Nintendo, recently won a lawsuit that was filed against a site called RomUniverse. As a result, the pirated game download portal had to pay a fine of USD 2.1 million.
Not only that, as the operator of RomUniverse, Los Angeles resident Matthew Storman had to permanently shut down the website he manages. Initially, this request was rejected by the court.
However, after looking back at the problems that occurred, there were several things that made the court decide that the website was closed because otherwise RomUniverse would likely be back in operation.
The plaintiff's evidence suggests a threat of further infringement based on the defendant's statement, that he can relaunch his website which previously contained the plaintiff's copyrighted games.
Storman also issued a statement that the relaunch of the site will not include Nintendo games. However, this request was rejected by the court.
The order also includes prohibiting RomUniverse from copying, distributing, selling or even playing unauthorized copies of Nintendo. Using the Nintendo trademark, logo or name in any way is not permitted.
Finally, Judge Marshall ordered Storman to destroy all pirated Nintendo games in his possession.
"The defendant must permanently destroy all unauthorized Nintendo games or other unauthorized copies of Nintendo's intellectual property including films, books and music by August 17, 2021," concluded Judge Marshall.
Actually, Nintendo has filed a lawsuit since 2019. It is known, the website facilitates online copyright infringement, massively of many popular Nintendo titles.
The developer of the Super Mario game stated that RomUniverse had 375,000 members and noted that hundreds of thousands of video game copies had been illegally downloaded. This includes nearly 300,000 copies of Nintendo Switch games and more than 500,000 copies of pirated Nintendo 3DS games.