Two years ago, Nintendo began a court battle against the warez-hosting website RomUniverse, suing its owner, Mathew Storman for damages. Storman defended himself on his own, without a lawyer, and attempted to dismiss the charges by claiming that he himself did not upload any ROMs to RomUniverse, therefore he was innocent. Now the verdict is in, with both Nintendo's lawyers and the presiding judge disagreeing, finding that Storman was responsible for the distribution of the illegal and infringing games on his site. Nintendo sought $15 million dollars in damages and legal fees, however, the US District Court Judge found this to be too harsh, instead fining Storman $35,000 per illegal ROM hosted on RomUniverse.

This added up to be $1.7 million. On top of that, Storman was hit with a charge of $400,000 in statutory damages, making the total amount a whopping $2.1 million. Nintendo also sought permanent injunction, though the Judge denied this, stating that Nintendo couldn't prove it had been irreparably damaged by the existence of RomUniverse, and that the company was not at risk, given the fact that the site has been permanently taken down.

The Court Grants Plaintiff’s Motion for Summary Judgment as to Plaintiff’s copyright infringement, unfair competition and Lanham Act claims, and awards Plaintiff $1,715,000 in statutory damages under the Copyright Act and $400,000 in statutory damages under the Lanham Act for a total of $2,115,000 in statutory damages.

Source: Courtesy of TorrentFreak

 

[Hells Malice]

Get rekt pirate scum

Looks like he'll be Storman off to prison

(for real tho what a moron...not even getting a lawyer lmfao)

 

[DKB]

"and attempted to dismiss the charges by claiming that he himself did not upload any ROMs to RomUniverse." idk if people of his..intelligence should be on the streets.

 

[Chary]

he himself did not upload any ROMs to RomUniverse

It's even better, because in his original testimony, he did admit to uploading ROMs...whoops.

 

[Xzi]

Good luck collecting on that Nintendo, dude's probably broke as a joke and gonna declare bankruptcy now.

 

[Stealphie]

This is the one Nintendo ROMS related lawsuit that i'd say is justified. This site was charging for unlimited downloads, aka basically selling the roms.

 

[Viri]

Nintendo is gonna find out what the RIAA found out when suing people into oblivion. They'll just declare bankruptcy.

 

[gudenau]

What a fun game of whack-a-mole.

I know of multiple sites that have Nintendo stuff up, wonder when they will get clobbered too.

 

[Kioku]

35k per rom... He only hosted 49 roms?

 

[Jayro]

Sweet, 3 more romsites are gonna pop up. I've had best of luck using that "mania" site. Hope they're not next.

 

[MaxToTheMax]

Woohoo.

 

[CompSciOrBust]

Legally I guess N is in the right but from a preservationist perspective Nintendo can get fucked. Games are an important part of our culture, they're works of art, and it should be ensured that future generations have some means to play them. It is unrealistic to expect the kids of today, future game developers who should be drawing from the past for inspiration to have the hardware and technical skills to dump a copy of a game that went out of production decades before they were born. Websites like this need to exist for the future of the gaming industry.

Nintendo used a scene dump of Mario Bros for the Wii's virtual console for god sake, even their own developers rely on these resources. But nah fuck em, they're distributing data that's prohibitively expensive to obtain today so sue them in to the ground.

 

[Crazynoob458]

i lost brain cells reading both comments and the news article
the storman really has no common sence

 

[Jayro]

Legally I guess N is in the right but from a preservationist perspective Nintendo can get fucked. Games are an important part of our culture, they're works of art, and it should be ensured that future generations have some means to play them. It is unrealistic to expect the kids of today, future game developers who should be drawing from the past to inspiration to have the hardware and technical skills to dump a copy of a game that went out of production decades before they were born. Websites like this need to exist for the future of the gaming industry.

Nintendo used a scene dump of Mario Bros for the Wii's virtual console for god sake, even their own developers rely on these resources. But nah fuck em, they're distributing data that's prohibitively expensive to obtain today so sue them in to the ground.

Well I mean... They haven't gone after archive dot org, which hosts rompacks as preservation. But they're also not primarily a "rom site" either.

 

[CompSciOrBust]

Well I mean... They haven't gone after archive dot org, which hosts rompacks as preservation. But they're also not a primarily a "rom site" either.

That's a good point, I'm not sure why. Maybe they think they'd lose if they tried to sue Archive.org. They wouldn't even need to sue though, if they tell them that something they're hosting is illegal they'll happily take it down.

 

[The Catboy]

I wonder how they are expecting to collect on this because I highly doubt that he has this money and that he will even be able to get this money.

 

[CompSciOrBust]

I wonder how they are expecting to collect on this because I highly doubt that he has this money and that he will even be able to get this money.

Knowing someone else who N has sued for a stupid amount of money they'll likely arrange regular payments that have to be made until the total is met (given the amount he'll probably be paying it back for the rest of his life)

 

[XDel]

I wonder if the clock were rolled back, if any of that would be spent on Epstein Island? Or would it go for more safety nets to catch the suicidal workers at their plants in China. Granted, I would be way off base and it's all just going to records, bubble gum, and so called sex change operations for Me-A-Moto.

 

[TheXpertXD]

Not tryna to justify the site or anything, but what damage did Nintendo really suffer tho? It's not like they're trying to sell the games themselves, from my perspective they lost $35,000 each on games they aren't actually making money on anymore.

 

[ihaveawindows]

Oh, the sacrifices I make for the good of this realm...
-Frederick (FE13)

I don't know about you, but here in Indonesia, there is no governing authority to stop the flow of pirated games and movies but piracy itself is illegal, and by such, on online shopping sites in Indonesia, you can find PS2 discs for Rp. 7000,- (around 0.5¢). That's why Nintendo, Sony, and Microsoft are reluctant to give development permits to Indonesian game companies such as Agate Studios Inc.

--------------------- MERGED ---------------------------

Not tryna to justify the site or anything, but what damage did Nintendo really suffer tho? It's not like they're trying to sell the games themselves, from my perspective they lost $35,000 each on games they aren't actually making money on anymore.

I also agree on this, I mean, you're just posting them, not modifying them or anything...
I don't get Nintendo...