Nintendo sues ROM sites

Ars Technica

Nintendo's attitude toward ROM releases—either original games' files or fan-made edits—has often erred on the side of litigiousness. But in most cases, the game producer has settled on cease-and-desist orders or DMCA claims to protect its IP.

This week saw the company grow bolder with its legal action, as Nintendo of America filed a lawsuit (PDF) on Thursday seeking millions in damages over classic games' files being served via websites.

The Arizona suit, as reported by TorrentFreak, alleges "brazen and mass-scale infringement of Nintendo’s intellectual property rights" by the sites LoveROMs and LoveRetro. These sites combine ROM downloads and in-browser emulators to deliver one-stop gaming access, and the lawsuit includes screenshots and interface explanations to demonstrate exactly how the sites' users can gain access to "thousands of [Nintendo] video games, related copyrighted works, and images."

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.")

After the suit was filed, LoveROMs was updated to remove all Nintendo-affiliated links, including ROMs and emulators, and the site announced on its social media channels that "all Nintendo titles have been removed from our site." LoveRetro.co now redirects to a single, text-only page that reads, "Loveretro has effectively been shut down until further notice."

Yikes! I mean, yikes! Really, it's a major battle of gray, but still...

Nintendo preparing to sue only because they are going to do paid online that provide free classic NES games.

Nothing wrong with that since it is their property. I do think that they, and others, should do a lot better at providing their games for purchase on current systems. I feel that they are leaving serious money on the table by not doing so.

This. I have no problem buying the older games if they're available officially but so many of them still haven't gotten re-released. If it's a choice between emulation and buying an overpriced cartridge from some random Ebay seller I'm emulating.

Nintendo have always been very detailed on ROMs and EMU and how non legal they actually are, other companies do such as well, Bethesda and RockStar are in the same camp.

And while 'some' claim they have rights if they own a copy to use that code as they want; they do not. Furthermore it goes without saying most who use EMU/ ROMs clearly don't own these game(s) anyway. It's impossible if you consider download rate to these games actual sales. It's piracy if one likes it or not

Nintendo are in the right here_

Nintendo - Corporate Information | Legal Information (Copyrights/ etc)

It's their right to do so, but to be fair Nintendo are basically holding their own games hostage from people who wants to buy them.

If I want to play a classic Nintendo game, and the options are:
download a ROM for free and have the game running flawlessy in 2 minutes,
or go to ebay, buy a NES and be lucky that it works, and find the game and be lucky that works, all for 500 bucks.
I'm going with the ROM.

If Nintendo however had the game for a good price on their Switch eshop, I'd gladly pay for it. Suit yourselves, Nintendo. Your games will never stop being downloadable ROMs and I think that's a good thing. Nintendo's games are really good and they need to be experienced by people, even if Nintendo themselves don't want that.

Once it's off the shelves for ten years it's public domain in my eyes: share it and keep it available and playable. Not particularly interested in what the law says in that regard: if we worried about the letter of copyright law, 90% of old games would be lost forever. Corporations don't care about game preservation in the slightest, which is why we should.

Distributing them on a mass scale is where you run into problems.

Seconded

There really needs to be some of a legacy service which adds all the games from previous consoles. GameCube had the chance but has yet to happen as of now. I get that Nintendo has the rights to their IPs, but as long as they keep games like Fire Emblem: Path of Radiance without an official re-release, as well as retro games being hella expensive these days etc, then emulation will continue to run rampant. Not everyone will be willing to put down £100/$100+ on a game they don't know if they will like or not.

Nintendont deserves to die.

Buying old copies of games(Which may be broken) won't give them any penny and most of them are not available.(Like some games that are not available digitally or some games that their source code is lost)