RomUniverse, a now-defunct pirate website, has been ordered to destroy all its pirated Nintendo games and will have to shut it down permanently by a California federal court.
According to media outlet TorrentFreak, two years ago, game company Nintendo filed a lawsuit against this particular pirate website where it had illegal copies of almost all of their games from a particular platform. It was massive online collection of popular titles and Nintendo was afraid of the damages it had done to them.
The owner and operator of the site, Matthew Storman disagreed with the allegations and defended himself in court. He stated that the site was not breaking any laws at all and asked the court that the case be dismissed as soon as possible.
The court disagreed with Storman’s defense and agreed with Nintendo with the evidence that it pointed out like its several flaws. Storman will now have to face the charges and pay the game company a lot of money, about $2.1 million USD.
The illegal website was left online for a while, but after talking with the legal team from Nintendo, Storman decided to make it offline.
US District Court Judge Consuelo Marshall has charged Storman to pay Nintendo $2.1 million due to infringement of the game company’s copyrights and trademarks. Not a complete win for Nintendo though because they were denied the permanent injunction against the operator since it did not have enough evidence to prove that it was suffering irreparable harm. It was also proven that Storman has already shut down the website so there was no need to do it.
Judge Marshall did change his mind after he saw evidence that the website could still pose irreparable harm in the future. Even if Storman is going to relaunch the website without the pirated titles, he still thinks it will cause harm in the future which is why he opted to put a permanent injunction against the website.
The injunction will not allow Storman to copy, distribute, sell, or play illegal copies of the Nintendo games. Anything that would look like Nintendo like logos or names, will not be allowed.
Lastly, all of the pirated Nintendo games should be destroyed.
This is the end of RomUniverse. Nothing will be left behind.