Nintendo Wins Legal Battle Against Website Used to Pirate Its Games - News
by William D'Angelo , posted on 02 May 2023 / 5,552 Views
Nintendo has won a court battle with sharehosting website operator Dstorage as the Paris Court of Appeals sided with the gaming giant.
In a statement via GamesIndustry Nintendo stated Dstorage failed to remove or block access to pirated copies of Nintendo games distributed using filehosting website 1fichier.com.
Nintendo says it demanded Dstorage to take down any unauthorized Nintendo games stored on its site and after this was not done it decided to take legal action.
The Paris Court of Appeals has ordered Dstorage to pay €442,750 to Nintendo in compensation and €25,000 to cover legal fees.
"Nintendo is pleased with the decision of the Paris Court of Appeals, as it again sends a clear message that in refusing to remove or withdraw access to unauthorised copies of video games despite prior notification, sharehosting services such as Dstorage (1fichier) are liable under French law and must remove or block access to such content and may be liable to pay compensation to those rights holders whose intellectual property rights have been infringed," said Nintendo in a statement.
"The Court’s finding of liability against Dstorage is significant not only for Nintendo, but also for the entire games industry. It will prevent sharehosters like 1Fichier from claiming that a prior decision from a court will be needed before pirated content has to be taken down, and additionally the Court decision confirms what rights holders have to give notice of when claiming that notified content infringes copyright or trademark rights."
A life-long and avid gamer, William D'Angelo was first introduced to VGChartz in 2007. After years of supporting the site, he was brought on in 2010 as a junior analyst, working his way up to lead analyst in 2012 and taking over the hardware estimates in 2017. He has expanded his involvement in the gaming community by producing content on his own YouTube channel and Twitch channel. You can contact the author on Twitter @TrunksWD.
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Damn Nintendo asking for legal fees to be covered too. Savage lol
a commonsense decision
Nothing against Nintendo as they are in their right, but that is a very much useless effort
Why was this even a battle?
Was it even one to begin with?.
Like I consider a battle two corps against one another, but Ninty vs a few ppl and one website is like David vs Goliath, it's not even a challenge.
Another 500 ways exist to pirate their games.
that means another 500 opportunity for Nintendo to get a lot of money from those pirates, eventually Nintendo will make enough money from this legal cases to cover all the companies expense.
I mean they got like €500,000 just from one case, and since most of this cases are easy to win, Nintendo should think of branching out to the legal business, there is a lot of money there.
They can't stop piracy though?.
That's the point.
Nintendo's well within their rights to fight people illegally distributing their content. But they really should up their security game. Later this year will be the 10 year anniversary of the Xbox One launch, and the Xbox One still hasn't been hacked, so piracy of Xbox One games isn't a thing as far as MVG and others assert (and MVG should know). Whereas every Nintendo system has been broken wide open.
Fighting piracy starts with making it a lot harder to start with. And in the case of Microsoft, they took most of the wind out of the sails of piracy by giving a legal path for emulators and other homebrew. Normally security is defeated by an unholy alliance of pirates and homebrew hackers. Reduce that to pirates only, and your system is much less likely to be jailbroken.
People still manage to hack the FBI and even others being able to hack and obtain military data, just let that sink in for a moment.
If military can be tapped into, possibly the highest chain on the planet of global importance, then what chance does a video game company stand if military cannot keep theirs under lock and key?
I'll say this: Whatever man can build, another can dismantle. You can try making it as hard as you want, but somewhere, at some point in time, someone is going to dismantle or crack it.
Piracy has been a thing for centuries, in many a form, and it has not been completely wiped out, it's not going away, it's not going to be combatted to the point where it's "miniscule". It is time for us all to stop living that fantasy fever dream, and step back into reality.
It's not theoretical, but assuming it's ironclad is foolhardy.
Don't forget that's 61 million and there are 7 billion of us on this rock, that still leaves out plenty more that could simply crack it in time.
There is one thing in this universe that no one can master and is a slave to, and it is time. People take time to work things out, so whatever Nintendo does now, doesn't mean it cannot be broken in the future (Just look wat what AI are able to come up with already and that should give you a small glimpse of what is possible).
I don't doubt that the Xbox One's security could be broken in time. But Microsoft took security very seriously, right down to the design of the silicon. And importantly they also opened up a legal path for homebrew, which reduced the number of people who cared enough to try and crack it. Sony did the same with the PS3 with "Other OS", and that also reduced how concerted the attempts to crack it were. When Other OS itself was hacked, and it became the security flaw, and Sony got rid of it, only then did other methods of hacking the PS3 really start to gain steam.
So the lesson the companies can all take from this is, take security seriously. Integrate it into the software and the hardware. And also consider human psychology in your approach. Had Sony kept Other OS more secure, perhaps the PS3 would have been cracked later (or not at all), just as the Xbox One has yet to be jailbroken.
Yet to be broken, yes, but why not just sell your games indefinitely to ultimately dissuade people from wanting to emulate/crack/pirate your products?.
There's usually two ways about why this happens, either it's down to people lacking money (games getting more expensive is definitely a global issue, as well as second hand sellers acting like scalpers and not knowing how markets work), or it's about preserving the game.
Companies for the most part care little for game preservation, because to them it's always about the money, but to us, it's about keeping the memories/nostalgia alive so that others can experience what they did years prior.
If game companies actually cared en mass, then there would be very little reasons to emulate/pirate/crack, and the same goes for people generally getting that lil bit more education in schools on how market economies work, and why trying to sell a melted limited edition Zelda 3DS for $500, is not "good value", not even worth anything.
MS may have gone for the limited time approach for protection, but Gabe saw the problem before MS did (and MS still refuses to acknowledge, like nearly everyone else apparently).
"Yet to be broken, yes, but why not just sell your games indefinitely to ultimately dissuade people from wanting to emulate/crack/pirate your products?."
I agree. That's what Microsoft is migrating toward. Sony and Nintendo keep closing down digital distribution stores for older systems. Microsoft has a unified store for all their systems, and keeps expanding backwards compatibility. Despite officially ending the expansion of back-compat, they likely will add several Activision titles to the programme if and when the ABK purchase is complete.
I can go on my Xbox and purchase 20 year old original Xbox titles right now and run them on my Series S.
So you raise a good point. This adds to my previous comment about taking human nature into account. An official way to run homebrew as I said, and continuing to sell old game as you point out, are good ways to discourage hackers from even bothering to hack your system.
It’s a spectacular waste of time, money, and resources on their part, and they stand to make substantially more money making their old library more widely available on either switch or PC (and in a non cloud streaming and non subscription format) than they could ever hope to make winning these cases against internet nobodies.
I love Nintendo products but their corporate culture is 30 years out of date and completely delusional on a lot of issues. Their copyright strikes on YouTube letsplayers are egregious and unjustifiable
- they just made half a million dollars from one case how is that a waste of time?
- the pirates are forced to pay legal fees (read the article bro..) so Nintendo is losing 0 dollars.
- leaving people to pirate games will not make their IPs popular, since people who pirate games will not buy future games just because they liked the game they pirated, they will just keep pirating the game.
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we are talking about combating piracy here, i don't know why you mention YouTube and copyright strikes, that has nothing to do with the subject here.
so in conclusion Nintendo should always go after the pirates, they will just make free money while making example of this pirates. in fact every company should do the same.
