Emulators: Nintendo sues ROM supplier LoveRETRO and LoveROMs

Nintendo claims damages from LoveRETRO and LoveROMs ROM vendors for copyright infringement. It is more than the individual case.

It is unfair competition and violation of copyright and trademark rights: Nintendo sued the operator LoveRETRO and LoveROMs. According to the complaint, both websites are owned by Mathias Designs and offer game ROMs for download. With ROMs, old games like Super Mario Bros. can also be read on the computer via an emulator. Many of the most popular ROMs were originally released for Nintendo consoles.

Nintendo sees this as a violation of its own rights and is suing a federal court in Arizona where Mathias Designs would be based. The TorrentFreak website has published the complaint.

"The website, LoveROMs, alone has 17 million visitors a month, attracting the convenience of having free and unauthorized copies of Nintendo's video games and other intellectual property", write Nintendo's lawyers. "The resulting popularity of LoveROMs and LoveRETRO sites has given defendants significant undue revenue, including donations and the sale of advertising space on websites."

High Compensation Claim

Nintendo seeks to pay tribute to the alleged offenses For each copyright infringement, the company claims up to $ 150,000, for each trademark infringement up to $ 2 million. In addition, Nintendo wants to prevent the operator of the platforms from continuing to offer Nintendo games as ROMs. He should also disclose the sources from which he obtained the ROMs. Nintendo states in the complaint that the operators are not retro lovers, but sophisticated and sophisticated businessmen.

LoveRETRO is offline in response to the chase. Who calls the website, there is only indication that the page "until further notice" is no longer available. "We hope we can recover this," he continues. Although still available, LoveROMs has removed all Nintendo content.

Nintendo's position is clear

It's not surprising that Nintendo is launching such heavy weapons against manufacturers and suppliers of emulators and ROMs. The company is considered extremely aggressive in protecting its intellectual property. On its own website, Nintendo writes: The emergence of emulators, which have been developed to illegally play copied Nintendo software, represents the biggest threat to the intellectual property of video game developers yet today. Danger if the products are offered free of charge. "We are not ready for negotiations:" It would not make economic sense to legalize the emulators.

How much does Nintendo mean a second recent case, also reported by TorrentFreak, that Nintendo GitHub has been warned by DMCA to withdraw a deposit with Gameboy Advance games GitHub has already responded to this request [19659013AreemulatorsandROMsreallyillegal?

The legal status of emulators and ROMs is complex, and the emulators themselves are generally considered legal – they are just game emulators As long as no protected code is used, this is basically trouble-free: the ROMs, ie the files that are provided to the emulator, are more complex and the games that are emulated with these files are protected by copyright. 19659006] This protection does not stop at the fact that a game is no longer officially sold, as is often the case with retro games The case is. The copyright remains unchanged in the United States 75 years after the first publication with the owner of the copyright. But there are also exceptions to copyright: In the United States, the doctrine of fair dealing applies. It provides that in certain circumstances, copyrighted material may also be used without the permission of the copyright owner when it is used in education, reporting, commentary or criticism. The fair use guidelines are extensible and could potentially be used for archiving video games.

In the end, there is the question of perspective: the ROM download could be considered legal – for example, if you already own the original game. Deploy downloads is always on another piece of paper. And then there are the allegations of patent infringement and unfair competition in the application – making the outcome of the trial even more difficult. Jurisdictions that can be drawn as appropriate precedent, there is no. The case of Nintendo against LoveRETRO and LoveROMs could also significantly influence future cases.

(Dahe)