Warez-hosting ROMsite RomUniverse finds itself back in the headlines, after a change to the ruling of a court case that wrapped up earlier this year. In 2019, Nintendo and its legal time brought up a lawsuit against the owner of RomUniverse, Mathew Storman. When faced with charges, Storman decided to defend himself in court, without a laywer, claiming innocence for the uploading of ROMs to his website, only for lawyers to prove he did indeed upload illegal content, as well as knowingly allowed others to upload such files. This May, a judge ruled that Storman owed Nintendo $2.1 million dollars for damages, though while Nintendo sought a permanent injunction against Storman, the judge denied this, as there was no proof that RomUniverse had caused "irreparable harm". .

Now, however, that has changed. In the past month, Storman has made claims that he might possibly want to bring his ROM website back online, although with the caveat that it would lack all Nintendo-related titles. Following this, it was submitted to the court, where the judge reversed his decision and hit Storman and RomUniverse with a permanent injunction, under the belief that with the possible revival of the copyright-infringing site, Nintendo could be at harm of further damage.

Storman has been ordered to destroy all illegal copies of Nintendo games, movies, books, music, and other illegally obtained files featuring Nintendo's IPs. The defendant has until August 17th to delete the offending content and comply.

Source

 

[munnimann]

read this
https://gbatemp.net/threads/piracy-common-myths.344858/

"Piracy is not theft because it does not cause any direct damage or loss to the other party"

Yeah, but if one pirate uses some lines of another pirate's open source code in their own closed source project, then try to make this exact semantic argument on GBAtemp and see how people here react.

 

[deinonychus71]

I'd say maybe not them but maybe other companies...
However, it's been already proven that piracy has no impact on sales

I'd love to see an an actual study on that.
A study that specifically isolates the case of old gen, current gen and indie games.

 

[Jacobh]

read this
https://gbatemp.net/threads/piracy-common-myths.344858/

The study linked in there literally says there are wide ranging effects of piracy including lost sales.

Yes, it says the exact amount of lost revenue cannot be calculated and many specific claims are bogus or based on questionable assumptions. It definitely does not prove piracy has no effect and even if the exact impact can’t be calculated it clearly says there is one.

 

[JaNDeRPeiCH]

mmmh... I doubt it's ACTUALLY legal, even in your country
I'm pretty sure it's more like in most country in the world and it's just a grey-zone
It's not framed, so it's not illegal but not legal either, there are literally no law about it

You know here in Mexico we dont have a official repair store from nintendo right? Even if you are right about the World legal ways,nintendo doesnt have any good presence here in México...as the same on the Apple products.Why im saying this? if theres a law to get your own legal backup in México its because with that situation im mention.

So in the first instance, the Court allowed Storman to keep a backup of all copyright infringing content?

That really doesn't make sense to me. But considering that most copyright laws exist to serve and benefit big companies and nothing more, that makes even less sense.

If he was indicted and found guilty of copyright infringement, he should've been asked to destroy all copyright infringing content/media because that was the main reason to be indicted in the first place.

Sorry but have to say this, it was very stupid for Storman to claim his return into "business"... Even if it has nothing to do with Nintendo's IP.

Can we speak of jurisprudence here?
In the sense that someone can be indicted and found guilty of copyright infringement, but there could be no -legal- reason to be forced to destroy copyright infringing content, unless you plan to "return into business"?

Sorry not reply in time i was sleeping,korn93 tell you the law in México with a nice webpage about.

Yes, I know, that's stupid, but US laws can do it. I mean, many US laws are really a very bad joke and pure nonsense actually, so its possible to be done.

Disclaimer.
I'm not promoting or giving support to copyright infringment actions. I'm just stating that US laws have many flaws in the way they are created and enforced, and that most of them obey to "greater intere$t$" and nothing else.

Check this example:

https://www.theguardian.com/global/video/2019/feb/08/alexandria-ocasio-cortezs-brutal-take-down-of-us-political-finance-laws-video

And the corresponding video:




Mind to quote a valid and legal source of your claims? I.e. a Law, Jurisprudence or something like that. I mean can you show us a valid source for your sayings?



Each country's laws are diferent, I agree.
But stating that you're legally entitled to do something without proving it by showing a legal source for it, just doesn't make sense.

The best way to claim something is to prove it. Mind to do so?

I'd really like to check for a valid source of what you're stating in your comments, as that means that my own ignorance about it could be eliminated.

Sorry not reply in time,korn93 give you a good webpage about the law.

 

[The Real Jdbye]

Good on that judge. So many romsites just decide to remove Nintendo content following legal trouble, which doesn't really solve the problem, they're not supposed to be hosting ROMs at all. Nintendo just happen to be the ones that usually go after these sites, but that doesn't mean they're safe as long as they're not hosting any Nintendo IP, lol. If you've already gotten in legal trouble why risk more of it, when you might get a more severe punishment the next time around?

@Chary "In 2019, Nintendo and its legal time" should be team, not time?

 

[Noctosphere]

Good on that judge. So many romsites just decide to remove Nintendo content following legal trouble, which doesn't really solve the problem, they're not supposed to be hosting ROMs at all. Nintendo just happen to be the ones that usually go after these sites, but that doesn't mean they're safe as long as they're not hosting any Nintendo IP, lol. If you've already gotten in legal trouble why risk more of it, when you might get a more severe punishment the next time around?

@Chary "In 2019, Nintendo and its legal time" should be team, not time?

Nintendo is the only one going after these sites because only THEIR consoles really are hacked and emulated
I mean, there's no emulator for ps4/5 or XBO/XBSXS
PS3 and XB360 emulator are not really working well
While Nintendo Switch emulators works very fine (on modern PCs though)

Also, PS5 and XBSXS aren't hacked and PS4 and XBO are barely hacked (only old hardware and old firmware)
So I guess that Sony and Microsoft don't really care about these sites because there are no reliable way to play those roms
That's why, IMO, only Nintendo is all against roms and rom hacking and all that stuff...

 

[samedifference]

Again, why doesn’t Nintendo take on bigger sites? Oh right, they download roms from there
themselves

This really isn't true, and I don't know why everybody keeps suggesting it is. Nintendo evidently DOES have their own archive of original masters for all of their commercial releases; the massive leak that happened last year clearly showed that they have their own archive/catalog from which they draw from. Just because Nintendo utilized the iNES header format, that doesn't mean that they download ROMs from random websites.

That said, Nintendo's practices in taking down ROM sites that host Nintendo content are extremely annoying.

 

[JaNDeRPeiCH]

This really isn't true, and I don't know why everybody keeps suggesting it is. Nintendo evidently DOES have their own archive of original masters for all of their commercial releases; the massive leak that happened last year clearly showed that they have their own archive/catalog from which they draw from. Just because Nintendo utilized the iNES header format, that doesn't mean that they download ROMs from random websites.

That said, Nintendo's practices in taking down ROM sites that host Nintendo content are extremely annoying.

Tell to the guy do their own original backup rom and nintendo stole it and put in their actual eshop. Those news are archived in gbatemp very buried deep but it was a intense discussion here sometime ago.

 

[chrisrlink]

so I was thnking of taking a jpeg of my butt changging the extension to a rom's send it to them (nintendo) just for the lulz if they sue me in court I'll tell them to change the extension back to jpeg just to tell them their so gullable

 

[samedifference]

Tell to the guy do their own original backup rom and nintendo stole it and put in their actual eshop. Those news are archived in gbatemp very buried deep but it was a intense discussion here sometime ago.

A correct ROM dump is going to have consistently matching bytes across the board. The fact that it matches someone's personal backup byte-for-byte doesn't mean that Nintendo just downloaded a ROM off the internet. Nintendo's use of the long standard iNES format doesn't really imply anything of the sorts. This twitter thread debunks it pretty well: https://twitter.com/LuigiBlood/status/1378735709671059464

 

[DBT]

Why? Are you rooting for this criminal/thief who should be imprisoned?

isnt that a bit harsh to outright say someone who shared roms online should be imprisoned.. there are people who actually do 'real' crimes.

Doesnt relate to my reply:
After all, Nintendo could make actually loads of money if they would consistently provide their older games which they arent in a useful way. The really did big with WiiVC and now with the switch they are at a point where they have (number wise) maybe not even half of the games that were once available on Wii/WiiU.

"Piracy is a service problem" - Gabe Newell

 

[Deleted member 668561]

But would people really buy the games instead? Or do they pirate more than what they can pay for? Because then the dev wouldn't have gotten anything anyways.

If a game sucks it sucks,

If I make a game that's half decent and sell it for $10 people will still pirate it

 

[realtimesave]

I was on a roms private torrent site once. I believe it was called "pleasuredome" Anyways, I got into a small argument with people on their forum where I stated simply that roms are warez. They disagreed to the point where I just flat out told them to delete my fucking account. So I did a hit and run on a torrent and left. I forgot what I downloaded but at least I didn't contribute to their lame site. lol.

 

[depaul]

Intuitively the defendant here will think : And why not sue other piracy sites as well? Why only me?

I think here justice should be applied to all rom sites, and not only some unfortunate ones that will be sued.

 

[DBT]

Intuitively the defendant here will think : And why not sue other piracy sites as well? Why only me?

I think here justice should be applied to all rom sites, and not only some unfortunate rom sites.

You can bet on it. This will most likely happen now that there is a clear precedent case.

 

[MadMakuFuuma]

common people download from any site that is easy, les the rest do it from private trackers and/or private groups. what is funny is that any half-ass portable console made in china came with dozens of Nintendo roms, but i never see Nintendo going against them lol

 

[FAST6191]

@Chary "In 2019, Nintendo and its legal time" should be team, not time?

Maybe Chary became a new lawyer while we were not paying attention and is now all about those billable hours.

 

[HRudyPlayZ]

Lmao take a $60 game, if 100,000 people pirate it, that's almost 10 million lost, scale that to 1 million people, it can bankrupt a small or medium dev studio


People realize that game sales have to cover the peogramming, art/graphic design, r&D, testing, advertising, and also to pay back investors


If they sell a million copies, they are not taking home every penny, something called business expenses

As a dev why should I even bother putting effort in a game if all people want to do is steal it

Then the same people complain that the sequel is horse shit, cause they put less funding in it

Piracy isn't impacting the industry as much as you think it is...

Let's take a 60$ game that may cost around 1 million to make, all things combined (marketing, design, graphics, development...). In order to not lose any money, the studio would have to atleast do around 15 000 sales. Most studios will get to that point at some point. This means any more sale made afterwards is only benefitial since it doesn't cost them any more money for the game (copy-pasting a file is free, this obviously wouldn't be true for physical media but even then it's a pretty small cost).

Pirates will pretty much always represent a slight portion of the total players and most will actually buy their game legitimately. If most of your playerbase didn't pay the game, then there's a problem somewhere. Either your game is completely unknown, is priced at an absurd amount or is just terrible but there's something wrong... As Gaben once said piracy is just a service-issue.

Another thing to note is that the ratio of pirates vs legit players stays proportional to the amount of sales and interrested players.
There's also a lot of pirates that wouldn't have bought the game otherwise, either because it is too expensive, they live in a poor country, they ended up hating the game after them "trying" it or other reasons... There's also the used market which is pretty much affecting devs the same way as piracy. There's countless examples of games that actually benefited from piracy, take a look at Minecraft or Isaac. Pirates couldn't afford the game, the devs have stated that they understand that, and they just ask for publicity in return.

Knowing all of that, no, piracy doesn't hurt most studios that much. I'm not saying it doesn't hurt them at all, because there's a definitely a tiny amount of pirates that would've bought the game if it wasn't for piracy, but it's not that significant. And in some cases, it actually helps the game by giving it a free marketing in order to reach more easily the audience that can actually pay.

I'm not even talking about the fact that pirated versions sometimes end up being better than the original game. Either because they take less disk space, or because of their lack of DRM. But that's not the topic here

 

[CMDreamer]

Basically. In Mexico if you are the legit user of a computer program, you are allowed to make a backup. I think games can be seen as computer programs


LEY FEDERAL DEL DERECHO DE AUTOR
Articulo 105
http://www.diputados.gob.mx/LeyesBiblio/pdf/122_010720.pdf

Thanks for the information!

 

[subcon959]

Let's take a 60$ game that may cost around 1 million to make, all things combined (marketing, design, graphics, development...). In order to not lose any money, the studio would have to atleast do around 15 000 sales. Most studios will get to that point at some point. This means any more sale made afterwards is only benefitial since it doesn't cost them any more money for the game (copy-pasting a file is free, this obviously wouldn't be true for physical media but even then it's a pretty small cost).

The actual numbers are probably very different as they don't get 100% of every sale, but you might be interested in this post: https://www.resetera.com/threads/it...rom-various-studios-need-to-break-even.10558/