Retro game repository EmuParadise says it's finished distributing ROMs
Nintendo has had enough of pirates and the websites that enable them, like EmuParadise. After shutting down a handful of sites and a Game Boy Advance emulator on GitHub in July, the publisher has seemingly done the work to convince EmuParadise to shut down. This massive online library of downloadable old games started 18 years ago, and up until this moment it hosted nearly complete libraries of games for various consoles that you could download and play on emulators.
Playing ROMs, as these game files are often referred to as, on an emulator exists in a legal gray area, but distributing these copyrighted works for download on the internet is obviously and clearly illegal. But Nintendo and other publishers have mostly avoided investing resources in tracking down and enforcing its legal right in many of these cases over the last couple of decades. For Nintendo, however, something has changed, and it is cracking down. And EmuParadise has confirmed that it is going to do what it must to avoid facing legal action.
"We will continue to be passionate retro gamers and will keep doing cool stuff around retro games, but you won't be able to get your games from here for now," reads an EmuParadise blog post. "Where we go with this is up to us and up to you."
Also at Kotaku and TechCrunch.
Previously: Nintendo Sues ROM Sites
Related Stories
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.
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
Nintendo's recent lawsuit against Switch emulator maker Yuzu seems written like it was designed to strike fear into the heart of the entire emulation community. But despite legal arguments that sometimes cut at the very idea of emulation itself, members of the emulation development community I talked to didn't seem very worried about coming under a Yuzu-style legal threat from Nintendo or other console makers. Indeed, those developers told me they've long taken numerous precautions against that very outcome and said they feel they have good reasons to believe they can avoid Yuzu's fate.
[...]
"This lawsuit is not introducing any new element that people in the emulation community have not known of for a long time," said Parsifal, a hobbyist developer who has written emulators for the Apple II, Space Invaders, and the CHIP-8 virtual machine. "Emulation is fine as long as you don't infringe on copyright and trademarks."
[...]
And others feel operating internationally protects them from the worst of the DMCA and other US copyright laws. "I have written an NES emulator and I am working on a Game Boy emulator... anyway I'm not a US citizen and Nintendo can kiss my ass," said emulator developer ZJoyKiller, who didn't provide his specific country of residence.
[...]
Chief among those differences is the fact that Yuzu emulates a Switch console that is still actively selling millions of hardware and software units every year. Most current emulator development focuses on older, discontinued consoles that the developers I talked to seemed convinced were much less liable to draw legal fire.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by anubi on Thursday August 09 2018, @11:41AM (18 children)
Shame to see them feel this way about it, as they are most likely sentencing the work to oblivion. The fan base isn't big enough to warrant the costs of marketing.
Guess we don't see it like an old painting. Geez, that thing's a hundred years old... lets burn it and get something newer.
No, we can't keep everything we ever made. Not near enough room for it. Nor enough time to even look at it all. But if someone cares enough about it to keep it, then do so. When no one cares about it anymore, its trash. Let it go. Back to the dust it came from.
It was a fan base that was keeping those old games alive by keeping emulators and means to keep the game running.
Its not like it was a big moneymaker for anyone anymore. Its like an old movie star. Whose old celluloid films are deemed to decomposition, and memory of the star deemed as trash, not worth keeping. Not much longer, and its nothing more than a pile of dust; destination: dumpster.
I do not have a dog in this fight... I never was much into playing videogames. But I do enjoy listening to some of the old 1920's big band music, as well as some of the classical stuff that is so old I would have to actually look it up in what century that stuff was composed. I guess if I had never heard Mozart, or Bach, it would not have made much difference, but I am happy their work survived thanks to dedicated musicians who could recreate the works from reading splotches of ink on paper.
Eventually, it will die out anyway, just as we are unaware of a lot of the music of the ancients. Whether or not Nintendo, Congress, and other wearers-of-the-suit-and-tie deem copyright as a justification of removing the work from existence.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
(Score: 4, Insightful) by The Mighty Buzzard on Thursday August 09 2018, @12:55PM (15 children)
I wouldn't sweat it. There's always that piratical-themed site if you want roms. They won't be neatly organized or searchable but who cares when you can just grab a batch of 10K roms and delete the ones you don't want later?
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 09 2018, @01:23PM (1 child)
10K roms x $20 ea. x 1M users = $200B revenue lost to whine about and push the agenda forward
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 10 2018, @11:08AM
Yeah, there's a flaw in this thinking. I had the opportunity to buy and play old games on a nintendo device. They wanted $15 or more from memory. I was thinking '$15? You have got to be kidding". I plunked $100 or so down for a mini nes and mini snes and enjoy them greatly. But, pay $15 for old old old games? Wow. No. Just, no.
Look, if it was $5 I may have played some games.
Especially since they are tied to the console. The console dies your games die.
Also, I've been spoiled. I really like playing old games in a SNES emulator. Being able to save status anywhere, restore, reply is just awesome.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 09 2018, @01:26PM (8 children)
My thoughts as well. In fact, now seems like a good time to go grab a rom collection or two. I don't think deleting any of them is even necessary, since it's not like disk space is a premium compared to the size of a rom. Might as well keep the whole collection intact and available to share with anybody else who wants a copy. It's the best way to preserve art history (ergh... ok, 99% of them can be permanently buried in a hole in the ground and nothing of value would be lost... until that happens and then suddenly everybody has to have a copy--c'est la vie) from corporate Vaults.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by anubi on Thursday August 09 2018, @01:42PM (7 children)
TPB will likely go the way of Napster once the pens get to wagging.
It won't stop things... just drive it underground... even more obscurity and encryption, as well as cause a lot more people to learn to do things this way.... which actually might be a good thing if more and more people are forced to do things really obscurely... steganography, and encryption to hide their doings from "the man". Trying to hide the transfer of an old obsolete videogame, no less. Oh, the men of the suit don't know how easy they had it when most of us communicated in plaintext.
With all this copyright crap, they are driving the whole world into all sorts of communication obscurity, damn near impossible to monitor. Most of it not to hide an overthrow of the government or terrorist crap... nah, it was to hide the transfer of a song!
Ok...start encrypting everything!
At least that way, the suit-men won't even be aware of whats going on.
It will be like several places I have visited, where suit-guy is running around the place commanding "English Only! English Only!", while most of the workforce is communicating amongst themselves in Spanish. And its driving the suit-guy nuts because he does not know what they are saying.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
(Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Thursday August 09 2018, @02:03PM
> Ok...start encrypting everything!
Nah, just Zerg them. Everyone, go download a bunch of ROMs!
(Score: 2) by AssCork on Thursday August 09 2018, @06:15PM (4 children)
Holy SHIT you must be new. Welcome (back) to the Internet!
So to get you up-to-speed, the Sweds tried to kill TPB, along with the US, the UK, most of China. Some even went as far as to seize domain names.
But TPB is still kicking.
(They were down for a few months once, which spawned the normal swarm of duplicate sites that LEOs have been chasing-down ever since)
Source: Google, Wikipedia, and a few other sites that popped-up since Napster was gut-checked by Lars.
Just popped-out of a tight spot. Came out mostly clean, too.
(Score: 3, Funny) by kazzie on Thursday August 09 2018, @08:10PM
Sweds: are they the the Swedish version of US federal agents?
(Score: 1) by anubi on Thursday August 09 2018, @09:54PM (2 children)
One thing I do know is the USA will make one helluva mess out of another country if it takes a mind to.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 10 2018, @11:14AM (1 child)
Is this a subtle reference to the US ripping through NZ law to get Mega?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 11 2018, @09:09AM
That was a subtle reference to the USA doing a *lot* of things to foreign governments when they do not obey.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 10 2018, @11:11AM
There is an easy solution for that. If you are speaking in another language then it is deemed you are not working. If you were, you would be speaking in English so collaboration can happen in the office. Other language equals on a break or goofing off. Do it too much and expect your next review to have a black mark for time keeping.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by anubi on Thursday August 09 2018, @01:27PM (2 children)
Yeh... you are so right... its just a big whack a mole, keeping a lot of people busy trying to find people sharing an old obscure computer game - over a technicality over copyright.
I guess it makes high paid jobs for wearers of the suit, shakers of the hand, and law enforcement. For what? an obsolete work?
Sounds to me like funding the FBI to catch kids peeing in the pool.
I don't think the laws fomenting this lunacy should have ever been passed in the first place. But now that they are, we have to live with them. Unfortunately, there are not enough of us to bring up embarassing observations to the table while politicians are trying to make a good image for themselves in front of the voters.
The protection durations they had for patent/copyright originally were about right. Protection for a limited time in exchange for doing it. No one else gets paid decades for yesterday's work. As one commenter on an earlier post of mine had observed... he made a car, but he does not continue receiving royalty payments as long as that car is on the road. Nor does a bricklayer get royalties as long as the house he constructed stands.
Maybe we all better go up in front of Congress and shake the Congressional Hand to get law made so if anyone does anything, they get paid as long as the thing they made is being used.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
(Score: 3, Insightful) by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us on Thursday August 09 2018, @05:44PM (1 child)
Not for an obsolete work. For the future of Nintendo, and indirectly the future of intellectual property creators.
If you're playing some ROM-downloaded NES title from the 80s then you're not either: 1) buying a Nintendo Switch and the latest cartridges, or 2) paying for the company-authorized NES Classic [amazon.com] system. You're not making them money by DIYing from a ROM site. Nintendo owns the copyright and it's trivial to show they're damaged by such behavior.
You can hate the law and disagree with the reasons for it. You can break it. But it is the law and it's functioning as intended - just not the way that is desired by some.
This sig for rent.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 11 2018, @05:11AM
It's not trivial to show they've been harmed by the behavior. How many of those people would have bought a "new" copy of games from back then? That's what they'd have to prove to prove damages. Fortunately for them, congress opted to get copyright holders statutory damages so they wouldn't have to actually be damaged or be able to demonstrate having been damaged like you normally have to do during a civil suit.
(Score: 2) by Sourcery42 on Thursday August 09 2018, @04:39PM
Searchable and organized? No problem at the size of these files. Every Atari 2600, 8 bit NES, and 16 bit SNES game ever made fits nicely on a 2gb SD card in my Wii with room to spare ;)
I think the reason roms chap Nintendo's ass is that they are still trying to sell some of these game. IIRC they call some classics "Virtual Console" games or something like that and still sell them through their store, to be played through their own approved emulator. That way you can pay again for content you already paid for in the 1980's, and pay again when the next console comes out... It's a perpetual revenue stream off of Zelda (1986) and SMB3 nostalgia.
(Score: 2) by Snospar on Thursday August 09 2018, @01:56PM
Not sure I agree with that, for the most part the older ROMs are tiny when compared with the size of modern online storage. And given that these are digital assets we can duplicate them perfectly and preserve them from degrading almost indefinitely.
The real problem is Nintendo's greed and the need for them to ensure that their franchises are kept in order and in house. Now that they've seen the popularity of retro games, as in the SNES Classic, then you can be sure that many of their old titles will be available locked into their current platforms and for a super high retail price for us all to repurchase them again soon.
Vote with your wallet and stop funding Nintendo's greed; they should only be rewarded for innovation and not simply repetition and regurgitation.
Huge thanks to all the Soylent volunteers without whom this community (and this post) would not be possible.
(Score: 2) by Gaaark on Thursday August 09 2018, @03:27PM
"But I do enjoy listening to some of the old 1920's big band music"
I like the old blues: the 'one or two black guys with guitar and harmonica' blues, not the 'bigger band, jazzy' blues,
but the 'Gershwin big band' type thing is good, yeah. (Not a jazz fan unless it's old and simple)
But yeah: good music is good music, which is why Beethoven etc haven't disappeared.
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 09 2018, @01:18PM (15 children)
Steam lists dozens of independent games that improve on classic game mechanics and many of those are available on gog as well. Best example is the whole Metroidvania genre that really sprouted some diamonds lately: https://store.steampowered.com/tags/en/Metroidvania/ [steampowered.com]
So, the way I see it, Nintendo are very much being assholes and cheapskates for targeting the pirating of such ancient games. But, it's entirely their fan base fault for sticking with those titles and making this uninnovative & litigious business model profitable.
You want Nintendo to stop shitting on you? Stop paying them to. It's as simple as that folks.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by ikanreed on Thursday August 09 2018, @02:28PM (13 children)
Honestly, that's like saying "Modern independent painters can do impressionism better than van gogh, so it's no big deal that we're banning reproductions of starry night"
Whatever the truth to the first half sentence might be, there's a definite lie to the second half.
(Score: 2) by Pino P on Thursday August 09 2018, @03:21PM (10 children)
The difference is that Van Gogh's The Starry Night is a lot older than these ROMs. Under the law then in effect, copyright in that painting expired in Berne Convention countries at the end of 1940 and in the United States at the end of 1945.
(Score: 2) by Gaaark on Thursday August 09 2018, @03:29PM (1 child)
Shhhhh... be quiet, or the US will change it retroactively and then they'll be able to squeeze your nuts every time you look at a Van Gogh!
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 10 2018, @11:17AM
Luckily they have a swath of morons at the border trained to squeeze nuts just enough that it hurts but not enough to cause damage so the airplane traveller can sue. They are also good at feeling up children.
(Score: 2) by ikanreed on Thursday August 09 2018, @03:41PM (7 children)
I mean, yes, it is. But also most of these roms are literally a quarter century old, made by companies that don't exist anymore, not sold anywhere, and are only being protected in the vaguest interests of a general principle.
Opt-out archiving is a necessary thing to not lose cultural artifacts. And yeah, I've got no objection to owners opting out.
(Score: 2) by Pino P on Thursday August 09 2018, @05:05PM (2 children)
As for first-party games, Nintendo certainly still exists. Copyright in third-party games is owned by whatever company bought the defunct company's copyrights at bankruptcy auction. Try researching whether the auction house has deposited notices of transfer with national copyright offices. (See for example "Recordation of Transfers" by the US Copyright Office [copyright.gov].)
(Score: 3, Insightful) by ikanreed on Thursday August 09 2018, @05:15PM
Or the law is dumb and needs to be changed but also not respected until it's changed.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 09 2018, @07:53PM
Good luck trying to track that down 5 years later, let alone 20 or more. Plus, video game companies go defunct all the time (especially in the 90s and earlier) without having transferred the copyright. And even if they did transfer the copyright, not everyone registers that. Why waste time and money registering copyright on something that doesn't actively generate revenue, after all.
(Score: 2) by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us on Thursday August 09 2018, @05:50PM (2 children)
If it truly is a company that doesn't exist, isn't sold, and nobody owns the rights to it..... who's going to sue you for copying it? Who will have standing to do so?
This is just a pre-emptive action to protect against someone who does very much have the rights to sue for it.
(By the way... should copyright also allow for the right for something to fade into obscurity or nothingness by failure of the creator to give permission? I don't know that the public served thereby, but the individual might be.)
This sig for rent.
(Score: 2) by ikanreed on Thursday August 09 2018, @06:44PM (1 child)
Well, actually, it's still nintendo shutting down access to 3rd party developed tools and roms to their previous second parties on the basis that they enable and facilitate piracy.
Not the particular roms that belong to nintendo. But the facilitation of access.
(Score: 2) by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us on Thursday August 09 2018, @09:13PM
You've got a point. The way I read it is that Nintendo was issuing threats and takedown orders. Those developers they are threatening (or their project/webhosts) are either voluntarily taking them down or voluntarily complying instead of facing an actual lawsuit. The most recent Nintendo takedown notice I read stated that the emulator site was hosting ROM copies, not just an emulator. And EmuParadise did host ROM images, not just provide emulation software.
As to being second or third parties... that would be a ground for refutation of the DMCA claims if Nintendo did not possess the legal authority to claim copyright on the titles being infringed. (Or did you mean that the 3rd party developed tools didn't belong to Nintendo? Or that the ROM codes being offered did not in fact originate from Nintendo-copyright-controlled media? Cleanroom development is not grounds for DMCA/Copyright, but Trademark infringement. Somehow I doubt that most ROM distributors are actually parallel developing their code.
Busting someone because they wrote an emulator.... a grey area, likely. And I don't think anybody really wants to press the button to see what the US Supreme Court (or most anyone else) would rule. But that also means the emulator writers don't want to fight it either (or at least anybody with enough money to fight the battle).
This sig for rent.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 09 2018, @11:29PM
I do have an objection to opting out. These things should be archived regardless of the wishes of the "owners," since they are part of culture. Copyright durations should be from 5-14 years at most, given how easy it is to replicate and spread art in the digital age. The entire point of copyright is to add to the public domain, not for "owners" to jealously guard their works. This is also why digital restrictions management should be illegal.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 09 2018, @06:53PM
No. This is like saying "lets not buy more Star Wars and Beauty of the Beast remakes since it encourages Disney to lobby for longer copyright laws and sue fan art" while mentioning "There better movies out there anyhow that aren't owned by multi-national conglomerates".
Your principle objection to copyrights (and their ridiculous and ongoing expiry extensions) is correct. But it has little to do with the above. i.e. There are great indie games out there and there's absolutely no reason for so many people to buy so many oldies that Nintendo can actually financially justify those lawsuits. It's not to say the old stuff is worse artistically. It's to mention the new stuff is, at the very least, better mechanically and has quite the nice art. So, if you're not sitting there admiring Super Mario's original pixel art while contemplating the significance of Kupa's color scheme to our way of life, you might want to give a newer game a chance. After all, if you played Mario enough to be nostalgic about it, it might be time to give a newer game a chance.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 09 2018, @11:25PM
It is true, though, that people should stop giving Nintendo and companies like it money.
(Score: 1) by nitehawk214 on Thursday August 09 2018, @02:57PM
I thought that was the point of downloading roms? Nintendo wants to keep selling people the same game over and over, so people are saying "No".
"Don't you ever miss the days when you used to be nostalgic?" -Loiosh
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 09 2018, @06:40PM
License agreements work one-side: You are obliged and you have to maintain it. The other side, publisher, is not - even if it is. These sites are the only source also for people who have original media with wear damages, they sometimes accepted the fraudulent agreements that defective media will be replaced, and now they are left with nothing. Even with literally written bad media return policy - when I asked for it once, asked for obligation I accepted in an agreement, I got an answer: "We won't carry out responsibilities - and what will you do, sue us?". No, this was not a small studio from a hole in the middle of nowhere - it was a console manufacturer with monopoly for making media for it!
So that's about license agreements and software publishers. First, they implemented a (usually poorly described) return policies to keep people from making backup copies for their own needs and jailbreaking their consoles, then they're refusing their obligations.
P.S. the full story I contacted with local distributor and the publisher is much longer and definitely deserves some article. Generally sometimes I felt like I was in a Monty Python show.
(Score: 2) by damnbunni on Friday August 10 2018, @02:29AM
Basically every article I've seen about Nintendo's retro consoles have comments full of 'lol just get a Raspberry Pi and download all the roms here's how you do it it's easy'.
I could see that pissing someone off to step up enforcement against ROM sites. Nintendo has always been against them, but they haven't been terribly aggressive about it in the last few years, till quite recently.
(Score: 2) by chewbacon on Friday August 10 2018, @02:36AM (2 children)
I recently built a retropie with a handful of games on it, but when I read about the first cease and desists going out, I went on a download spree at Emuparadise. Nice knowing 'em!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 11 2018, @06:05AM (1 child)
As always, Reddit has the answer.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Piracy/comments/7630fc/emuparadise_alternative/ [reddit.com]
(Score: 1) by anubi on Saturday August 11 2018, @09:19AM
Remember the "Macarina" [youtube.com]?
Now, let's everyone do the "Whack-A-Moley!"
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]