Nintendo has won their latest legal victory, this time in French courts.
This is the final chapter in a series that started in April 2023, when the Paris Court of Appeals found Dstorage SAS responsible for pirated copies of Nintendo games hosted on their website 1fichier.com. By failing to block access or remove said games, they would be liable to the plaintiff Nintendo for Nintendo games illegally distributed on their website.
As reported by Video Games Chronicle, the appeals court ordered Dstorage to pay €442,750, and an additional €27,000 in legal costs, to Nintendo. Dstorage chose to make a final appeal instead, but in their poor fortune, they have lost that appeal as well.
France’s highest court, the Cour de Cassation, upheld the appeals court’s decision. Therefore, Dstorage has to pay the penalties as ordered by the court, but that’s not all. By virtue of this precedent, all filesharing sites, not just in France, but the EU’s domain, will have to block access to any illegal content on their services when requested. Failure to do so will mean these sites will be liable to the respective rights holders for compensation.
Nintendo’s legal victory has implications beyond Nintendo’s properties, and really, the world of video games. Other creative industries will also now be able to demand restricted access or compensation when their creative works are illicitly distributed on file sharing sites.
And of course, that’s actually how these laws and rules are supposed to work. We won’t be judging our readers on what files they download or distribute online, but this is a clear cut case of existing rules and laws surrounding intellectual property rights being openly broken in the face of legal protections.
In Nintendo’s case, they were clearly looking to clamp down unauthorized distribution of their games. Accounts of Nintendo having to deal with software pirates and bootleggers go back to David Sheff’s 1993 book Game Over: How Nintendo Zapped an American Industry, Captured Your Dollars, and Enslaved Your Children.
In recent years, pirates and bootleggers had gotten so brazen as to open the Switch up to piracy, while Nintendo was clearly still selling the console and its games. Nintendo has responded as best as they can to effectively deter other would be pirates, as you may know from the example of Team Xecuter’s Gary Bowser.
In the case of Dstorage and 1fichier, Nintendo set the precedent for the EU. While it doesn’t necessarily apply to all regions and countries, given 1fichier’s popularity worldwide, they have locked down one emerging platform for piracy of Nintendo’s games.
