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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: 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.