Once Nintendo sniffs out a pirate, that miserable scallywag should prepare for the worst. The Mario creator is aggressive in stamping out copyright infringement – it’s almost a hobby, as Nintendo demonstrates with yet another DMCA takedown of Switch emulator repositories on GitHub.
Copyright news site TorrentFreak reports Nintendo took only one day to file a total of seven DMCA anti-circumvention notices at GitHub, impacting over 400 Switch emulator repositories. It’s an old routine for Nintendo, which killed Switch emulator Yuzu after settling for $2.4 million in 2024. Nintendo also killed emulator Ryujinx by asking it politely to go away that same year, and it habitually performs DMCA sweeps to demonstrate that any Switch emulator still online will wither under its legal stare.
This time, some of the exact language Nintendo uses when requesting content removal is revealed on their tombstones – I mean, main GitHub branches, which now show only Nintendo’s DMCA request. The company says, “Nintendo Switch emulators are primarily designed to play Nintendo Switch games,” and therefore “Nintendo Switch emulators illegally circumvent Nintendo’s [technological protection measures, or] TPMs in order to run illegal copies of Nintendo Switch games.” Nintendo doesn’t like that.
The developer emphasizes, “In their ordinary course of operation, the TPMs require the application of information and a process […], with the authority of Nintendo, to gain access to Nintendo’s copyrighted works.”
All these weighty words certainly sound convincing, but as TorrentFreak notes, none of the affected Switch emulator repositories should have existed in the first place – not because they’re morally dubious, but because Nintendo technically already took their parents to court. Many of the newly removed repositories are forks or mirrors of emulators that were supposed to have been dealt with, including Yuzu. Hence, the regularity with which Nintendo practices its DMCA takedowns, and the common knowledge that you never really have only one mouse in the kitchen.
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