Nintendo has filed a lawsuit against the alleged operator of the popular console ROM sites LoveROMS.com and LoveRETRO.co. The sites are among the most notorious online hubs for pirated games, according to Nintendo, and face millions of dollars in potential damages.
Even ROM sites come in various flavours, from sites merely offering the ROM images for download without using any trademark imagery or logos, all the way up to sites like LoveROMS and LoveRETRO, which use in-browser emulators so you can play the games in question in your browser, all dressed up in trademarked logos ad imagery.
Little to say here – distributing ROMs is illegal, and while the damages Nintendo claims are clearly insane, there’s no grey area here.
There’s enough people who enjoy the results of copyright infringement to be able to politically push for copyright reform.
But people are lazy.
So instead companies push politicians to forever extend copyright terms, and to reduce fair use windows.
Given sufficient will, the people who use roms and old software etc could absolutely get an “abandonware” exemption for copyright placed into local statutes. Just actually get off your ass and lobby your local politician. Or support the Pirate Party. Just do *something*.
Nintendo is actually building competing products, retro systems and coming virtual consoles. They all use emulators, so oh wait. Emulators are next, we’ll of course
Can I just buy the ROMS from Nintendo. I would pony up the dough. I even have the cartridges. I’m just too lazy to buy/make a ROM burner to copy my cartridges to ROMS.
Same. Seems like Nintendo is just leaving money on the table by not selling to people like us. Many of these games I’ve bought several times over on different platforms, and now they want to charge monthly for it on the Switch. Sorry, Nintendo… I’m not playing that game anymore. Either sell me the roms, or go directly to Hell… do not pass Go, do not collect $200.
Nintendo has always taken a “We’d outlaw fair use if we could” stance, so I went out of my way to give them the finger by buying a Retrode and eBaying used cartridges as a way to legally play their games without financially endorsing their current efforts.
(Not even indirectly, since anyone who didn’t already go for the much cheaper Virtual Console option is unlikely to change their mind just because I beat them to a purchase.)
Edited 2018-07-24 06:19 UTC
The emulator and abandonware scene used to be HUGE, but now it’s basically nothing… If Nintendo take this course of action the only thing they will achieve is to bring back the curiosity of emulating and thus the pirating of the ROMS they claim to be trying to stop… Not the brightest of ideas IMHO… oh wait, this does of course come with free advertising for them doesn’t it…
There are plenty of homebrew roms out there that are perfectly legal to distribute.
The thing is, Nintendo trying to monetize ancient games like they’re doing is ridiculous. 8 dollars for Moon Patrol? If it were like a buck for an old arcade game like that, I’d probably be fine with it. Lucky for me, I’ve never been that big of a Nintendo fan, though I do own a Switch.
Oh come on, do you seriously tell yourself there’s “plenty” of them? That’s not what vast majority of people look for…
Regarding the news, I wonder when Nintendo will do something with, offered by legitimate EU-based companies, NES clones with built-in pirated games and counterfeit cartridges with pirated classic games on allegro.pl (our local eBay equivalent), which claims to fight offers of counterfeit products but is apparently OK with pirated NES games… They also don’t care about pirate Game Boy cartridges, reporting obvious ones does nothing.
Edited 2018-07-26 23:51 UTC
I mean even Nintendo must know that their entire body of 80s and 90s work has been downloaded tens of thousands of times from Torrent sites. I guess they’re trying to send a message but it’s not 1998 anymore. This ship has sailed.
The funny thing about this is that Nintendo can’t seem to understand why people still have interest in emulation to this degree despite:
* Making you repurchase your entire library each time a new console comes out (if your lucky and can get your old titles on the new platform).
* Charging insane prices for their content.
* Not having a number of the iconic older games available at all on their virtual console platform.
If they want to talk about lost revenue, maybe they should be looking at their own business practices first, and then worrying about software piracy second.
Just two weeks ago an NES emulator was found hidden inside of Animal Crossing. It can run ROMs easily found on the internet. Now Nintendo is going after NES ROM sites. Hmmmmmm…
Why does the fact Nintendo developed (or used) an emulator to run licensed ROMs forbid then from chasing illegal ROM sites?
Basically, the reason the site mentioned above got sued was because they fell outside the DMCA safe harbour provisions by uploading the illegal content themselves or endorsing it, hence being aware the illegal content exists.
Edited 2018-07-24 16:16 UTC
No, its probably more related to the widespread availability of the NES Classic mini and the SNES classic mini. They can be easily hacked to play almost any rom. Its really simple to do from the articles I’ve read. It seems like they want to make roms more difficult to find than to fix the hack.