Nintendo Wins Million Dollar Suit Against ROM Hosting Site

Nintendo has won a multi-million dollar lawsuit against the ROM-hosting website RomUniverse.

The owner of the site will have to pay Nintendo $2.1 million in damages after the court ruled in Nintendo's favor. Nintendo filed the suit in September 2019 seeking $15 million in damages for copyright infringement and federal trademark infringement, accusing RomUniverse of hosting pirated versions of Nintendo games for users to download.

RomUniverse also offered a premium subscription service that would allow subscribers to pass a download limit it had put in place.

Although RomUniverse's owner, Matthew Storman, filed a declaration in which he "denies and disputes that he uploaded any files to said website and at no time did he verify the content of said ROM file," he had previously testified that "he and or his 'admin' uploaded ROMs of Nintendo's copyrighted works," leading the court to strike the declaration, according to a report by TorrentFreak.

Storman had owned and operated RomUniverse for more than a decade. It served as his primary income in 2019, generating between $30,000 and $36,000 in revenue that year. He represented himself in court and kept the site up until summer 2020, but discussions with Nintendo's legal team led him to shut the site down.

Analysis

Nintendo is notoriously litigious when it comes to protecting its intellectual property. As recently as 2018 Nintendo was awarded more than $12 million in damages following a lawsuit against two other ROM hosting sites. The thinking goes that a failure to act on these infringements weakens the company's legal claim for future lawsuits, forcing them to take down every small time operation they can find.

Generally speaking, ROM hosting is a fairly innocuous crime. These are typically games that the big games companies haven't rereleased, and have no plans to rerelease, even as the systems they were made for fade into obscurity. ROM emulation is the only reasonably accessible way for most players to try these games, and the only way for thousands of games to be preserved for posterity.

Lawsuits like this one are often examples of big corporations flexing their legal departments to the detriment of video games as a medium, actively erasing history because they don't stand to profit from it.

That dynamic shifts slightly when the ROM distributor is looking to make a profit from distributing the ROMs, as RomUniverse did. Preservation requires funding, but short of finding a nonprofit angle ROM distributors are hard up for legal recourse when the rights owners come knocking. Nintendo was well within its rights to shut down RomUniverse, but its continued campaign against ROM distributors is a net negative on games as an art form.