Two major ROM providers have been sued and as a result their Nintendo ROMs removed as part of a lawsuit filed recently by Nintendo.
A simple open/close case? Probably not
Although the Nintendo ROMs removed from two huge ROM providers may seem catastrophical for those who want to play their childhood favourite releases using emulation software, in reality the real issue here for Nintendo is that they’re fighting a bit of a losing battle; these ROMs will likely have been distributed to a ton of other websites so the end-player is unlikely to feel the hit.
Which sites are affected?
We really don’t like to name and shame but as it’s public knowledge we can report that the two websites taken down were loveretro.co and loveroms.com – these sites are both under ownership of Jacob Mathius. Both of these sites provided everything from emulators required to run games for systems like the SNES and SEGA Megadrive, to ROMs (the games that run within the emulation environment. Although not (usually) illegal the emulators aren’t the problem, the issue is with the bios files that are required to run many emulators of which contain the copyrighted material.
What were the charges?
As part of the lawsuit filed on July 19th, Mathius was charged with $100 million in damages (based on 140 ROMs at $150,000 each). Although Nintendo knows that they’ll unlikely reclaim anywhere near that amount they want to use this as an example to other sites doing the same thing.
Nintendo ROMs removed and the site is finished
loveroms.co used to have a Super Mario Bros retro theme which gave the site some real colour and a nostalgic feel, but now its a bland shade of blue – needles to say the effects have been felt.
The remaining ROM site…
Although not offline at the time of this article, the likelihood is that hosting a website that contains ROMs that got Mathius got into trouble with in the first place will go down as well.
