Nintendo has been aggressive in the last year, targeting people and businesses who are distributing their copyrighted work in an illegal manner. It seems they’ve struck again, with Nintendo suing an Orange County, California resident for violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright act.
They filed a lawsuit (via The Hollywood Reporter) on December 11 accusing Mikel Euskaldunak and company Does-1000 of infringing on Nintendo copyrights. The company says that Euskalduank has been selling modified Nintendo Switch consoles that are able to play unauthorized games. In addition, he’s being accused of selling modified NES Classic consoles that come preloaded with 800 games, and that he is being accused of selling them up to 15 dollars above normal asking price.
The main source of the complaint comes from the OfferUp website, where Euskaldunak is being accused of offering these modified consoles up for sale.
Nintendo is also accusing the defendant of giving players instructions regarding how to use the illegal components he is selling “in a manner least likely to be caught or arouse suspicion.” They are asking the court to order an injunction that would prevent the defendant from selling or distributing technology that circumvents its controls.
Nintendo has been extremely aggressive in targeting people over the last year with their copyrighted work. Back in August, EmuParadise, a long-running website that offered Nintendo roms since at least the year 2000, removed all of their roms from the website in order to avoid a potential lawsuit from Nintendo. That came after Nintendo filed a lawsuit back in July targeting two websites, LoveROMs and LoveRETRO, asking for $150,000 for each game hosted on their site and $2,000,000 for each trademark infringement. They ended up settling with the company for $12.2 million last month.
By going after rom websites and people who modify their consoles, it’s clear that Nintendo will defend their copyrights to the death if need be.
