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Nintendo to ROM sites: Forget cease-and-desist, now we're suing
Nintendo's attitude toward ROM releases—either original games' files or fan-made edits—has often erred on the side of litigiousness. But in most cases, the game producer has settled on cease-and-desist orders or DMCA claims to protect its IP.
This week saw the company grow bolder with its legal action, as Nintendo of America filed a lawsuit (PDF) on Thursday seeking millions in damages over classic games' files being served via websites.
The Arizona suit, as reported by TorrentFreak, alleges "brazen and mass-scale infringement of Nintendo's intellectual property rights" by the sites LoveROMs and LoveRetro. These sites combine ROM downloads and in-browser emulators to deliver one-stop gaming access, and the lawsuit includes screenshots and interface explanations to demonstrate exactly how the sites' users can gain access to "thousands of [Nintendo] video games, related copyrighted works, and images."
Also at Tom's Hardware.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by julian on Tuesday July 24 2018, @03:13AM (3 children)
Again, is this the late 90s? This is absurd. Nintendo was able to sell NES Classic consoles as fast as it could possibly manufacture them. They've resold their catalogs 2-3 times to their hardcore fans and their oldest games still sell new copies every year, decades after they've recouped their production cost. Emulation doesn't do any damage at all and in fact feeds a culture of appreciation for hardware/software history which Nintendo is in the prime position to produce "authentic" replicas of.
I have a collection of every NES, SNES, GB/GBC/GBA, and N64 game and it's a little over 11 GB in size. It's about 2600 files (not all game ROMs). After the N64 file size balloons because they started using discs so an entire GameCube collection is more than an order of magnitude larger. For comparison, the Atari 2600 library is about 520 titles and fits on three 1.44 MB HD floppies. Of the small amount of those Nintendo games that I've ever played or ever will play, I've probably bought 20% of them multiple times in various formats. I haven't cost Nintendo a cent. I'm actually a good customer.
If they're being beat out by a free site that just means they need to put those old games on the App Store and charge $0.99. They've already made their money back on those titles. I'd pay $0.99 or even a couple bucks to play Advance Wars or Super Mario World on my iPhone without some stupid browser hack that doesn't work very well. These products are, some of them, decades old. Charge a small fee and rake in profit forever. It really doesn't take much effort to undercut the pirate sites.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 24 2018, @04:02AM
What? A non-greedy big corporation?
(Score: 2, Disagree) by shortscreen on Tuesday July 24 2018, @08:03AM
TFS says websites had the games running in an emulator inside the browser. Given what I know about websites, browsers, and JavaShit, I'd assume the games were probably glitchy, laggy, mangled, and otherwise unplayable. That's why Nintendo had to shut them down, because their product was being represented in an unfair and disparaging manner, threatening future sales.
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Tuesday July 24 2018, @06:01PM
After this I wouldn't give Nintendo corp. even two cents. I'd probably give them a penny if it cost them a nickel to accept it.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.