Nintendo wins injunction against pirate site RomUniverse
Nintendo’s success in securing a permanent injunction against the videogame piracy website RomUniverse signals the games company’s aggressive stance when protecting its IP.
The US District Court for the Central District of California handed down a decision earlier this month ordering the website’s owner Matthew Storman to destroy the copies and file a declaration certifying his compliance no later than August 20.
The court published a declaration yesterday, August 17, confirming that Storman had destroyed the unauthorised copies of Nintendo IPs, including games, movies, books, and music.
Nintendo’s injunction was initially denied in a summary judgment in May, but the court order was eventually handed down on August 5, following fears that the website would be re-launching.
Storman will also be required to pay Nintendo £2,115,000 in statutory damages.
Nintendo’s crackdown
Nintendo is particularly bullish on shutting down piracy sites, more so than their two biggest competitors in the video game console market—Sony and Microsoft.
“I suspect that one of the main reasons that Nintendo has been so aggressive with pirate sites is that it’s a bigger target for piracy than its competitors,” said Ryan Meyer, of counsel at Dorsey & Whitney.
He added: “Nintendo has a huge catalogue of games, including many games, such as the Super Mario and Zelda series, that have become iconic and recognisable even to non-gamers...Because of the relative simplicity of those games and their consoles, they have long been easy to emulate.”
Nintendo also monetises its legacy titles through digital re-releases and consoles such as the NES and SNES mini.
Case history
Nintendo of America first sued Storman in October 2019, identifying RomUniverse as “built largely on brazen and mass scale infringement of Nintendo’s IP”, and claiming that it was among the most visited hubs for pirated Nintendo games.
As well as copies of games from Nintendo’s legacy systems such as the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES), RomUniverse also shared pirated versions of the company’s current Switch and Nintendo 3DS games.
In the complain t, Nintendo claimed that nearly 300,000 Switch games and more than 500,000 3DS games had been downloaded from the website.
Storman denied that he had uploaded any files to RomUniverse and claimed that the website had “service provider status”, which he argued made it immune from copyright infringement.
The court claimed that Storman had provided no evidence to support that he had complied with Nintendo’s initial Digital Copyright Millennium Act (DMCA) notifications, so the safe harbour for protection for infringement did not apply here.
Nintndo moved for a summary judgment, demanding damages for both copyright and trademark infringement as well as a permanent injunction against Storman.
Judge Consuelo Marshall granted the injunction, ordering Storman to pay $2.1 million in damages but initially denied the injunction request, claiming that Nintendo did not prove “irreparable harm”.
Storman contested the damages order and filed a motion for reconsideration, while Nintendo asked the court to reconsider the denied injunction.
Similar litigation
In 2018, Nintendo reached a settlement in another high-profile piracy case against the owners of two piracy sites-LoveROMS.com and LoveRETRO.co.
The proposed settlement was for a total of $12 million, which many saw as a deterrent for similar sites, as reported by TorrentFreak.
This strategy seemed to work, as shortly after the settlement one of the largest game piracy websites EmuParadise ceased operation.
Meyer said: “In both litigations, the courts ordered the defendants to pay millions of dollars in damages to Nintendo and also imposed a permanent injunction to prevent them infringing Nintendo’s IP rights again.”
“The biggest difference between the two proceedings is that Nintendo and the Mathiases arrived at this result through settlement, whereas RomUniverse fought until Nintendo finally prevailed on the merits,” he concluded.
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