Judge Orders Rom Site Owner to "Destroy" Anything Nintendo Related Following Lawsuit

Its no secret that Nintendo (or their lawyers, at least) have a long time lack of acceptance towards things like emulators. And one particular site went a little too far, and now theyve been ordered to permanently destroy anything Nintendo related they may have.

Detailed by TorrentFreak, RomUniverse owner and operator Matthew Storman has been ordered by a California district judge to destroy any and all unauthorized copies of Nintendos intellectual property. And it has to be gone by August 17 (the date this article is published). Storman will also be required to file a declaration with the California federal court certifying his compliance with this demand by the 20th.

This ruling follows a lawsuit back in May, where Storman was ordered to pay a whopping $2.1 million in damages for copyright and trademark infringement. Nintendo of America had pressed charges back in 2019 against the RomUniverse website.

Lastly, Nintendo also filed for a permanent injunction, barring Storman from reviving the website in any capacity. This request was granted last week.

We know Nintendo doesnt like ROMs of their games. But you still might be wondering why they went particularly hard against RomUniverse. And theres a very good reason for it. The website was doing something none of the other ones were: profiting from it.

No, were not talking about ad revenue or premium services that block adds. RomUniverse had a special subscription service that granted customers access to Nintendo related ROMs of both old and relatively new games. Since access was locked behind a paywall, Storman directly profited off of these games being on the site. And since the site contained fairly new games (Wii U and Switch era games), there was a greater precedent that his actions negatively impacted Nintendo. Its commonly believed that these two factors were the biggest reason Storman and his website were targeted to such a strong degree.

As someone who cares about the preservation of video game history, we generally dont mind the existence of ROMs and emulators. They allow us to experience relics of the past. But as content creators, we also recognize that a person or organization has the freedom to defend their creations however they see fit. We do think that putting the ROMs behind a paywall was a step too far, though.