Nintendo has filed a lawsuit through the federal court in the state of Arizona against the owner of 2 major ROM hosting sites, Jacob Mathias, and his Arizona-based company, Mathias Designs L.L.C. The company is being sued for unfair competition, as well as trademark and copyright infringement for featuring readily accessible retro ROMs, proprietary BIOS software, and copyrighted musical recordings and sounds.

This includes the copyrighted BIOS files for the Gameboy Advance, Gameboy Color, and Nintendo DS systems. Defendants also make a vast library of unauthorized copies of Nintendo’s copyrighted musical works

These contents are reportedly uploaded and maintained directly by Mathias's company on a regular basis. In the motion, Nintendo also claims that the defendant is profiteering off of the popularity and subsequent ad-revenue of his sites, with one site regularly reaching over 17 million visitors per month. This is popularity gained, of course, exclusively from providing Nintendo's copyrighted content, that being both in the form of software as well as copyrighted visual logos to advertise the content.

Under the count of "unfair competition", Nintendo claims that:

Defendants’ conduct constitutes unfair competition that is contrary to honest practice in commercial matters under Arizona common law. Specifically, Defendants have traded on Nintendo’s reputation for quality and integrity in order to pass off their unauthorized copies of Nintendo video games and other copyrighted works to consumers. By advertising these copies as genuine Nintendo products, Defendants have actively misled consumers about the true source of these copies.

Nintendo is seeking compensation of $150,000 in statutory damages, on top of up to $2,000,000 for the infringement of each Nintendo trademark. Because there are more than 140 copyrighted titles and 40 trademarks reportedly being infringed, this could possibly result in upwards of $100 million in damages when totaled. In addition, they are demanding that Mathias provide them information on the sources of any and all infringing material hosted on his sites. Of course, Nintendo also seeks to shut both sites down with this motion. Mathias himself has yet to publicly respond to the allegations.

Source

 

[EmBlaze]

The one place I could get my Xbox games without adfly. RIP

AdsBypasser. And that's all I'm going to say regarding this.

 

[B.B.Link]

Yet thousands of rom websites still exist. Good luck taking them all down Nintendo. So stupid. Im glad I hacked my 3ds so I can get games free now. I supported Nintendo enough through the years rebuying the same games over and over. All I see in them is greed now. If they want people to quit downloading roms then make 30+ year old games cheaper than 5 to 10 dollars.

Ha HA HA!!!!!! Check your underpants kid, because you're full of it.

Y'all need to stop making excuses on why you steal games. The Switch could've came out with a VC with every Romset in the galaxy and you STILL would find an excuse to justify pirating roms, so throw that shit out the window because its getting old. Downloading commercial roms is wrong, plain and simple. Stop trying to clear your conscience.

 

[FAST6191]

Downloading commercial roms is wrong, plain and simple.

What if you already own the game?

Not that I actually care what people do in this regard.

 

[DarthDub]

Ha HA HA!!!!!! Check your underpants kid, because you're full of it.

Y'all need to stop making excuses on why you steal games. The Switch could've came out with a VC with every Romset in the galaxy and you STILL would find an excuse to justify pirating roms, so throw that shit out the window because its getting old. Downloading commercial roms is wrong, plain and simple. Stop trying to clear your conscience.

I wouldn't lose sleep over pirating games that aren't sold physically anymore.

 

[eriol33]

10000000 people downloaded Mario Bros 3, imagine how much revenue we lost. Oh Nintendo...

 

[Alex4nder001]

The keyboard warriors have arrived

 

[the_randomizer]

Too bad for Nintendo I managed to download the entire US Snes ROM set, *shrug* So, until more of those games are publicly available for digital purchase, no dice.

 

[SirNapkin1334]

Running your piracy site in someplace like the US while profiting off the distribution of copyrighted work is a very bad idea. They might get off lightly now that they've removed all the Nintendo stuff.

This might sound snobbish also, but if you're going to pirate at least do it right. There are so many better methods and alternatives than ad infested sites. And for the love of all that is holy don't pay for any 'premium membership,' that's just wrong on so many levels.

Yeah. I mean, running ads so you can have enough money to keep the site up is one thing, but profiting, that’s even worse than pirating.

 

[Bladexdsl]

"checks the roms sites i go to" ....still there so WHO GIVES A FUCK

 

[osaka35]

Yikes, that's a lot of money gained from hosting nintendo stuff. I'd be pissed too if someone was hosting all my work and making that much money off it X'D. Why didn't they host elsewhere, and keep every piece of this stuff out of the US or Japan?

 

[Kyuuketsuki]

Hosting...

That's why the sites I use [REDACTED] and [REDACTED], have external hosts (people are making good use of Google Drive), while [REDACTED] has a little download button (possibly the next one to go). Sites that aren't hosting, usually have the loophole of users submitting links and then those links have been shared through multiple forums and the source doesn't direct to the sites in question (the same loophole with torrent hosts).

 

[EddieEddie90]

This is why I keep my all my roms on my hard drive, I just don't know when they are going to be taken down from the internet

 

[MasterJ360]

I know 1 rom site was asked to stop sharing 3DS games which they were forced to take down everything under Nintendo. So they sue some folks and persuade others for take down. Hmmmm these 2 guys were just unlucky

 

[B.B.Link]

What if you already own the game?

Not that I actually care what people do in this regard.

I don't care about the morality of pirating. i do it more than anybody here. I just hate when people make excuses on why they do it. "Nintendo should do this" "Sony should do that" Just pirate already.

 

[Blasingame]

Something like this similar happened in Australia and I think it was resolved with an out of court settlement. Interested to see if it would happen again. Usually this could be Nintendo making an example of these folks.

Then again... profiting from the ad revenue does tick me off.

 

[LuxerWap]

I know I am gonna get hated for this, but I still stand by Nintendo on this. Please noye that i am not some Nintendo fanboy since I know some people expected that when I defended most of their actions, but what they are doing with ROMs sites are fair.

I pirate games as well, but I don't complain when some company takes them down. It's pretty understandable. They have to protect their IP from anyone who is try to make bucks out of them. And don't say no one does that. I have seen many "XXX games in 1!" cartridges and Plug n' Play systems everywhere. Mostly around big Flea Markets. Most games are pirated and being sold for $20+.

Nintendo isn't the one to blame here. It is us because we are screwing around their games without their permission.

 

[Trash_Bandatcoot]

$100,000,000?!
Gee, don’t mess with Nintendo or Reggie comes knocking at your door with a payment of a 100 million dollars!

 

[the_randomizer]

Ha HA HA!!!!!! Check your underpants kid, because you're full of it.

Y'all need to stop making excuses on why you steal games. The Switch could've came out with a VC with every Romset in the galaxy and you STILL would find an excuse to justify pirating roms, so throw that shit out the window because its getting old. Downloading commercial roms is wrong, plain and simple. Stop trying to clear your conscience.

So? You think legalities have stopped people before? What about games you already own, or games that are not available on digital services? Sorry, but illegalities only make them more desirable. I sure as hell aren't going to pay for the games I already own on the VC or eShop.

 

[Captain_N]

First off those 2 that own that love site should not have making money off of pirated material. Thats how they are getting slammed. If they made zero money out of it then they would only be sewed for distributing copyrighted content with out the content holders permission. When money is made off pirated content, the companies have ammo to use for montary damages. All the Russian servers on DC++ dont make any money for the server holder. Good luck shutting them down. One dude was sharing 210 terabytes of content. Mostly 23gb+ blu ray rips. it was a real share to.

Those of us that are well aware of roms and emulators should just download the entire rom set for the classic consoles. I have a server up for them all and i can load them on any device i need over the network or copy to usb/sd card. I can understand trying to download every 3ds rom. that's a lot of storage. I have over 7000 ds roms and it totals over 270 GB uncompressed. 3ds roms are so much larger total size is probably 2 TB or more even when compressed.
I suggest getting the rom sets you want so you already have them and dont have to rely on the internet for them.
Classic console roms take up such a small amount of space.

 

[B.B.Link]

So? You think legalities have stopped people before? What about games you already own, or games that are not available on digital services? Sorry, but illegalities only make them more desirable. I sure as hell aren't going to pay for the games I already own on the VC or eShop.

You again..............

There you go, making excuses on why you should pirate. If you already own the game, why do you need to download it again? Even if you sold it, why should you get a free copy? JUST PIRATE THE ROMS, no excuses.