SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
from the How-did-they-get-all-that-money? dept.
Nintendo wins $12m lawsuit against ROM sites run by a married couple
Nintendo has won a legal battle against pirate ROM websites LoveROMS.com and LoveRETRO.co. The judgement from the Arizona court has resulted in the owners of the now-defunct sites having to pay the Japanese game developer $12.23 million in damages.
The ROM site owners are married couple Jacob and Cristian Mathias, who registered the two sites under their company, Mathias Designs. Their legal troubles started this past summer when Nintendo filed a complaint with the federal court against them. In order to avoid a drawn-out legal battle the couple took down the two websites in July and put up a notice that said they were under maintenance.
As TorrentFreak notes, however, the couple soon owned up and admitted to both direct and indirect copyright as well as trademark infringement of Nintendo's games and other copyrighted content. The two ROM sites the Mathias couple ran offered pirated copies of Nintendo's retro games, including Super Mario World, Mario Kart 64, Super Mario All-Stars, and many more. People were able to download these pirate copies and play them on PC and other platforms they weren't intended for with an emulator, thereby bypassing Nintendo's hardware ecosystem entirely.
As the paperwork obtained by TorrentFreak shows, both parties – the Mathias couple and Nintendo – have now reached an agreement after the dispute was raised this summer.
Also at Motherboard.
Previously: Nintendo Sues ROM Sites
EmuParadise Removes ROMs After Nintendo Sued Other ROM Sites
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 14 2018, @06:43PM (10 children)
Why on earth would they attach their real names to a criminal organization?
I use roms and am sad this will probably lead to the closure of emuparadise, but fuck me I'm not stupid enough to run one of those sites, let alone with my real name.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 14 2018, @06:45PM (3 children)
I meant criminal in the colloquial sense of illegal, not the legal sense.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 14 2018, @07:32PM (2 children)
I assume that the reasons for doing so were that up until this court wielded the ban hammer, what they were doing hadn't been legally 'tested'. Very occasionally courts will return judgements which basically 'throw out' stupid (or badly applied) laws, very occasionally...but obviously not in Arizona, as I assume there's a 'special relationship' between the judiciary there and the copyright mafias.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 14 2018, @10:46PM (1 child)
It seems fucked up that the law doesn't actually specify what is and isn't illegal precisely enough that a lawyer can tell prior to a court judgment.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 15 2018, @10:27AM
Ah, if the laws were so clearly defined, then there'd be no need for lawyers...
I'll preface this with, of course, IANAL, but I've had to employ them on a number of occasions over the past decade and I've had to trawl through thousands of pages of legal documentation. If you look hard, there's always something in the wording used in a law, some ambiguous word or phrase, which allows for some degree of lawyerly 'wiggle' and a future judicial precedent. I've been told that some of the legal tribe specialise in trawling through the wording of all enacted laws looking for these exploitable loopholes that others of the legal tribe seem to specialise in surreptitiously introducing..
(Score: 2) by PartTimeZombie on Wednesday November 14 2018, @07:32PM (4 children)
I'm a bit torn on this.
If Nintendo have allowed these games to die, and they are not available anywhere else, then I think ROM sites are completely justified in offering them. However I am led to believe Nintendo is actually selling these games again, so at least people can enjoy them.
As is often the case the pirates will probably offer a much better product, but that will be because Nintendo (like most huge companies) does not understand or care about it's customers. There is not much to be done about that.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 14 2018, @07:40PM (1 child)
Yeah, they re-release them on their newest systems, charge WAY too much, and offer no portability. All the software exists, big companies could patch them up and sell old games for $1 and make a killing!
But nooooo. Can't have an old gaming ecosystem compete with their new stuff so they have to price it in the collector's price range. No one will shell out $10 for lots of old games, just the few they really want to play again.
We have a wealth of culture and entertainment that most humans will never have access to and it is sad. Collecting dust and doing no one any good, WOOOOO!
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 14 2018, @09:56PM
"Collecting dust and doing no one any good"
Welcome to the jewish world-view.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 14 2018, @07:45PM
It doesn't matter if what they did was right or wrong, what matters is that they intentionally made themselves hugely vulnerable without good reason. They should have done it anonymously.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 14 2018, @11:38PM
If Nintendo was going to take action, they should have done so years earlier. It's not like these sites were hidden somewhere that isn't easily accessible via a quick web search.
An organization the size of Nintendo could easily afford to have somebody checking this out on a regular basis.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 15 2018, @07:07PM
There are lots of torrents with these collections. Most ROM sites (emuparadise) included don't dare have anything with Mario in the name. Nintendo is a bitch.
If you need anything, just ask.
Sincerely,
A diagnosed data-hoarder.