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

 

[EpikJimmer]

It really hurts when I JUST discovered this existed.

 

[spotanjo3]

That's okay. There are always private site somewhere. RomUniverse is not a private site and easily to be caught and order to removed all roms.. The same for many other non private sites of roms. You are better off go with the private sites.

 

[EpikJimmer]

Yeah, you're right.

 

[subcon959]

What even is the motivation for someone to start a public warez site anyway?

 

[smf]

What even is the motivation for someone to start a public warez site anyway?

money and notoriety.

 

[subcon959]

money and notoriety.

It seems like you could do the same thing with less risky content though.

 

[smf]

It seems like you could do the same thing with less risky content though.

Like? Any copyright violation is a risk.

Although you have to be pretty dumb to carry anything by nintendo, it's not the first site to be taken down.

 

[RedBlueGreen]

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

People pirating the game weren't buying it new anyway so no sale is lost. Piracy isn't as common or widespread as you think. Piracy of stuff like PC games that are still available is done mostly by kids and teenagers with no money, or people from poor countries where the wages are super low. 100,000 adults capable of buying games in first world countries where the games are actually sold aren't pirating it, let alone a million people. Even the most popular ROMs for consoles like the DS have downloads in the tens of thousands, and those are games you can't buy new and some you can't even find used very easily anymore, and a lot of those ROM downloads are duplicate downloads too. A good number of games don't even sell 1 million copies.

 

[Deleted member 668561]

People pirating the game weren't buying it new anyway so no sale is lost. Piracy isn't as common or widespread as you think. Piracy of stuff like PC games that are still available is done mostly by kids and teenagers with no money, or people from poor countries where the wages are super low. 100,000 adults capable of buying games in first world countries where the games are actually sold aren't pirating it, let alone a million people. Even the most popular ROMs for consoles like the DS have downloads in the tens of thousands, and those are games you can't buy new and some you can't even find used very easily anymore, and a lot of those ROM downloads are duplicate downloads too. A good number of games don't even sell 1 million copies.

Eh If I ever work for a game company ya'll will fucking hate me, just sneak my own "drm" in on top the existing, game breaks, and I wipe your save game

 

[RedBlueGreen]

Eh If I ever work for a game company ya'll will fucking hate me, just sneak my own "drm" in on top the existing, game breaks, and I wipe your save game

Sounds clever until it wipes the wrong legitimate user's save and they sue your ass.

 

[Deleted member 668561]

Sounds clever until it wipes the wrong legitimate user's save and they sue your ass.

You can check saves, and salt them


Nobody would sue, just force you to download an in-game update that'll fix it

 

[Dr_Faustus]

People pirating the game weren't buying it new anyway so no sale is lost. Piracy isn't as common or widespread as you think. Piracy of stuff like PC games that are still available is done mostly by kids and teenagers with no money, or people from poor countries where the wages are super low. 100,000 adults capable of buying games in first world countries where the games are actually sold aren't pirating it, let alone a million people. Even the most popular ROMs for consoles like the DS have downloads in the tens of thousands, and those are games you can't buy new and some you can't even find used very easily anymore, and a lot of those ROM downloads are duplicate downloads too. A good number of games don't even sell 1 million copies.

Piracy mainly exists for those who do not have proper access to the stuff regardless. Its not so much that they cannot buy it because they are poor, but because the country they are in or the situation they are unable to obtain it regardless of legitimacy. I might be showing my age a bit referencing this but back in the day when there was a West Germany and an East Germany the latter would not have access to various forms of media with the most desirable being Music which were very popular in cheap vinyl bootlegs being made and sold in secret since they were not allowed to have such things in said country. This was not done to hurt the sales of legitimate sales, but to get it to territories that would otherwise never allow such to exist in the first place for its people. A similar situation which Nintendo themselves did a workaround was that they were not allowed to sell their products in mainland china, but got around it by licensing deals with other companies inland to sell their products under a different name.

As for me, While I will not admit to pirating anything myself, I can understand why its a thing and examples of why its necessary in history. When things are hard to access or are forbidden because a controlling power prevents it for people, people should find the means to seek and obtain it for themselves any way they can. Culture is formed and/or destroyed this way.

Also I totally support the idea of distributing stuff that has long since been out of print or things that are typically innocuous and benefit interest of history of development (game/software betas) as well as rare materials that serve no greater purpose as they have no monetary gain to profit from it (unless they are one of those smegheads who think that owning a rare game and refusing to release a ROM of it makes it that much more valuable, in which case there is a special layer of hell waiting for those folk).

That is my take of the situation. Outside of that anything I might listen\watch\play, if I enjoy it enough I find myself supporting the creators anyway I can. Plus I am one of those old style folk that also loves to own physical copies of stuff. I have no problem showing my support as long as its accessible for me to.

 

[Taffy]

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

No, I was saying that their choices are not great.

Yeah, that's illegal and the fact that he announced that he was going to do it AGAIN just made things worse.

That is the part that's not great. Should have been a bit more clear about that, sorry.

 

[Jjones]

Sad. Just sad, its irritating to see a website that aims to only preserve gaming history through game roms being shut down because of "piracy". If you're so upset with it, create something that bring back the games that aren't even actively playable on the switch. For instance, you still can't play Mario RPG on the switch so, it is impossible to even play that game without this website. Just goes to show that companies like Nintendo are greedy and don't care about their fans.

 

[the_randomizer]

The fact he was selling the ROMs or charging a fee to access them was a dick move and he deserved to get caught.

 

[Seelenamt]

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

Imprisoned for piracy? Calm the hell down.

This guy'll find another reason to get himself imprisoned if he was already publicly talking about reopening the site a month after losing a $2.1 million judgment

 

[AHB]

"REMOVE ALL THIS JUNK FROM THE COMPUTER, SON!"
*remove shortcuts from the desktop* "Okay, they're all gone."

Spoiler: That's obviously not how it's gonna work here...

...but at least half of you have done that with your folks.

 

[Bladexdsl]

charging for roms what a dipshit. use ads or rapidgator links like the smart people. that's how you make money running a pirate site and gets you less attention from the feds too

 

[realtimesave]

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.

Yep. I still see people buying Nintendo games. Unsure why though as it has been so frickin easy to get any game u want for free for over a decade now lol