the country had to flee the presidential palace and stay at because it was so unsafe. i went everywhere i wanted to. just looking into peoples eyes is most the time all i need to move around. if u want to attack me u better be quick with weapons because thats the only way im going down without taking someone else with me. and just looking in my eyes if someone is thinking about doing something has been enough to keep me out of lots of fights in life.

cheers mate. keep fighting the good fight u do.

 

[MeowthBlep]

why didn’t I think Nintendo would do this some day

Anyway prepare for 9 billion more forks

 

[MPRTwice]

The classroom analogy doesn't work that well here. A teacher is only managing a small group of people, barely 50. That group is already heavily restricted in their freedoms, and the punishments for breaking the rules are metted out immediately. As a teacher, you know how to differentiate the best from the good, make investigations into each person and determine the guilty from the innocent.
How do you think Nintendo can do that? How would they separate the guilty from the innocent

Post automatically merged: Feb 15, 2026

There's no way you can pirate any switch 2 game on the switch 2. The only way to play pirated switch 1 games on the switch 2 is to use the mig, and at that point, you are actively pirating a game, because it's been confirmed that playing your own dumped games on the mig doesn't can't any problems on your switch 2. The software protections on the switch 2 are more or less the same on the switch 1. You run a game with a flagged cert, your license is revoked. Same with the switch 1.
Also, there no way to brick your switch 2 while playing any game on it. Or even using the console. Your console is only dead if you mess up with the hardware yourself. Even a banned switch 2 is not dead.

classrooms actually work well with Good Influence everywhere. teachers are dealing with human souls; doctors merely keep physical bodies from dying sooner, though that is still appreciated. And those souls now lead huge companies overseeing well over ten major cities and their buildings in one country alone. I should not have to go into too much detail over how a skyscraper or car engine series designed poorly can lead to catastrophic physical deaths internationally, which is prevented by showing Ganas to leaders in a classroom.

Emulators have procedures that they already use to help mitigate theft: citron discord, for instance, requires proof of ownership. They made a greater attempt to separate innocent from guilty as a ragtag team of coders than a large professional company, and with far fewer resources and far less decades of time to come up with feasible solutions: no excuses from Nintendo.

Even the aliens parody of the vietnam conflict reflects this mindset:

"Hudson: Seventeen days? Hey man, I don't wanna rain on your parade, but we're not gonna last seventeen hours! These things are going to come here like they did before and they're gonna... [starts rambling unintelligibly]
Ripley: Hudson! HUDSON! [Hudson stops talking] This little girl survived longer than that with no weapons and no training [to Newt] Right?"

switch 2 emulation is understandably not widely available at this point, as it was with the switch in the earlier years.

 

[The Catboy]

"can be used for" and "are used for" are two different things

You are splitting hairs; my point doesn’t change regardless because your argument is still a bad argument. There are a few reasons why
1: Proving a negative, we can neither prove nor disprove your claim. There’s absolutely no evidence or way to gain evidence that 99.999% of the time emulators are used for piracy. Thus, the same logic that came to that conclusion can still apply to literally anything else that has the potential for piracy.
2: Enabling piracy is not a crime. This is why emulators, CFWs, jailbreaking, etc. are fully legal. As well, to make the process of enabling piracy a crime would still make your operating system a crime. Your OS (regardless of what you are running) does not stop you from pirating. Android, iOS, Linux, BSD, etc. all have emulators as part of their app distribution systems. Windows and MacOS allow emulators to be installed.
3: No OS stops you from pirating software, media, and so on. There’s a high chance you’ve used your OS in the process to download an MP3 or some form of media you didn’t pay for at some point in your life. Meaning that an OS would meet the same kind of “99.999%” used in piracy.

My point is, even if emulators are used for piracy, that doesn’t change anything, as enabling piracy is not a crime. If distributed without copyrighted material, then it doesn’t violate copyright. Neither Nintendo nor any other company would be in the right to go after emulators if they comply with the law by not themselves distributing copyrighted material.

 

[DuoForce]

Now imagine Nintendo's legal budget being put towards their games

 

[Kioku]

ITT: False equivalencies, shallow arguments, veiled deception, and all around arrogance. Yup, it's a thread about piracy.

The only way these DMCAs hold water is if there's copyrighted code incorporated into it, or they're distributing copyrighted/protected content. The intent of the software really should never have been allowed to become the main argument. Bleem set a precedent that's going widely ignored in the modern era, which is just weird.

 

[Exnor]

Nintendo needs to be challenged in court. They have zero legal stance here (assuming none of those emulators use any part of their IP).

I wonder if a dev in a country with good legal support could take them on? Nintendo is basically bullying their way because they assume no one has the money and time to take them to court.

Anyway, they can do all the bogus (or even legit) DMCA takedowns they want, that will not stop the emulation scene from continue. People will just do this in a more obfuscated way.

F*ck corporate greed!

 

[Ampersound]

What else do you think emulators are used for? other than running 100% piracy software. It’s not as though you can say they are used for homebrew purposes

Here is a simple example.

I own a gamecube and Mario Sunshine, and wanted to take a longer trip in a foreign country.
Naturally I can't bring a whole setup with me, so I installed Dolphin on a laptop.
Now I was able to 100% legally play the Eclipse romhack on the go, because of an emulator.

Also: Super Smash Bros. Melee is mainly played on emulator nowadays.
Because the emulator adds a full online service with rollback netcode.
Good luck getting something this stable and competitively viable from Nintendo Online.

 

[Captain-Z]

Well remmeber none of these emulators they just took down were custom. They were all forks of emulators they already legally took down.

To be fair Yuzu and Ryujinx were not deemed illegal in court, they settled with Nintendo be for they could.

Unlike you and half the people in this thread, I'm not going to pretend to be a lawyer. However, it is unlikely that emulators have any provable impact on Nintendo's bottom line.

That's for the courts to decide, but Nintendo did provide a lot of evidence of commercial impact in their suit against Yuzu. Enough to make Yuzu back down. Whether or not that same evidence would work against other emulators remains to be seen.

Post automatically merged: Feb 15, 2026

Nintendo needs to be challenged in court. They have zero legal stance here (assuming none of those emulators use any part of their IP).

I wonder if a dev in a country with good legal support could take them on? Nintendo is basically bullying their way because they assume no one has the money and time to take them to court.

Anyway, they can do all the bogus (or even legit) DMCA takedowns they want, that will not stop the emulation scene from continue. People will just do this in a more obfuscated way.

F*ck corporate greed!

Actually the law favors Nintendo here, there's even the possibility that a court battle could set an even worse precedent for emulators overall.

 

[Bladexdsl]

ever since those c***s bribed took down ryu they think they can get away with anything now whether it's legal or NOT

 

[Beaukilla]

Lol, some nice rage bait for the cry babies on this site . Troll on Nintendo. Love it!

 

[doorbell8423]

.

 

[RyanTheArchivist]

To be fair Yuzu and Ryujinx were not deemed illegal in court, they settled with Nintendo be for they could.


That's for the courts to decide, but Nintendo did provide a lot of evidence of commercial impact in their suit against Yuzu. Enough to make Yuzu back down. Whether or not that same evidence would work against other emulators remains to be seen.

Post automatically merged: Feb 15, 2026

Actually the law favors Nintendo here, there's even the possibility that a court battle could set an even worse precedent for emulators overall.

But still the problem is they are using both of them as their base here. This will be a forever ongoing issue as long as they keep using the same base.

 

[ZeroT21]

Some things are just not worth paying for and Nintendo knows it

 

[Exnor]

To be fair Yuzu and Ryujinx were not deemed illegal in court, they settled with Nintendo be for they could.


That's for the courts to decide, but Nintendo did provide a lot of evidence of commercial impact in their suit against Yuzu. Enough to make Yuzu back down. Whether or not that same evidence would work against other emulators remains to be seen.

Post automatically merged: Feb 15, 2026

Actually the law favors Nintendo here, there's even the possibility that a court battle could set an even worse precedent for emulators overall.

How does the law favors Nintendo in this case?

 

[Captain-Z]

But still the problem is they are using both of them as their base here. This will be a forever ongoing issue as long as they keep using the same base.

No, the base isn't the issue, Nintendo would still issue DMCA notices to completely original emulators as well. Since Nintendo ultimately didn't go to court against Yuzu or Ryujinx there's no legal precedent against them that makes them more susceptible to DMCA take downs than any other emulator.

Post automatically merged: Feb 16, 2026

How does the law favors Nintendo in this case?

Copyright law prohibits any technology that can harm TPM protected works. Whether the emulator technically did anything wrong doesn't matter. If emulators are being used for piracy then they can be prohibited. Intentions don't matter in copyright law.

 

[NinStar]

I don't use emulators, I love the real deal. But I feel the community shouldn't release emulators, capable of playing retail games, for consoles that are still available in stores. Playing games that you're still able to buy, isn't preservation, it's piracy, simple as that.

I genuinely hate when people use this stupid argument. Intentionally or not, it is extremely disingenuous, by that logic we shouldn't be allowed to preserve something like Super Mario Bros. for the fucking NES. because Nintendo to this day is still milking that and other games from 40 years ago.

These companies exists for the sole purpose of profiting, nothing less, nothing more. We shouldn't gatekeep digital preservation based on corporate interests, that will never workout.

 

[CMDreamer]

Lol nintendo hate the fact that emulators prove that nintendo keep recycling the same shit but lie claiming its enhandes.

When you can emulate SW1 BoTW at higher resolution and faster fps than the so called switch 2 enhanced edition..

Just nintendo still recycling a game thats nearly a decade old.

Your "logic" doesn't apply solely to Nintendo, but to the whole video games industry.

 

[RedBlueGreen]

Nintendo needs to be challenged in court. They have zero legal stance here (assuming none of those emulators use any part of their IP).

I wonder if a dev in a country with good legal support could take them on? Nintendo is basically bullying their way because they assume no one has the money and time to take them to court.

Anyway, they can do all the bogus (or even legit) DMCA takedowns they want, that will not stop the emulation scene from continue. People will just do this in a more obfuscated way.

F*ck corporate greed!

Nintendo actually needs to be the ones to pursue legal action here. Just because you get a DMCA notice doesn't mean you have to abide by it.

Then their case can get thrown out because the legality of emulation has been established for nearly 3 decades .