Nintendo Sues ROM Sites for Copyright Infringement

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Nintendo has taken legal action against ROM sites in a lawsuit that says the ROM distributors are infringing on the gaming company’s work.

For those who get their games through official means and aren’t familiar with ROMs, the read-only memory files are copies of game data from video game cartridges and discs, in this case. That means that gamers who don’t have access to physical editions of their favorite games can download their ROMs to use with an emulator. Nintendo doesn’t profit off of this though, and since the games belong to Nintendo and are being used through unintended means, Nintendo’s looking to put a stop to at least two ROM sites.

TorrentFreak reported recently that both LoveROMS.com and LoveRETRO.co are the targets of Nintendo’s copyright and trademark infringement lawsuit, the full suit seen here. You can check out the ROM sites above if you wish, but fair warning that more than one unwanted redirect occurred when trying to navigate the LoveROMs site. Nintendo’s suit says that both of the sites are owned by the same person and referred to the sites’ alleged transgressions as “brazen and mass-scale infringement of Nintendo’s intellectual property rights.”

“The LoveROMs and LoveRETRO websites are among the most open and notorious online hubs for pirated video games,” Nintendo’s lawsuit said. “Through the LoveROMs and LoveRETRO websites, Defendants reproduce, distribute, publicly perform and display a staggering number of unauthorized copies of Nintendo’s video games, all without Nintendo’s permission. This includes thousands of games developed for nearly every video game system Nintendo has ever produced.”

The suit went further to say that both sites used Nintendo logos and characters to promote the illicit downloads. Shredding any defense of ignorance, Nintendo insisted that the defendants “are not casual gamers” who might be mistaken regarding who owns the rights to the games and said that the sites’ owners are “sophisticated parties with extensive knowledge of Nintendo’s intellectual property and the video games industry more generally.”

As for the current state of the ROM sites, LoveRETRO is completely down right now with no word on when it’ll be back. LoveROMs, however, is still up, though you won’t find any Nintendo files there.

“Loveretro has effectively been shut down until further notice,” the site says upon visiting. “Thanks for your patronage to date and we hope to get this figured out.”