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.

Comments

Copyrights Hijack History

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re: Copyrights Hijack History

[Immerman]

As a creator you work a few years to make something, you typically make 90% of the total money in the first few years, and can then milk the long tail for a tiny trickle of residual income for decades afterwards while depriving society, including other creators, of the ability to use your work.

It's that last part I have a problem with - how is that in society's best interest? Because there's nothing sacred about copyright, it's an artificial gift from society, given to encourage creators to create more things. How exactly is that goal served by continuing to let you lock up your creation for another 90 years beyond when you've already extracted most of the total money you'll ever get from it?

Disney, in addition to being one of the major architects of the current near-perpetual copyright terms, is an excellent poster child of why it's a bad deal. An incredible number of their hits are retellings of much older stories, mostly unencumbered by copyright. From Sleeping Beauty to Moana those stories are all, at their roots, other people's creations, given new life by a new interpretation in new media. Why should Disney get to strip-mine other people's creations without giving anything back?