Nintendo Co. have filed lawsuits against LoveROMs and LoveRETRO websites for gaining money via donations and selling advertisement space on the web sites that hosted ROMs of games originally meant for Nintendo Entertainment System.
Nintendo of America's lawsuit is directed towards Jacob Mathias and his company Mathias Designs, responsible for running two different but interrelated websites - www.LoveROMs.com and www.LoveRETRO.com.
Both these sites are full of ROMs for pretty much any old school console and arcade machine, those belonging to Nintendo included. Therefore, the plaintiff is suing Mathias for copyright infringement on the grounds that he used Nintendo's work to generate massive profits through ad revenue and donations.
According to the , LoveRETRO alone is visited by over 17 million users each month, which pretty much means it's raining advert money for Mathias. If Nintendo has its way with Mathias though, it won't be long before he's left without any of it or he even ends up with a crippling debt. They are asking for $2 million for each trademark infringement, $150.000 for each Nintendo game the websites hosted and that Mathias hands over both domains as well as the sources of their ROMs.
It would be interesting to see what Nintendo would do with said sources, as they are not strangers to selling their customers copies of their own IP that they . Regardless of their intentions for the ROMs in case the court rules in their favour, LoveROMs has removed all Nintendo games it hosted, while LoveRETRO has been shut down entirely. In fact, if you go there now, you can apparently for yourself, which would in turn make for an interesting lawsuit love triangle between Nintendo, Mathias and the new owner of the domain.
Nintendo
While copyright infringement should definitely not go unpunished, it is worth pointing out that there is no way to play these old school gems on PC without emulators. There will not be one either as Nintendo refuse to sell them for usage on PC, likely in order to promote their current and future consoles. So much for the role of cross-play's good Samaritans.
