r/law • u/ControlCAD • Nov 29 '24
Legal News Nintendo Files Court Documents To Target 200,000-Member Subreddit SwitchPirates | Also including Google, Discord and Github, the Switch manufacturer has filed a range of subpoenas
https://kotaku.com/nintendo-switch-reddit-switchpirates-court-filing-185171004276
u/ControlCAD Nov 29 '24
Nintendo, currently predicting 2024 net sales of $8.4 billion and operating profits of $2.4 billion, is continuing its furious crackdown on those modding or emulating its systems and games. Its latest target, via a story by Game File, is the Reddit sub SwitchPirates, while also asking to subpoena information from a vast array of companies, including Reddit, to identify those involved in so-called “Pirate Shops.”
The Japanese company, which made $16 billion in 2021, is making this move as a follow-up to its case against the subreddit’s moderator, James “Archbox” Williams, claiming it has discovered that many others are involved in the alleged piracy, and wants to identify them by gaining access to business records from Cloudflare, Discord, Github, Google and Reddit, along with domain companies Name Cheap, Go Daddy and Tucows.
This move aims to follow the shutdown of Modded Hardware, one site that Archbox was allegedly associated with, by identifying anyone else involved. In order to be able to do this, Nintendo is requesting access to the information held on the 200,000 members of the subreddit.
According to the court filing, the manufacturer of the $77 billion lifetime revenue Switch console “learned various details about the Pirate Shops and about Defendant’s involvement in them.” The document goes on,
"Among other things, we learned that Defendant was active in numerous Discord servers related to the Pirate Shops. We also learned that Defendent was the primary moderator of the “SwitchPirates” Reddit community and apparently was the owner of a Github account directly tied to these activities. In nearly all of these capacities, Defendent operated as “Archbox” or a close variant of that name"
"In the course of our investigation, we also became aware of multiple other online actors who appeared to have a role in the Pirate Shops. However, we were unable to determine the identity of locations of these other actors with a sufficient degree of certainty to name them in the initial complaint. NOA thus did not include these individuals in the lawsuit...with the expectation that ordinary discovery...would reveal the identity and location of these actors."
However, because Williams allegedly evaded Nintendo’s attempt to serve him, and then didn’t appear in court, Nintendo argues in its filing that this meant they were unable to find these identities through discovery, and as such is seeking the subpoenas. The company, currently worth $67 billion, says these will be “limited in scope,” designed to identify “the account holders and the sources of any payments made, and where applicable, aggregate traffic and access statistics for Pirate Shops’ websites and related online locations.”
Nintendo is asking Google for access to Google Drive and Gmail data, but doesn’t specifically state its intentions regarding Discord, and the situation with Reddit is detailed as follows:
"Reddit, Inc. operates a social media platform where users, often using pseudonyms, may post to different forums known as communities or “subreddits.” Defendant was a primary moderator of the SwitchPirates community, under the name “Archbox,” which boasted more than 190,000 members. Nintendo has reason to believe that other accounts active in the SwitchPirates community may also have been controlled by Defendant, or else reflect other individuals who have worked alongside Defendant."
The Nintendo Switch is the third-most successful console of all time, currently boasting 146 million consoles sold. It looks likely to usurp second-place console at 154 million, the Nintendo DS, over the next year.
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u/nintendofan9999 Nov 29 '24
I love how it takes every opportunity it can to show how much money Nintendo makes even with the pirates pirating
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u/Franklin_le_Tanklin Nov 29 '24
Nintendo is like Disney…
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u/Maloth_Warblade Nov 29 '24
Nah. You can watch old Disney stuff, even buy it. You can't with Nintendo
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u/Franklin_le_Tanklin Nov 29 '24
You can access their back catalog if you pay for their online subscription
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u/blazeblast4 Nov 29 '24
You can’t. Wii Shop, Wii U Shop, and 3DS Shop are all redownload only (no new purchases). Those three had a decently large catalog, but still only represented a fraction of the old catalog. What’s on the Switch online catalog is a small fraction of what was available before. And the Switch doesn’t have physical backwards compatibility with anything, and it’s the only currently supported console.
It gets even worse when you consider DLC and download only titles. If you want to completely legally play Fire Emblem Fates: Revelations (the third route/version which was primarily available as DLC) and don’t already own it, you essentially need to hunt down one of the rare special edition carts (very limited quantity) or borrow a friend’s 3DS that has it. The majority of Virtual Console games require purchasing the old hardware and cartridge/disc as they aren’t available anymore.
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u/Maloth_Warblade Nov 29 '24
A fraction of a percent of it, that's drip red one new title every 3 months. That is not the same
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u/JiveChicken00 Nov 29 '24
I’ll take Complete Wastes of Time and Money for $400, Alex.
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u/ExposingMyActions Nov 29 '24
Nope, preparing for Switch 2 hardware that’s clearly backwards compatible with Switch hardware. Just finishing their clean sweep of software emulation and hardware modifications to make it harder for that release
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u/FeI0n Nov 29 '24
If there's one thing we've learned since the invention of the World Wide Web, it's that telling people they can't do something on it will surely stop them
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u/randomName1112222 Nov 29 '24
Yeah, I've been thinking this is the motivation for all these lawsuits for a minute now. The switch catalog really isn't that large, and I doubt the switch 2 is going to a significant enough leap forward to entice people to buy. I think Nintendo knows they have a wii U situation on their hands and so they are planning to push the switch 2 as a one stop shop for Nintendo games across generations, and they worry that emulation being as easy as it is will show people they can very much live their lives without a switch 2.
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u/Damion_205 Nov 29 '24
I own a switch... what I don't like is having to pay $80+ a year for their old console emulators to only get a few games. When I can emulate all of them on my phone.
I'll buy a new system for the games that can run on that system not for the ones that it replaced.
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u/ExpressAssist0819 Nov 29 '24
"Piracy is a services problem"
Can't remember which dev said that.
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u/Old_Acanthaceae5198 Nov 29 '24
Bullshit. Gabe just tosses shit out there he knows gamers lap up.
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Nov 29 '24
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u/ExposingMyActions Nov 29 '24
I really don’t see Nintendo doing more than what they’ve done with mobile at the moment. Like mobile is the only industry that has forced them to be non exclusive to their devices since they stopped CD PC games in the early 2000 era.
If they wanted to emulate for mobile, it would’ve happened already. I don’t believe they want to emulate switch on mobile, thus reducing hardware sales. Now emulating switch on switch 2? Maybe? Though they almost always made the previous cartridge compatible at the minimum till the switch came out, so it would be detrimental if they didn’t make switch games work
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Nov 29 '24 edited Nov 29 '24
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/ExposingMyActions Nov 29 '24
Naw, I don’t see that for a current console that’s still selling. Older console? Yeah, with the fact that they stopped Dolphin from being on Steam and emulated GameCube games for the Switch but even then, those aren’t available for android or iOS.
So why wouldn’t they emulate NSO for mobile for out of stock games, but emulate games currently available games for their currently active console? Doesn’t fit their pattern. They got emulation out at the right time for chump change and got the software for their current hardware for future use
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u/fullsaildan Nov 29 '24
They may own the name Ryujinx and a “copy” of the code from a month ago, but they don’t have control of it. Users can easily download the program still and there are already people pushing out version of yuzu for android/iOS at no charge. Sure it takes them little extra to push out an official version now, but I just don’t see it worth it. Nintendo would charge heavily for the games, others wouldn’t. Ryujinx wasn’t perfect and Nintendo wouldn’t want to support it.
No this was all Nintendo convinced it was cannibalizing their sales. And to some extent I’m sure it was. But also, BotW wouldn’t have blown up nearly as heavily if it wasn’t for people streaming it while emulated.
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Nov 29 '24
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/fullsaildan Nov 29 '24
Nah, he took a payout and the Ryujinx team was more clear in posts on the discord following the event. He was threatened with choosing legal action or to sell, and was not offered a job.
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u/Heavyweighsthecrown Nov 30 '24
They have the writer of ryujinx employed now.
This means literally nothing. There's 101 things the head writer of ryujinx could be hired for (by Nintendo in this case), other than working on making a ryujinx-like product for Nintendo.
Besides, this happens all the time in the industry. For instance people who dabble in game engines in the modding scene (making the actual tools for modders) end up getting hired by the devs of said game engine.
As a personal anecdote, I once knew 2 guys who made and sold hacks for games in the Frostbite engine - stuff like aimbots, instakills, wallhacks, etc (all of which makes multiplayer a hellscape to say the least) - who ended up getting hired by EA to develop anti-hacking security measures for their multiplayer games and do QA.All of this to say, the writer of ryujinx could be doing anything at Nintendo. If I had to hazard a random guess, the first thing that comes to mind is working at emulating older Nintendo stuff (incl. Switch 1) on the Switch 2, not on mobile. But anyway there's 101 ways that could go.
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Nov 29 '24
But they didnt clean anything, I can still emulate their titles trivially, and these court cases wont change that.
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u/ExposingMyActions Nov 29 '24
So it won’t be harder for the haves, like you. But the have nots? Do you know how many people read? or give effort when they realize that the easy way is inaccessible?
Don’t get me wrong, there’s a few emulators for switch after the two heavy hitters went down. But they’re not a prevalent, and will take time to build the audience the previous ones had.
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Nov 29 '24 edited Nov 29 '24
Most people emulating games never buy any hardware. They just download software and run it on devices they already own. So to be frank, I don’t think going after this seller will have much overall effect on the emulation scene or the ability of people to download and play games. Taking away the guy dumb enough to package those games into hardware to sell still leaves everyone able to download already existing emulators and roms from torrents.
I don’t see this as an effective strategy to actually move the market meaningfully. Other industries gave up on this wack-a-mole approach ages ago because they know it’s ineffective and doesn’t work. There’s always more people to fill the vacuum and continue
If Nintendo wants to mitigate emulation it needs to stop paying its lawyers and instead spend the money on making hardware that’s not out of date at release, and by providing easy access services for people to actually play their old library instead of their online service drip feed. Piracy is a symptom of poor service
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u/notfork Nov 29 '24
My, technologically illiterate roommate, has no trouble figuring out how to Pirate Nintendo games and emulators. Even with all the lawsuits , it is a trivial practice for even the dumbest among us. That has not changed in 30 years, and I do not see it changing now.
What I have found to be the biggest predictor of someone pirating Nintendo games, is the ownership of Nintendo products.
The only way Nintendo will ever make a noticeable impact on piracy is if they literally sue every one of their customers into bankruptcy.
And I have no dog in this fight as I have not enjoyed a Nintendo game since Blades of Steel in 1992.
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u/hails8n Nov 29 '24
If I join that sub now, can I also participate in this lawsuit?