ROM Site Owner Made $30,000 a Year — Now Owes Nintendo $2.1 Million

An nameless reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: The now-unemployed proprietor of a shuttered ROM distribution web site has been ordered to pay $2.1 million in damages to Nintendo after attempting and failing to defend himself within the case. In September 2019, Nintendo filed a lawsuit in opposition to Los Angeles resident Matthew Storman over his operation of RomUniverse.com, which provided outstanding downloads of “Nintendo Change Scene Roms” and different copyrighted sport information. On the time, Nintendo mentioned that the positioning had been “among the many most visited and infamous on-line hubs for pirated Nintendo video video games” for “over a decade.”

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In offering abstract judgment for Nintendo (as famous by Torrent Freak), the choose urged that this was a transparent case of infringement, one wherein “there is no such thing as a real challenge of fabric undeniable fact that Plaintiff owns the copyrighted works and Defendant copied the works.” Whereas Nintendo sought $4.41 million in copyright damages — or $90,000 every for 49 video games — the choose lowered the quantity to $1.715 million ($35,000 per work). That quantity must be ample to “compensate Plaintiff for its misplaced income and deter Defendant who’s at the moment unemployed and has already shut down the web site,” the choose wrote. The choose additionally awarded an extra $400,000 for RomUniverse’s use of Nintendo’s trademarked field artwork, down from a large $11.2 million ask. However Storman prevented a everlasting injunction on “future infringement,” with the choose suggesting that there was no “irreparable hurt” given the financial damages and the truth that the positioning had already been shuttered. Storman invoked the “secure harbor” protections of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), however Nintendo acquired him to confess that he had uploaded Nintendo’s copyrighted ROM information himself. “One other tried Storman protection based mostly on the ‘first sale doctrine’ additionally did not go anyplace, for the reason that web site was distributing copies fairly than Storman’s private property,” provides Ars.