![]() I don’t think there’s any causal connection there. I’m sure the majority of people who buy VC games don’t know how to set up an emulator, but I’m sure the majority of people in general don’t know how to set up an emulator. Collapse replies (6) Reply View in chronology I ain’t sayin’ Nintendo doesn’t care about preserving its library of games and its history for future generations…but I ain’t sayin’ it cares enough to preserve all of it. ROM preservation is the only way many of those games will ever exist outside of thirty-year-old cartridges that may or may not work nowadays. Getting the rights issues cleared up would be a nightmare. Some of the best games (and a lot of the worst games) on the NES were licensed games- Tecmo Super Bowl and Total Recall, for example. ![]() Finagling the rights to a game like Batman (bless you, Sunsoft) would take more money than Nintendo could ever hope to make back through sales-and then some. And even if the market considered that a fair price, Nintendo could only ever sell games for which it owns the copyrights/trademarks or games it could license with ease. Why can’t they just sell their old games for $5 to $10 eachīecause no one in their right mind would pay $5 for a digital copy of an NES game. Either way, it makes a game out of the legal system, rather than trying to get to a just result.Īnd it has to be pointed out again that this is all happening as Nintendo competes with these sites perfectly well with its very cool retro consoles. It will be used either as a way to force voluntary shutdown of those sites, or as a template for settlement demands in the future. In other words, Nintendo pushed for a settlement amount it wouldn’t have gotten at trial not as an act of justice, but to use as a bludgeon against other ROM sites. This happened before in the MPAA’s lawsuit against Hotfile, where a $80 million judgment in court translated to $4 million behind the scenes settlement. It wouldn’t be the first time that a judgment in court is more than what the parties agreed to privately. In practice, the defendants could end up paying much less. We can only speculate but it’s possible that Nintendo negotiated such a high number, on paper, to act as a deterrent for other site operators. But that agreement likely comes with the understanding that after this is all inked with signatures and the blessing of the court, a separate deal will be worked out for the payment of an entirely different amount. In this case, the couple has admitted to infringing Nintendo’s copyright rights, has agreed to hand over any emulators and ROMs it has, and has agreed to the amount in question. To be clear, nobody is saying the settlement is invalid or anything like that. “Plaintiff is hereby awarded judgment against all Defendants, jointly and severally, in the amount of $12,230,000,” the proposed language reads. On the contrary, they actually agreed to a judgment that exceeds $12 million. ![]() ![]() However, on paper, the married couple won’t be getting off cheaply. Paperwork obtained by TorrentFreak shows that Mathias and his wife admit that their involvement with the websites constituted direct and indirect copyright and trademark infringement, which caused Nintendo irreparable injury. They agreed to a consent judgment and a permanent injunction that will resolve all outstanding disputes. Today we can report that both sides have indeed reached a deal. The husband and wife operators of have agreed to a $12 million settlement they can’t pay, and likely won’t have to, to have Nintendo call off its dogs. Well, it looks like the output of this effort is going to be Nintendo playing games with at least one of these suits, getting a settlement that nobody thinks it’s actually going to pursue in full just to have a multi-million dollar number to threaten other sites with. All this, of course, as Nintendo was showing how silly this all is given the insane performance of its Nintendo retro consoles. Many sites simply voluntarily shut down, sweeping away decades of video game history to be once again locked up by Nintendo, while others stared down the company’s legal guns. What at first looked like it might be something of a surgical strike mission-creeped this past summer into a full war on ROM sites generally, with Nintendo using a buckshot lawsuit approach. Fri, Nov 16th 2018 09:31am - Timothy GeignerĪ couple of years ago, we first discussed how Nintendo, long-time maximalists on intellectual property concerns, decided to open up a new front against ROM sites. ![]()
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