The never-ending legal battle that sees Nintendo face off against the latest copyright circumventing piracy device continues with two brand new lawsuits. On May 15th, Nintendo filed a couple of lawsuits involving entities responsible for reselling devices used for the "sole purpose of which is to hack the Nintendo Switch video game console in order to allow people to play pirated video games." The first lawsuit is against a group of websites and their respective "John Doe" owners, for anxchip.com, axiogame.com, flashcarda.com, mod3dscards.com, nx-card.com, sxflashcard.com, txswitch.com, and usachips.com, while the second suit specifically targets Tom Dilts Jr. and their company Uberchips.

UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURTNORTHERN DISTRICT OF OHIOWESTERN DIVISIONNINTENDO OF AMERICA INC.
Plaintiff
,v.
TOM DILTS, JR.
and
UBERCHIPS, LLC, d/b/a UBERCHIPS.COM

Plaintiff Nintendo of America Inc., by and through its counsel, on personal knowledge as to its own actions and on information and belief as to the actions, capabilities, and motivations of others, hereby alleges as follows:

What all these sites have in common is that they sell Team Xecuter's SX dongle, which allows users to bypass the protection on the Nintendo Switch in order to load custom firmware. Nintendo alleges that these products are used purely for piracy. In the past, Nintendo's taken on TX multiple times, perhaps most notably in 2018 where they won a lawsuit against several people who were selling hacked NES Classic systems and SX chips for the Switch on Offerup.

Nintendo is seeking compensation for "irreparable" damages to the company, as all of the websites have warehouses within the United States, and thus fall within the confines of the law. The monetary demands amount to $2,500 per violation of 17 U.S.C. 1201 (a DMCA provision), as well as $150,000 per violation of Nintendo's rights under the U.S. Copyright Act, in addition to possibly requesting profits the resellers received from selling the offending devices.

Source 1 / 2

 

[Jayinem81]

Does Nintendo have Phoenix Wright Ace Attorney as their lawyer? If so errerybody is screwed.

OTTH, if one of these websites would hire Phoenx Wright Acey Attorney Nintendo is screwed.

 

[Mrperson0]

Atmosphere and SXOS are all tied together

No, they are not. SXOS ships with sigpatches or whatever that allow you to install games, whereas Atmosphere does not. That is the clear difference between them.

No matter what CFW it is it enables you to run pirated games on it.

Atmosphere does not allow you to do this if you download it from the official Github.

 

[Astoria]

Don't know if already posted but UberChips is complying and has canceled every SX order:

https://www.uberchips.com/

 

[Bladexdsl]

my uh switch runs android as well tho...so there’s that...

but you have to hack it to run it. shield tv does everything straight out of the box. fuck the switch for emulation who cares if the shield tv isn't portable it does everything i need it to do. and it will never be in danger of nintenDMCA

 

[Kioku]

but you have to hack it to run it. shield tv does everything straight out of the box. fuck the switch for emulation who cares if the shield tv isn't portable it does everything i need it to do. and it will never be in danger of nintenDMCA

I wish Nvidia would make another shield tablet

--------------------- MERGED ---------------------------

@8BitWonder & @Mrperson0

Atmosphere and SXOS are all tied together you can pirate games on either one so Nintendo can sue either. The whole point is "enabling" you to do something this is what the lawsuit is about "enabling" No matter what CFW it is it enables you to run pirated games on it. Not one company I know wants you to have that type of access to the system.

Look at Xbox One as an example you have to pay $20 to access the DEV menu they dont care if you want to play retroarch and run code they already took your $ to do what you want... until the day someone actually find a way to pirate games they will take it away like how Sony did otherOS.

Atmosphere does not include the patches that allow a user to run pirated Switch titles. Xbox Dev mode is also different in that regard. Being able to run Retroarch is the not same thing as installing a pirated version of Halo MCC.

 

[Goku1992A]

@8BitWonder . @Mrperson0

I have a feeling in future updates Atmosphere is going to permanently stop sigpatches in future updates. I personally want them to do that because if they are going to label themselves as anti piracy they need to block their firmware from being cracked for future liabilities. If you want to pirate buy a SXOS License or stay on legacy firmware where you can downgrade. Turning a blind eye isn't good enough anymore.

@Memoir
I never found DEV Mode appealing I don't want to spend $20 to play retroarch when I can play for free on my phone or computer lol.

 

[8BitWonder]

I have a feeling in future updates Atmosphere is going to permanently stop sigpatches in future updates.

I'll personally wait for Scires to say he's blocking ips patches before assuming that, but you do you.

I personally want them to do that because if they are going to label themselves as anti piracy they need to block their firmware from being cracked for future liabilities. ... Turning a blind eye isn't good enough anymore.

They really don't need to block them, they just need to continue not packaging sigpatches with it like they're doing currently.

If what they've been doing isn't enough then Nintendo's legal team would have gone after the project by now.

 

[Mrperson0]

I personally want them to do that because if they are going to label themselves as anti piracy they need to block their firmware from being cracked for future liabilities....Turning a blind eye isn't good enough anymore.

Why? It's more than enough for them to not allow you to pirate by downloading Vanilla Atmosphere. As long as they keep on doing that, Nintendo has nothing on them.

 

[SG854]

I'm a lawyer that got my education from the Pheonix Wright Ace Atorney Games so I know better then all of you and I say Nintendo is evil & wants money and can't shut this down because it's not within their legal right.

 

[Fred Molyneux]

You are being very naive about Atmo. If Nintendo were to go after Atmo and SciresM in a country with big companies lobbying like USA, you can be 100% certain SciresM will end up in jail. There was plenty of blank or homebrew only R4 type cards etc. that never held up in court in USA. The only reason they go after TX is because when you ask real end users at a high school or whatever what they use, you have 20 TX users for 1 atmo. Gbatemp doesn't represent at all the Switch market. Atmo is peanuts for piracy (because Atmo and SX OS are used for exactly the same thing: piracy, get them to block sigpatch for real and see how many topics will be updated here about Atmo suddently -i.e.: almost none), so right now they don't bother. But just like this lawsuit came at once, don't be surprised if one morning you wake up and you hear about SciresM and al. being all under arrest.
And in general, because of the high cost, lawsuits always target the big guys, and the big guys are TX.
They know they have no hope to stop them, but their move makes sense, they go after resellers in key markets where law is in their favor or where they can bend the law with money (USA and UK are 2 good examples). This way they keep piracy under control. And they are really clever, because they know in those countries, piracy won't really improve their sales, when for example in China or India, no piracy means no sales, so anyway, they don't want to stop people there, they will be shooting themselves in the foot.

 

[Kubas_inko]

SX OS isn't copyrighted material, right ? So, there's nothing illegal in it.

The xci mounting uses some copyright stuff iirc.

 

[Mrperson0]

But just like this lawsuit came at once, don't be surprised if one morning you wake up and you hear about SciresM and al. being all under arrest.

Just like how we should have been expecting smea to get arrested for leading the way to homebrew for the 3DS? Or the loads of CFW out there for that console?

 

[Kubas_inko]

@Mrperson0
No matter what CFW it is it enables you to run pirated games on it.

One can (and most of the time will) argue, that it's not for piracy, but for legally owned backups. But if you market it for piracy, that's a different story.

As stated before, atmosphere itself does not come with sigpatches, but sx os does. Thats where the problem lies, as sigpatches circumvent the device's "security" (not to mention the xci loading).

 

[anth4m]

Don't forget that Nintendo collaborates with Tencent in China now. It may no longer be that easy for modchips and dongles to be manufactured and shipped out from China.

 

[samcambolt270]

I guess they still don't get that modding your device is legal. First sale doctrine, guys. Selling something that allows copies of a proprietary format to be made, sure, but something that simply allows unsigned code to be run is not. Just because someone could use it for piracy does not make it illegal. That would make damn near everything illegal.
Dvd burners? Didn't you know? You can use those to play pirated movies on your dvd player! BAM! illegal. And don't get me started on computers. Did you know that computers allow people to have complete access to the internet where they can pirate whatever they want!

 

[MasterJ360]

Big oof but something like this was bound to happen. I'd be a fool to say go underground, but that wont aid product sales.
Saltyendo has been purging sxos videos for a long time halting media advertisement, but that switch lite chipset was the last straw for them I guess.

 

[antiNT]

SX OS sells a license (which these mods likely come with) to use their OS, which comes preloaded with the sigpatches (or whatever they call it) required to install roms IIRC. That's promoting piracy. This is why atmosphere makes sure to never bundle sigpatches.

That's not promoting piracy at all. It also lets us play custom .nsp

 

[alepman90]

Probably Nintendo should focus on making games instead of porting WiiU library and charge $60 for it
honestly even investing for a hacked switch isn't worth it

 

[anth4m]

Probably Nintendo should focus on making games instead of porting WiiU library and charge $60 for it
honestly even investing for a hacked switch isn't worth it

Isn't Nintendo developing new games? Those WiiU ones are just for people who never tried it since WiiU was a failure.

 

[chrisrlink]

remember these are the assholes (scratch that the entire Japanese government) that made cheating in a video game a jailable offence i mean come on thats so rediculus