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
(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.