Nintendo’s Lawyers May Have Just Killed ROM Sharing For Good
Robert Triggs / Android Authority
TL;DR
- Nintendo has won a major lawsuit against 1fishier, a filesharing site in Europe, for hosting pirated games.
- Failure to remove infringing material will result in heavy fines and compensation for rights holders.
- The court’s decision has sweeping implications for file hosting across Europe.
Nintendo’s anti-piracy efforts may have just hit a crescendo, with one of the highest courts in Europe handing down a decision with sweeping implications for the industry. After a multi-year legal battle, the French Supreme Court has ruled in Nintendo’s favor against filesharing site 1fishier.
This comes after several appeals from 1fishier’s parent company, Dstorage. Ultimately the judges sided with Nintendo, and now filesharing companies across Europe must comply with requests to remove pirated content or face serious fines and pay compensation to rights holders.
This decision has implications for filesharing services across all of Europe.
1fishier is not a website focused on games or piracy, but rather a general-purpose filesharing site with a freemium model. However, the site refused to remove infringing content after demands from Nintendo, leading to the lawsuit.
A statement from Nintendo implores gamers “not to download pirate copies of Nintendo games as this increases the risk that this will interfere with the functionality and experience that playing legitimate Nintendo games on authentic Nintendo hardware provides.” However, the vast majority of retro games are not available on modern hardware, raising issues for game preservation.
This is just the latest in Nintendo’s long battle against piracy, which has largely targeted emulation and piracy for the Nintendo Switch. Last year saw the high-profile shutdown of TropicHaze, the developers of the Nintendo Switch emulator Yuzu. Despite this, several forks have sprung up, seemingly removing the copyright-infringing elements of the emulator to focus nominally on “homebrew games.”
Nintendo’s efforts haven’t stopped emulation as a whole, as even Nintendo itself admits that emulation is legal. Instead, it has targeted websites sharing copyrighted materials, such as ROMs. The company has also gone after Switch modders, which modify original Nintendo Switch hardware to download and run pirated games.
The Nintendo Switch’s underpowered hardware has proved relatively easy to emulate on modern devices, and Nintendo may be gearing up efforts to shut down piracy ahead of the launch of the Nintendo Switch 2 later this year.
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