Nintendo has filed a lawsuit against the alleged creator and owner of two ROM sites, seeking up to hundreds of millions of dollars in damages over emulations of games for its systems. The sites, LoveROMS and LoveRETRO, are being sued in Arizona federal court over copyright infringement and unfair competition.
TorrentFreak was the first to publish the 27-page PDF of the lawsuit, in which Nintendo claims that the sites are "built almost entirely on the brazen and mass-scale infringement of Nintendo’s intellectual property rights." The company is seeking $150,000 in damages per Nintendo title on the sites, plus as much as $2,000,000 for each infringed trademark.
"The LoveROMs and LoveRETRO websites are among the most open and notorious online hubs for pirated video games," the lawsuit, filed on July 19, reads. "Through the LoveROMs and LoveRETRO websites, Defendants reproduce, distribute, publicly perform and display a staggering number of unauthorized copies of Nintendo’s video games, all without Nintendo’s permission. This includes thousands of games developed for nearly every video game system Nintendo has ever produced."
LoveRETRO has since been taken offline.
"Loveretro has effectively been shut down until further notice," the homepage reads. "Thanks for your patronage to date and we hope to get this figured out."
In a Facebook post, LoveROMS wrote that "All Nintendo titles have been removed from the site. #willupdateyoulater"
Nintendo is also requesting an order for the domain names for those sites, as well as others in the defendants' possession. For now, though, it seems to have already achieved its primary goal: getting those ROMS offline.