Nintendo Sues Two Big ROM Sites

ROMS and emulation exist in a bit of a grey area. They’re technically illegal if you don’t own the games you have software dumps for, but they’re freely available to download on the internet with just a cursory Google search in the way. The ethics of it becomes a bit murky when you factor in game preservation; making games that can no longer be easily purchased available to play. Nintendo, however, isn’t a fan. They’ve now come down hard on two major emulation sites that distributed old Nintendo games.

Nintendo has taken a hardline stance over emulators and ROMs by suing LoveROMs and LoveRETRO. Emulators lets you run games on hardware other than the device it was intended for without the need of the console or its games in physical form while ROMs in this case, refers to a game's data that's used with an emulator.

According to a report from TorrentFreak Nintendo took two of these sites to court in the US. In a complaint filed at a federal court in Arizona, the company sues LoveROMS.com and LoveRETRO.co for copyright and trademark infringement.

"The LoveROMs website alone receives 17 million visitors each month. Such visitors are drawn to the website by the widespread availability of free, unauthorized copies of Nintendo’s video games and other highly valuable intellectual property. The resulting popularity of Defendants' LoveROMs and LoveRETRO websites has allowed Defendants to reap substantial ill-gotten gains, including through donations and the sale of advertising on the LoveROMs and LoveRETRO websites," claims Nintendo in its filing.

Aside from ROMs, the sites also have proprietary BIOS pertaining to Nintendo and its trademarked logos and characters the company stated.
This should come as no surprise that Nintendo is looking to stamp out any sites looking to preserve its legacy. The company has recently brought back its older hardware like the NES and SNES as the NES Mini and SNES Mini with games preloaded. It also killed off its Virtual Console service that allowed games for older consoles be playable on current Nintendo consoles.

All of this paints it as a company that's not interested in preserving its heritage and history unless it can profit from it, which is amusing when you consider that the version of Super Mario Bros. available on Wii is a ROMNintendo downloaded off the Internet.

July 23, 2018