SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
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, 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.