Nintendo Wins Another Piracy-Focused Court Case

Nintendo has won its court case against Dstorage, a website operator that hosted pirated games on cloud-storage site 1fichier.com. Dstorage was found liable for failing to remove pirated Nintendo games from the website, leading to an ongoing court battle.

This comes via GamesIndustry.biz, which noted that the Paris Court of Appeals ruled in favor of Nintendo, ordering Dstorage to pay €442,750 ($483,106) to Nintendo in compensation, along with €25,000 ($27,285) in legal fees.

Nintendo previously requested that Dstorage remove pirated Nintendo games from the site, but the website operator refused. This led to a lawsuit that ended with the Paris Judicial Court siding with Nintendo in May 2021, which in turn led to the appeal that has now concluded.

A statement from Nintendo reads, “Nintendo is pleased with the decision of the Paris Court of Appeals, as it again sends a clear message that in refusing to remove or withdraw access to unauthorized copies of video games despite prior notification, sharehosting services such as Dstorage (1fichier) are liable under French law and must remove or block access to such content and may be liable to pay compensation to those rights holders whose intellectual property rights have been infringed.”

“The Court’s finding of liability against Dstorage is significant not only for Nintendo, but also for the entire games industry. It will prevent sharehosters like 1Fichier from claiming that a prior decision from a court will be needed before pirated content has to be taken down, and additionally, the Court decision confirms what rights holders have to give notice of when claiming that notified content infringes copyright or trademark rights.”

This is far from the only time Nintendo has gone to court over game piracy. In 2022, a hacker named Gary Bowser was sentenced to 40 months in prison for creating, distributing, and selling hacks to allow consoles to play ROMs for Nintendo games.