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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.
Copyrights are now hijacking cultural history. If you're not actively selling the material to for some reasonable period (10 years) then the copyright should go to the public domain.
The message that Nintendo is sending fans seems clear. Don't use, buy, play or in any other way invest your time or money in Nintendo, as their only interest is in bleeding you dry by whatever means they can. As a company they are signaling that they have neither social insight nor ethics, and do not treat fans as assets nor as free publicity.
Message received and understood, so I'm adding Nintendo to my short boycott list. It's just a personal statement and of course will have no effect on Nintendo individually, but I doubt that I will be the only one making such a decision. Evil deeds and blind corporate greed should not go unpunished. Conversely, competitors now gain an extra chance.
My poor Wii will never have a brother or a sister.
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
...why Nintendo gets ALL the roms?
I mean surely there are games out there that Nintendo doesn't have copyright for. Why should they get the chance to reverse engineer someone else's IP?
What would the likes of Namco, Accolade, Sega, and so on have to say about this?