ROM Site Ordered To Destroy All Nintendo Content By Court

By M. Kang

Posted on August 16, 2021

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Recently, Nintendo successfully sued ROMUniverse, a ROM site which had Nintendo games as part of its catalogue. However, they recently went further and have forced the site to destroy all its content by court order.

According to VGC, Nintendo originally sued ROMUniverse and its owner Matthew Storman for copyright infringement of it IPs, winning $2.1 million in damages by failing to get a permanent injunction. This injunction would have prevented the site from operating again at a different time. The judge has ruled this way because “the site had already been shut down [so] there was no threat of further infringement.”

However, it appears Storman’s failure to pay the $50 installments caught Nintendo’s eyes, forcing their hand and asking for the permanent injunction.

Since it has been granted by the court, Storman “is no permanently banned from every copying, distributing, selling or even playing any unauthorized copy of a Nintendo copyrighted work.” He is also required to destroy all unauthorized copies of Nintendo’s IPs by August 17^th.

Nintendo is notoriously protective of its IPs and certainly from a business perspective, would not want other actors selling unofficial versions of their games.