The question of ROM legality is back in the news again. It probably won’t shock you to see it’s because of Nintendo as well. A California judge has ordered Matthew Stroman, founder of offline ROM site RomUniverse, to “permanently destroy all unauthorized Nintendo games or other unauthorized copies of Nintendo’s intellectual property including movies, books, and music”. Stroman must file a declaration, under penalty of perjury, with the California federal court “certifying his compliance with these terms” by August 20th. If you want to see the full injunction, you can do so here.
If you are new to this legal case, here’s the simple breakdown. Nintendo of America sued Stroman and the website RomUniverse for copyright and trademark infringement in September of 2019. In May this year, courts ruled in favor of Nintendo and ordered Stroman to pay $2.1 Million in damages. Storman was ordered to pay the fee in monthly installments of $50, due to his unemployment. Unfortunately, he missed his first payment. Nintendo then filed for a permanent injunction in order to prevent Storman from reviving the site. The filing was granted last week. Because of the injunction, there is no way that RomUniverse can be revived anytime soon without legal action.
I’m not going to argue the legality of ROMS to finish this article off. There are people much better suited for that than I ever will be. But the idea of ROMS does sound promising when Switch players have been begging for a return of the Virtual Console service. This might be due to the releases on Nintendo Online being lackluster, to say the least. Ah well. What do I know? I don’t have a library of classic games people adore that I’m just keeping locked up.
Via Eurogamer
