If you like piracy, friends, take out your umbrellas because Nintendo is raining down legal summons! The Japanese firm, not really known for its tolerance towards piracy, has just drawn a new legal salvo which risks shaking quite a few people in the Switch community.
And this time, it's not just anyone who finds themselves in the sights of the lawyers with the big Mario mustache: Reddit himself and his 200,000 members of the sulphurous subreddit r/SwitchPirates !
It all starts with James Williams, aka Archboxa moderator of the famous Phoenix-based subreddit, who was caught for creating and managing “Pirate Shops”, online stores illegally offering pirated Switch games.
But now, our friend James had the brilliant idea of playing hide and seek with the law, ignoring the summons and even refusing to appear in court. A behavior which earned him a default judgment in November 2024, but which above all gave an idea to Nintendo's lawyers: why settle for a single pirate when you can cast a wide net?
This is how Nintendo, from the top of its $8.4 billion of sales planned for 2024, has just filed a mass subpoena request to obtain the personal data of all the users involved. The firm requests access to information held by:
- Reddit and its 200,000 SwitchPirates members
- Discord and its servers dedicated to piracy
- GitHub to track down hack tools
- Google to dig through Gmail and Drive
- And hosts like Cloudflare, GoDaddy, Namecheap et Tucows
The Japanese company (but bad) is not careful when it comes to requests, asking for the complete identity of users, payment histories, traffic statistics, connection logs as well as private messages. The official complaint is here.
We can understand Nintendo's determination because with their Switchses 146 millions of units sold and its $77 billion of revenue generated, that represents quite a jackpot that they intend to protect. It even follows the Nintendo DS (154 million) to become the second best-selling console in history.
But this steamroller approach raises serious questions about privacy protection. Is it reasonable for a company weighing $67 billion on the stock market could potentially access the personal data of hundreds of thousands of users just because they frequent a forum?
Because since the complaint was filed in June 2024, several “Pirate Shops” like Libera Shop have already closed their doors and investigators even suspect massive destruction of evidence via the deletion of compromising messages and emails.
In short, this story reminds me of the time of the P2P and Napster lawsuits. At the time, the industry already thought it could stem piracy through legal action and we saw the result: file sharing did not disappear, it just adapted.
So while we wait to see how this all ends, a piece of advice: clean up your history if you hang out on questionable forums. You never know who Nintendo's lawyers will run into next!
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