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Nintendo To ROM Sites: Forget Cease-and-Desist, Now We're Suing (arstechnica.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from 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." The biggest amount of money Nintendo is seeking comes from "$150,000 for the infringement of each Nintendo copyrighted work and up to $2,000,000 for the infringement of each Nintendo trademark." The company has also requested full disclosure of the operators' "receipts and disbursements, profit and loss statements, advertising revenue, donations and cryptocurrency revenue, and other financial materials."
LoveROMs has since removed 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." Meanwhile, LoveRetro.co now redirects visitors to a page that reads: "Loveretro has effectively been shut down until further notice."
LoveROMs has since removed 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." Meanwhile, LoveRetro.co now redirects visitors to a page that reads: "Loveretro has effectively been shut down until further notice."
You shouldn't steal things that don't belong to you. No sympathy here.
These sites should be trying as hard as possible to pivoting into work with Nintendo on a web based subscription library of games. Ala Napster 2.0.
So what's up with Tesla lately? Are the shorts winning or losing?
amiright?
1. Video games are stupid.
2. Piracy is stupid.
1. Sue websites for hosting 30 year old games
2. Anger customers
3. ???
4. Profit!!!
If anyone thinks this has to do with any thing other than cashing in on selling people the same games that they have already paid for multiple times as a virtual console cash grab, they are morons.
I'm a good cook. I'm a fantastic eater. - Steven Brust
They make shit games, they treat their fans like shit.
Why does anyone buy anything they make?
People are getting their switches banned just for homebrew and they're charging full price for phone tier games.
I don't get it. Why are they morons? Because they are grabbing cash? Isn't that what companies do?
if you don't cease (and/or desist, which is the same thing), then they threaten to sue.
the other party doesn't cease
so Nintendo sues
that's what C&Ds are for! if you never sue over a C&D, your targets might (such as these guys) just ignore them. Sue, and now your C&Ds are threats again.
There's clearly still a demand. And the used games market has dried up because piracy is much simpler.
Suing your fans or the things they like never ends well.
While I fully acknowledge and support an owner's copyrights, I also believe that in absence of clear, genuine use or capitalization upon a particular copyright, certain IP should enter the a "semi-public" domain wherein limited duration licensing to those copyrights may be sold on behalf of the holder.
Example: If Nintendo is still making money on "Pokemon" in general, good for them. However, if they don't find it financially viable to re-make the original GameBoy Pokemon games and thus choose not to make them available on modern platforms, people should be able to pay a fair value semi-public domain license to replicate or acquire those games for use on any platform. The license could be limited (1 year) and affordable ($2/year) with at least 50% of that licensing going to Nintendo with the remaining going to support this semi-public domain licensing system.
This would be better for everyone. Nintendo doesn't have to ramp up their lawyer pool to squeeze blood from stones (users and distributors of emulators and games) and those "stones" could pay their share in small amounts. Nintendo continues get to get paid and retain control while users get their games and don't get dragged to court.
The same could be done for books no longer in print (I have a couple I'd like to replace but cannot find anywhere) and movies that haven't made the transition to digital media. Hell, I'd happily pay a flat $0.50/DVD to be able to rip them and store them for my own convenient watching while being 100% certain that I can never be sued for having done so (instead of having to argue fair use in court).
The demand is there. Partner up with GoG or somebody and simply sell the older games...
*sigh* You know this is really about some corporate lawyer or middle manager trying to keep his job for another few months...
I get the argument that this is abandonware and so therefore, they shouldn't prosecute people who use it, but I don't think that that argument holds up well. A lot of the most popular ROMs are available through Nintendo channels, but it's locked to Nintendo's hardware. I personally don't want to deal with having another device (and don't want to have to pay for that device either), so it's tempting to download the ROM and use the emulator rather than purchase the legitimate copy from Nintendo. I think that the era of abandonware is over (or at least abandonware that's any good).
People already played all the old games and downloaded all the roms.
Now we want VR games.
They have become a blight on the gaming community and are very big copyright maximalists.
If you care about the gaming economy, stop buying Nintendo.
Honestly, after 14 years with potentially a single 14 year extension TOPS. This stuff should be public domain by now.
I own them on NES, SNES, Gameboy, Gameboy Advanced, and N64 and those are just the Nintendo consoles I have owned and still have the cartridges too. I am not buying those games again and will stick the the emulators, thank you very much.
And the cat is already out of the bag here, even if they get a few sites, they won't even remotely put a dent in them and then we got the torrent sites spreading the Goodsets of these things which is literally the entire collections of every game, which many will download and store just to keep from every downloading them again if they ever get harder to find. They aren't even remotely big by todays standards.
Nintendo has lost the market for games. Why? To much proprietary crap. How long does patents last, 14 years?
Dump Nintendo games and create games on Steam or Open Source Games.
There is only a handful of games for the XBox making people by the XBox, very stupid.
MindCraft used to be on every Hardware. What happened when Microsoft bought MindCraft?
On the note of copyright, infringement, and public domain, as long as there is a rights holder for an IP it is still considered copyright content. The more compelling question is why did Nintendo wait until now 30+ years later?
It's like people are still shocked at this by now.
Nintendo are scummy. Always have been.
They are Apple-tier. Tolkein-tier.
Want to know what I did to show my disdain for it? I stopped buying any of their shit. Done.
Sadly other people are spineless and cave easily because they have no other hobbies besides gaming. Those that are the core fanbase of most hobbies. The obsessives. The ones any hobbyist and entertainment company LOVES because they know they can scam the fuck out of them.
They could easily make a competitive solution to this, which is the reason these sites even exist.
Will they? Will they FUCK. Nintendo are backwards. They are stuck in the 90s. Christ, even Switch networking is terrible. How are those incompetent fucks still around? Oh yeah, obsessives I just said.
If Sony weren't just as retarded, Nintendo would have been gone years ago. But Sony release handhelds and let them die. I'm also done with them and their stupidity. PS5 can get fucked, quite frankly. PS4 has been abysmal with the overall quality of games.
Fuck Nintendo
It's the litigous bastards and greedy fuckers at Nintendo AMERICA.
The more sensible people at Nintendo JAPAN, a.k.a the actual, real Nintendo, are not this greedy and fucked up.
The demand is obvious, given the Nintendo NES Classic re-release (after that disasterous launch in 2006). Sure you can probably build a cheaper one, but again, Nintendo's version has all the ROMs licensed properly.
(And Nintendo didn't see Sega and Atari screwed themselves when they sold their stuff to AT Games, which is why those retro consoles never sold well - they may say 1000 games on the box, but it's really about 10 official real Sega Genesis or 2600 games, and 990 "inspired" games by AT Games themselves, so it's really a box full of shovelware). Whereas the NES Classic (and SNES Classic) contain nothing but real games.
And the re-release is done quietly this time around so it's actually possible to get them. Launch day stock lasted beyond the first day because unless you knew, it wasn't advertised.
Any why are we so quick to condemn actions like this, but cheer on the likes of people who go after GPL violators? it's exactly the same thing A GPL violator is a pirate - they've committed copyright infringement. Distributing GPL binaries without source is copyright violation - if you didn't agree to the GPL, your rights are what the law grants you.
I was an avid NES / SNES player back when they were originally released, but my general opinion is that these are mostly old games I don't want to play anymore. I'm not really interested in buying a NES or SNES mini that would pretty quickly find their way to my tech junk box and start collecting dust. Just doesn't appeal to me.
I did buy Final Fantasy 3/6 in the Android store. I had never played it originally, and heard so many good things I thought I'd give it a try. I think it was $14 if memory serves. Was it worth it? I don't think so. I got bored pretty quickly and never finished it. There was nothing wrong with it, I actually prefer the touch screen controls to a controller. I just didn't find it all that fun. I will probably re-visit and try to finish it some other time. Not a total waste, but too much money for what I received in my opinion. I think as much as $10 of the price was due to nostalgia, and $4 was actual value.
My son has a New 2DSXL, and I'll probably see if I can buy WarioLand 4, Advance Wars, and maybe a few others if I can get them for $5 each. If they are too expensive, or not available, I guess I won't buy them. This does not anger me more or make me sad.
As far as legality vs. "right or wrong" / grey area, I feel like on one hand Nintendo has the legal right to their own IP, but they have also benefited from ROM sites keeping their games popular over the years while they figured out a way to mass market them again.
It kind of feels like the end result of this is that Nintendo will keep selling overpriced "mini" products, people will keep buying them, and most of these old games will just be bundled in with more popular titles and never played anyway.
Prior to modern copyright, which began in the early 18th century with the Copyright Act 1710 aka the Statute of Anne, a monopoly called the Stationers' Company owned rights comparable to copyright in the form of the exclusive right to operate a printing press.
Third, if a game isn't compelling enough to buy after viewing a "Let's Play" then I have to question what value it provided in the first place.
Walkthrough videos reportedly hurt sales of That Dragon, Cancer by Numinous Games.
Source: "That Dragon, Cancer dev calls out Let's Plays for why game hasn't turned a profit" by Allegra Frank
There, FIFY.
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used games are far from dried up. game stop brought them back ebay prices have gone threw threw the roof.
counter sue for useing ines headers in there own emus.
They benefit from the free workload of the people doing the emulator work but want to shut them down and force people to use there own emulators that do less then the free ones.
What about being able to just buy the roms?
So you can use your own emulator or use an flash cart on real hardware?
I assume Nintendo is preparing to release some online switch store where you can get a rotation of games for a membership like PSN and XBOX does or you can directly purchase access to old games.
As such, they are getting rid of any low hanging fruit before release now that these rom sites are possibly costing them money.
"Old Nintendo games" and "Nintendo copyrighted works" are not the same thing.
If your NES or SNES rom was not published or developed by Nintendo then Nintendo has no issue with you.
The company that did publish it might care if its still in business but its not Nintendo's problem. Notice
the sites they are suing are making money off their IP and trademarks.
It's not even the real Nintendo either. It's their "we're a law-firm" distribution arm Nintendo of America. They don't make games.
They're little more than copyright trolls.
What did they expect? Nintendo is actively engaged in these old games' sales with the retro / mini units. Obviously a lot more people would be buying the units if free ROM downloads didn't exist. It's just business. They didn't seem to care much for years before the units came out.
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
Is a download counted as an infringement? How many downloads are there?
Lets just make some numbers up and say 30 million downloads.
That's $105,000,000,000,000. 105 trillion dollars!!!!
Nintendo is basically the mafia (I mean this almost unironically- check their history on how many times they've been busted for their business practices such as price-fixing), and the ROM sites made money giving their IP away for free.
I'm not going to shed a single tear for Nintendo however since they suck as a company and have pretty shitty practices on shifting the electronic content you buy from them around (No virtual console on the switch, meaning eat shit if you bought a bunch of stuff on your WiiU. Hope your dead console keeps working!) and have an 80 year-olds view of the internet as far as their properties are concerned. Remember that they mass DMCA'd fucking Let's Play videos, and demonetize anything with a microscopic amount of footage of their games even if that footage is used in a way that satisfies fair use. They also wanted to start a sort of profit-sharing agreement with youtubers and streamers who merely DISCUSS their games.
Nintendo is scum. They don't deserve your money.
ROM sites are also not innocent obviously. They made money off your downloads, and there was always a better way to get them. There's not much to them- you risk your PC's safety dealing with intrusive ads, bitcoin miners, malware, etc.- the site owner makes money off the download of material they don't own.
Really, if you want to just pirate all of the games for old Nintendo system (which IMO there's nothing wrong with, because they've resold them in one inferior form or another a dozen times, or not at all in the case of many) they've been on bittorrent in the form of easily-to-store ZIP files for years and years. Every NES title ever known (including demos, bootlegs, unreleased games, etc) can be had in a ZIP file that's a hefty 50-ish Megabytes. Every SNES game ever made cames out to the low hundreds of Megabytes. Pull down one of those archives and store it however you wish if you're worried. In the case of the NES/SNES there's even cycle-perfect emulators (which the NES/SNES classic do not use).
Do you think the Nintendo Classic and SNES Classic would have been such a hit had they made those games available for free on the web the past decade? Not that I agree with it, I think they still would have sold for the novelty factor, but I can see the logic. Use childhood nostalgia like an investment account that compounds interest the longer you create scarcity for that nostalgia, then cash out when each generation hits 30 years old.
It might be OK if you could actually buy the games, you know?
Why isn't there a legal understanding of that?
A blog I run for the wealth
All these people that "own" the ROMS need to just let people resell them and be charged.
I would happily pay $100 for an image of all Nintendo ROMS, an emulator and a good front end. Same goes for MAME and everything else.
Then companies would emerge that sell cabinet hardware for old cabinet games. Others would make a console looking thing that runs some cheap hardware for Nintendo emulation.
There is a lot of money to be made. Just "shutting it down" is a lawyers brain at these companies doing the thinking. Let a CEO with some creativity make the damned decisions.
about cars john Deere wants to make all repair/diagnostic software dealer only. Other car manufacturers as well.
Welp, your childhood is under lock and key. Go piss on Sonny Bono's grave if you don't like it.
Any why are we so quick to condemn actions like this, but cheer on the likes of people who go after GPL violators?
The point of the GPL is to leverage copyright in order to guarantee certain freedoms to the software's users; freedoms which, at least according to some, users ought to have by right in the first place, and which copyright has helped take away. If you happen to be in the group which thinks this way, there is nothing inconsistent about opposing copyright but still being upset with GPL violators, not because they are violating copyright (which is just a means to an end—using the opponent's preferred system against them) but rather because they are denying the users of their software those freedoms.
"The state is that great fiction by which everyone tries to live at the expense of everyone else." - Bastiat
I'm not sure what you're getting at here, because that included games section doesn't imply that the games are unlicensed.
go fuck a tree
there is nothing inconsistent about opposing copyright but still being upset with GPL violators, not because they are violating copyright (which is just a means to an end—using the opponent's preferred system against them) but rather because they are denying the users of their software those freedoms.
If there were no copyright then there would be nothing to enforce the GPL at all. Sure you could make copies of the binaries but the whole point of software freedom (access to the source code) would be lost. You can be upset with GPL violators all you want but if you oppose copyright then you inherently are endorsing people's right to violate the GPL which is why your view is so inconsistent, you are an enabler of the very thing you're upset about.
The Berne Convention is what set this all in motion. Then when America signed the treaty to support the Berne Convention it extended copyright by a decade or two, without the paperwork hassles the US had previously required. After that, when Disney got close to losing their copyrights, already dealing with Chinese knockoffs of Mickey Mouse back in the 70s, they pushed for and got the Sonny Bono Copyright Extension passed, paving the way for the past 30 years of IP encroachment.