Nintendo drags two ROM sites to court over "brazen and mass-scale infringement of Nintendo’s intellectual property"

[ItsMitch]

S: Arstechnica | United States Court for the District of Arizona. 

 

Summary: 

• Two sites in question are LoveRom and LoveRetro
• Both sites have been taken down while they handle legal matters
• Nintendo seaks over $150'000 per infringement of each nintendo copyright. (That could add up to $50'000'000 easily) 
• They also seek $2'000'000 in pure damages.
• Nintendo have previously filed a Cease and Desist on both sites in the past.

 

Nintendo is pulling up it's big boy pants and called it's lawyers to drag two notorious Nintendo ROM sites to the Arizona District Court for "brazen and mass-scale copyright infringement". Nintendo isn't throwing little punches either, it's demanding $150'000 in damages PER Infringement. This could be a huge problem for both of the sites as they both held hundreds of games from Nintendo. 

Quote

Nintendo is seeking serious money as relief for alleged damages, with the biggest number coming from "$150,000 for the infringement of each Nintendo copyrighted work and up to $2,000,000 for the infringement of each

Nintendo trademark." (Multiply that first figure by "thousands" of copyrighted works, and, well, that's a lot of zeroes.) Additionally, Nintendo has requested full disclosure of the operators' "receipts and disbursements, profit and loss statements, advertising revenue, donations and cryptocurrency revenue, and other financial materials," which relates to the suit's demand for a "reward" to Nintendo for whatever profit the sites made.

 

The lawsuit makes a point of describing the named defendants as "not casual gamers," but "sophisticated parties with extensive knowledge of Nintendo’s intellectual property and the video game industry more generally." It is possible that the suit uses this language to explain why some ROM sites' operators may not draw the same legal fire. (Additional, alleged paths to revenue may not help matters for the named defendants, as Nintendo alleges that the operators "enrich themselves through, among other things, donation requests and the sale of advertising space.")

 

[Froody129]

Is this newish games or games from the N64/NES/SNES era that aren't easily available anymore?

[ItsMitch]

2 minutes ago, Froody129 said:

Is this newish games or games from the N64/NES/SNES era that aren't easily available anymore?

They are affecting games from the following developers / publishers, etc.

Quote

 

"MAME, DOS, ZX Spectrum, Amstrad CPC, PS1, Nintendo DS (Could argue fairly modern ish?) PS2, BBC Micro, Atari 800, Amiga 500, PSP, Super Nintendo, Sharp X88000, Nintendo, GBA, Atari 2600, Commodore 64, Apple 2, MAME 037B11 and Sega Genesis. 

 

So I'm guessing that these games was almost impossible to find on the cheap side because collectors love their old games. 

[NMS]

6 minutes ago, Froody129 said:

Is this newish games or games from the N64/NES/SNES era that aren't easily available anymore?

Quote

Defendants are solely responsible for the contents of the LoveROMs and LoveRETRO websites. In particular, Defendants uploaded and continue to upload and maintain the unauthorized copies of Nintendo video games that they make available to users on those websites. For example, on October 15, 2015, Defendants promoted the availability of pirated copies of Nintendo’s games with the following announcement to the LoveROMs.com Facebook page: “The complete Nintendo DS Collection has been uploaded, 5,000+ ROMs now readily available! Enjoy.” More recently, on January 30, 2018, Defendants posted the following announcement to the LoveROMs.com Facebook page: “Direct Nintendo Wii downloads coming soon! We’re also adding some additional titles. Stay tuned.” Indeed, Defendants boast that they are “constantly curating our titles, adding new covers, game information, and creating innovative ways to play online.”

 

I want to say "RIP".

[ItsMitch]

1 minute ago, NMS said:

5,000+ ROMs

I hope they have a lot of money saved up for the fees Nintendo hopes to fuck them with. 

[Drak3]

8 minutes ago, Froody129 said:

Is this newish games or games from the N64/NES/SNES era that aren't easily available anymore?

Old games.

[NMS]

1 minute ago, SC2Mitch said:

I hope they have a lot of money saved up for the fees Nintendo hopes to fuck them with. 

Well I neither visited those sites, nor do I know how popular they were, but I doubt that they have enough money to cover more than 10 titles.

After all, people who visit sites for pirated content are VERY unlikely to donate, if that was even an option. And let's be honest, ad revenue there was probably a nightmare. Since again, those people run adblocks.

[Dissitesuxba11s]

14 minutes ago, SC2Mitch said:

• $150'000
• $50'000'000
• $2'000'000

Completely off topic, this is the first time I've seen this style of notation.

[mynameisjuan]

I am against piracy but when content is not in production anymore it should be allowed to distributed digitally. 

[GoodBytes]

Just now, mynameisjuan said:

I am against piracy but when content is not in production anymore it should be allowed to distributed digitally. 

How can you predict the feature?

[Stefan Payne]

16 minutes ago, Froody129 said:

Is this newish games or games from the N64/NES/SNES era that aren't easily available anymore?

they look like the latest they have is late 16bit console ROMs, so 25 Year old and not sold anymore.

 

I hope they do crowdfunding and go through the instances.

Because in some cases it is that the copyright can be abandoned if you don't use and/or defend it...

 

And a shitstorm in the Direction of Nintendo would also not be a bad idea.

 

They are pretty bad already because they don't allow you to stream content on streaming sites like Youtube and claim the content or get you a copyright strike.

[GoodBytes]

I think Nintendo is more interested in doing an example out of them.

They have done cease and desist i the past, but it just results the site moving and renamed.

 

[GoodBytes]

1 minute ago, Stefan Payne said:

They are pretty bad already because they don't allow you to stream content on streaming sites like Youtube and claim the content or get you a copyright strike.

Well, if they are in the wrong, people can do a class action lawsuit. But that is not being done. I guess no lawyer is interested in a losing case.

[mynameisjuan]

Just now, GoodBytes said:

How can you predict the feature?

I cant but a good majority of old games are not released again. So it screws over the consumers wanting to play an old game and have to choose to pay $500 for a used game or waiting years on end for the developers to re-release the game.

[Stefan Payne]

1 minute ago, GoodBytes said:

How can you predict the feature?

Copyright should last at most 15 years for games.

 

But we aren't even talking about N64 ROMs as far as I know so we're talking about software from the 80s and early-mid 90s...

 

Sadly there are some companys that lobby for longer copyright because their cash cow (=Mikey Mouse) would fall into public domain.

 

And we should all work for better (=less strict) Copyright laws, so that:

a) if the person responsible for the Work, dies

b) if it isn't a single person work, the company owning the copyright goes under

c) after a medium amount of time, lets say 15-20 Years, maybe 30

 

falls to the public domain, so that the people can do whatever they want.

 

Especially things like Axanar should be allowed and the best the companys should be able to do is ask for a reasonable portion of the money you make (like 10-30%).

[PlayStation 2]

While I still stand by Nintendo having the right to sue, I really do wish they made it much easier to play these games.

That's what Nintendo doesn't really seem to understand, that people obviously want to play their games that can't be easily acquired anymore.

[Stefan Payne]

3 minutes ago, GoodBytes said:

Well, if they are in the wrong, people can do a class action lawsuit. But that is not being done. I guess no lawyer is interested in a losing case.

Yes, because that's too expensive and cost a couple of million dollars...

And its only a small amount.

 

The Class Action Lawsuits seem to be as useless as the "Verbraucherschutz" here in Germany, that only does high profile stuff and doesn't care about the highly illegal stuff.

For example: A PSU over 75W has to have a certain PFC factor. And there are still (sometimes) dodgy ones without that sold.

[jagdtigger]

Courts really should kill off the legal protection for these ancient games. Its just insane that nintendo demands damages, and at the same time they arent selling these games anymore. So their demands are pretty baseless IMO.....

[TimeOmnivore]

6 minutes ago, GoodBytes said:

Well, if they are in the wrong, people can do a class action lawsuit. But that is not being done. I guess no lawyer is interested in a losing case.

That's because, legally, Nintendo's almost definitely in the right with all of their asinine and draconian business practices - the problem is that ethically (by many people's standards) and in the court of public opinion, Nintendo is completely in the wrong here and in several other places. Unfortunately, Nintendo will continue to fuck over its consumers and fans so long as they keeping making money. Even if their profit starts to take a downward trend because of the way they treat their players like criminals, I'd wager that Nintendo is more likely to just fuck over everyone even more rather than actually change their polices for the better, though I'd love to be proven wrong here. Just because Nintendo is legally allowed to do what they're doing, doesn't mean what they're doing should be considered reasonable or acceptable.

 

Side note: the amount Nintendo is suing these sites for is completely ridiculous and unreasonable - even if these old games were easy to purchase and play (they aren't), there's no way in hell Nintendo would be losing anywhere near the amount of money they're suing for.

[asus killer]

the problem is the stupid copyright laws that old games never get to public domain.

 

[Shally]

This is crazy, they won't get the money they were looking for but they will stop any further fowl play

[Brooksie359]

30 minutes ago, jagdtigger said:

Courts really should kill off the legal protection for these ancient games. Its just insane that nintendo demands damages, and at the same time they arent selling these games anymore. So their demands are pretty baseless IMO.....

I dont get how they can claim damages when it won't affect sales as they aren't selling those games anymore. 

[AngryBeaver]

Here is the thing.

 

When it comes to game design these games are only relevant for so long. Meaning they see their initial boom of sales then the game falls out of production and availability of this games starts to die. This is very much different than the copyright of say a movie. People still purchase old movies and they are still obtainable from places like amazon, netflix, etc.

 

So the copyright laws revolving around games should be around 10-15 years which is when these games generally fall out of production and become hard to acquire. That being said, if the company takes steps to continue to support these games and make them available.. then that changes things.  So maybe it should be something like 5 years from the date of retiring the game. There is little to no reason for a company to hold on to a copyright for a game they have no way to monetize. It isn't like they see anything for the resale of these old games. So I think it is pretty damn silly they can sue a company for lost anything on a game they haven't made money on in a decade.

[GoodBytes]

1 hour ago, mynameisjuan said:

I cant but a good majority of old games are not released again. So it screws over the consumers wanting to play an old game and have to choose to pay $500 for a used game or waiting years on end for the developers to re-release the game.

If the developers sees that there is a market, then they will re-release the game. If it was your IP, you would do the same.

[Yoinkerman]

The same roms they pirated for the classic systems?