Recently, the issue of emulation and piracy has caused a lot of commotion due to The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom being leaked, and some individuals are playing it illegally. It seems that this bothered Nintendo enough to start taking legal action, and now they have dealt a heavy blow to Switch emulation.
As GBAtemp reports, in recent days, Nintendo began taking actions to remove an important project for the video game preservation scene. It turns out that they sent cease and desist letters to stop the development and distribution of Lockpick, a project by preservation enthusiasts.
But what the heck is Lockpick? It is a system that allows users to extract unique keys from games for Switch purchased legally and thus have a backup that can be used. Of course, these ROMs can be used to emulate games on PC.
But if emulation is legal when you use your own games and the Lockpick team is not distributing ROMs, why could Nintendo send a cease and desist letter? The company argued that the methods Lockpick uses to extract keys infringe Nintendo's intellectual property rights by bypassing their copy protection systems. This represents a violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of the United States.
As a result, Lockpick developers decided to abandon the development of homebrew tools they were creating. That's not all, as the creators of Skyline, a Switch emulator for Android, also announced that they were halting the project to avoid legal problems.
"With great sadness, we bring you this news. Recently, Nintendo has issued a copyright complaint against Lockpick RCM that will likely take effect on Monday. Lockpick is a fundamental part of legally transferring Switch keys. They claim it circumvents their copy protection (TPMs) and therefore violates their copyright. We are in a position where we are potentially infringing on their copyright by continuing to develop our project, Skyline, through dumping keys from our own Switches," the Skyline team said.
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