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
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.
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
When 54-year-old Gary Bowser pleaded guilty to his role in helping Team Xecuter with their piracy-enabling line of console accessories, he realized he would likely never pay back the $14.5 million he owed Nintendo in civil and criminal penalties. In a new interview with The Guardian, though, Bowser says he began making $25 monthly payments toward those massive fines even while serving a related prison sentence.
Last year, Bowser was released after serving 14 months of that 40-month sentence (in addition to 16 months of pre-trial detention), which was spread across several different prisons. During part of that stay, Bowser tells The Guardian, he was paid $1 an hour for four-hour shifts counseling other prisoners on suicide watch.
[...] Nintendo lawyers were upfront that they pushed for jail time for Bowser to "send a message that there are consequences for participating in a sustained effort to undermine the video game industry."
[...] Bowser also maintains that he wasn't directly involved with the coding or manufacture of Team Xecuter's products and only worked on incidental details like product testing, promotion, and website coding. Speaking to Ars in 2020, Aurora, a writer for hacking news site Wololo, described Bowser as "kind of a PR guy" for Team Xecuter. Despite this, Bowser said taking a plea deal on just two charges saved him the time and money of fighting all 14 charges made against him in court.
[...] Now that he's free, Bowser says he has been relying on friends and a GoFundMe[https://www.gofundme.com/f/garyopa-restarting-his-life] page to pay for rent and necessities as he looks for a job. That search could be somewhat hampered by his criminal record and by terms of the plea deal that prevent him from working with any modern gaming hardware.
Despite this, Bowser told The Guardian that his current circumstances are still preferable to a period of homelessness he experienced during his 20s. And while console hacking might be out for Bowser, he is reportedly still "tinkering away with old-school Texas Instruments calculators" to pass the time.
Alternate source with GoFundMe link (added to the story above): Nintendo Sued a Man So Severely That He Can Only Survive on GoFundMe
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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: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 14 2018, @06:11PM
Copyright should be 14 years.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by stretch611 on Wednesday November 14 2018, @06:30PM (2 children)
They agreed to pay $12m?
How much did they make from the ROM site? That is quite a bit of money. How do they have it from that site...
Ahh the TorrentFreak Link explains it...
Now with 5 covid vaccine shots/boosters altering my DNA :P
(Score: 3, Interesting) by bzipitidoo on Thursday November 15 2018, @04:09AM (1 child)
I've heard that there is often a big gap between winning a huge judgment and actually collecting. Defendants can appeal, and there is of course settling. If worst comes to worst they could probably declare bankruptcy, or even leave the country. If they actually have that much money, they could just pay the penalty, and it might even be a wrist slap, they might have a lot more money than that. Seems unlikely their wealth would be close to $12 million, it'll either be a lot less, or a lot, lot more.
One wrinkle I wonder about is who is liable. The company? Or are the owners personally liable? If the former, the company can be thrown to the wolves easily enough. If the latter, might not be the sort of precedent that big corporations want to set.
Anyway, yeah, the whole thing smells. "Further, they have to hand over all Nintendo games and emulators they have." That kind of order, what does it mean? They can't keep legitimately purchased cartridges that they happen to possess? They have to hand over all their hard drives and flash drives and the like that contain copies of the ROMs? Whatever, it seems totally based on the flawed notion that these things are material, and therefore scarce. What does it accomplish, when there are surely many other copies of everything, scattered all over the world? Seems like one of those obtusely spiteful acts that accomplishes nothing, much the same as burning books. The court aspires to being the firemen of Fahrenheit 451.
(Score: 2) by stretch611 on Thursday November 15 2018, @06:31PM
I agree... It does seem odd to me as well.
But based on TF, it seems that they are willing to accept lets say $1m(completely random guess) of real money in the agreement for the privilege of saying that they got a lot more in court documents. I assume this is to scare future defendants with paying up big before trial by saying the last person we sued lost $12m in court.
Due to it being a settlement, I assume that Nintendo will be paid, or the agreement would be null and void, and back to court they go. (IANAL)
Taking the material goods stops the ROMs from being uploaded to other sites out of spite towards Nintendo. And if they become scarcer, it just increases demand for Nintendo's next Retro Arcade style release.
Now with 5 covid vaccine shots/boosters altering my DNA :P
(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.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by archfeld on Wednesday November 14 2018, @09:18PM (1 child)
Isn't person who acquires the ROM for illegal use responsible rather than the supplier who is offering the items in good faith ? If the couple had made it clear that the ROMS were for use by people with legal ownership of the original game cartridges or CDs and for the exclusive purpose of shifting the content to a newer medium or backing up said properties would the act still have been illegal? I have many old games for my Atari, Nintendo, and Sega that barely play anymore, can't be replaced but I still have the license to use by my understanding. Anyone with a better legal grasp than I care to venture an opinion.
For the NSA : Explosives, guns, assassination, conspiracy, primers, detonators, initiators, main charge, nuclear charge
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 14 2018, @11:47PM
No, copyright is about the right to make and distribute copies. Which is as it should be. You can't control who downloads publicly accessible files, but you can generally control what you upload.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 15 2018, @12:47PM
It's true that Nintendo today sells
crappyemulators with old games. the interest of people for those antiques is mainly consequence of those pirate sites spreading them. I seriously doubt that nowadays could be such level of attention on old games if not for this type of sites. Then Nintendo capitalizes the momentum. Without pirate sites, the demand for old nintendo games would be minimal and not financially worth of offering current Nintendo repackaged oldies to the general public.