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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: 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.