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Couple Who Ran ROM Site To Pay Nintendo $12 Million (vice.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: Nintendo has won a lawsuit seeking to take two large retro-game ROM sites offline, on charges of copyright infringement. The judgement, made public today, ruled in Nintendo's favor and states that the owners of the sites LoveROMS.com and LoveRETRO.co, will have to pay a total settlement of $12 million to Nintendo. The complaint was originally filed by the company in an Arizona federal court in July, and has since lead to a swift purge of self-censorship by popular retro and emulator ROM sites, who have feared they may be sued by Nintendo as well.
LoveROMS.com and LoveRETRO.co were the joint property of couple Jacob and Cristian Mathias, before Nintendo sued them for what they have called "brazen and mass-scale infringement of Nintendo's intellectual property rights." The suit never went to court; instead, the couple sought to settle after accepting the charge of direct and indirect copyright infringement. TorrentFreak reports that a permanent injunction, prohibiting them from using, sharing, or distributing Nintendo ROMs or other materials again in the future, has been included in the settlement. Additionally all games, game files, and emulators previously on the site and in their custody must be handed over to the Japanese game developer, along with a $12.23 million settlement figure. It is unlikely, as TorrentFreak have reported, that the couple will be obligated to pay the full figure; a smaller settlement has likely been negotiated in private.
LoveROMS.com and LoveRETRO.co were the joint property of couple Jacob and Cristian Mathias, before Nintendo sued them for what they have called "brazen and mass-scale infringement of Nintendo's intellectual property rights." The suit never went to court; instead, the couple sought to settle after accepting the charge of direct and indirect copyright infringement. TorrentFreak reports that a permanent injunction, prohibiting them from using, sharing, or distributing Nintendo ROMs or other materials again in the future, has been included in the settlement. Additionally all games, game files, and emulators previously on the site and in their custody must be handed over to the Japanese game developer, along with a $12.23 million settlement figure. It is unlikely, as TorrentFreak have reported, that the couple will be obligated to pay the full figure; a smaller settlement has likely been negotiated in private.
You've obviously never browsed the Nintendo online store - lots of ancient games back up for sale, prewrapped in crappy emulators that lack any of the impressive features of your typical 20-year-old PC-based emulator.
Let's hear it for perpetual copyrights! Hip hip...*crickets chirping*.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
It's that last part I have a problem with - how is that in society's best interest?
How is us being able to not repair or preserve our videogames in the public interest? Little shits like you have been piggybacking on corporate money for a long time. We essentially have eternal copyrights where nothing goes public domain.
Copyright law has been extended 5 times in favor of "value creators" over the public interest every time, arguments like yours fall on deaf ears because corporations own our governments.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
IP law was created to incentivize you to produce works that are accessable to the public to enjoy, not for you to build a feudal empire which is what modern IP law amounts to.
If rule of law existed and sane IP laws were in effect, games would be going open source 12-20 years after they were made and Nintendo's little lawsuit wouldn't even exist because Mario and other old games had fallen into the public domain.
The fact that we don't get source code for PC games that we've all bought is also a big pisser, which is why we have to resort to revese engineering and emulation, if we'd gotten the source code with the games we were paying for every game that has been created for PC would not need an emulator and could be enhanced and updated. The reality is the public is too stupid to understand technology or IP which is why IP law is so corrupt to begin with. The average citizen in capitalist society is a moron which is why human cultural works like videogames are broken and being destroyed by big companies in their eternal quest to prevent any and all culture from ever slipping into public hands.
People like you should go read Lessigs book "Free culture". The big plan is for corps and the 1% to have a monopoly on all human culture.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
GP was agreeing with you by saying that the whole purpose of extending those copyrights is to let people continue to squeeze out the last drops of value to the detriment of the public.
"basic concept of ownership"
That's when you have something that if someone takes from you, you are deprived of possessing or using. That's the "basic concept".
If someone uses your brain-fart it doesn't deprive
you from usage.
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It's not stealing. It's copyright infringement. They really can't be more different.
If it was stealing they would have been charged in a criminal court and imprisoned. This was a civil suit, where they were charged an amount to compensate for the losses claimed by Nintendo.