The background legal debate around ROM sites, emulation, and their status as game preservation has been in discussion for several years now. Nintendo has always been fiercely protective of their intellectual property, as is their right. Earlier last year, they filed a number of lawsuits against a certain site by the name of RomUniverse. In that lawsuit, a decision was reached in May 2021 to award Nintendo $2.1 million in damages from the site. The owner of RomUniverse, Matthew Storman, refused to quit, and now we’ve ended up here, with the state of California’s federal court ordering RomUniverse to destroy all of their Nintendo ROMs in the current lawsuit.
Here’s the judgment:
“Defendant shall permanently destroy all unauthorized Nintendo games or other unauthorized copies of Nintendo’s intellectual property including movies, books, and music no later than August 17, 2021.”
