Nintendo attacks Switch emulation after Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom leak

In yet another attack on emulators, Nintendo took legal action to remove essential tools to emulate the Switch. These are components called Lockpick and Lockpick_RCM, which are tools that allow you to extract unique keys from the Switch, necessary to run games on emulators like Ryujinx and Yuzu.

While Lockpick has been available for quite some time, Nintendo has only now decided to take action against it, perhaps due to the leak of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, by issuing a DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) takedown order to the of the project on GitHub. In practice, Nintendo accused Lockpick’s creators of infringing copyright and wants the removal of the tool because of that.

Nintendo’s move was reported by developer and security researcher Simon Aarons at twitter. He tried to make a copy of the Lockpick repository on GitHub, but received an email from Nintendo’s legal team, which claimed that Lockpick is “fraudulent software that infringes on Nintendo’s intellectual property rights”.

The Skyline emulator, which serves to emulate Switch on Android smartphones, was affected by Nintendo with this decision, with its responsible having announced on Discord (via XDA) that stopped his development. Skyline requires keys obtained from Lockpick to function, and those in charge are concerned that Nintendo could target them if they continue working on the emulator.

Other popular emulators, including Yuzu and Ryujinx for PC, remain online, with the Ryujinx team saying on Discord (via wccftech) that will not close the activities.