Game news Nintendo is pulling out its claws! A group bringing together 200,000 users on this social network is in the crosshairs
Published on 02/12/2024 at 4:40 p.m.
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Nintendo is not the only publisher to defend its interests from an intellectual property point of view, but it is perhaps the one which displays it most clearly. We learn regularly and in a very official manner that this or that procedure has been launched. This time, it's Reddit and a very particular forum that is in the sights.
New complaint from Nintendo against an alleged pirate
Nintendo defends its brands and its products, everyone knows that. The publisher is even particularly zealous on the subject, even if it means stopping the development of fan projects. In recent years, Nintendo particularly fought against the circulation of emulators and ROMswhich sometimes led to some serious calls from the authorities. It must be said that the company has not been spared, with the famous R4 cartridges on DS and 3DS then with the leaks of the biggest Switch exclusives.
Here, we have warned you several times to be very careful because some of the major titles were found in the wild days or weeks before their release. But the pirates are always one step ahead and the fight is perpetual. Nintendo is therefore not letting up the pressure, and, after having eliminated many of the existing emulators, the company is attacking the piracy communities. In a court complaint filed in Washington state against Switch modder James “Archbox” WilliamsNintendo explained how it intended to fight against pirate stores. Everything was relayed by GameFiles, and the documents are accessible sur Scribd.
Nintendo wants information, and officially requests it from several major companies
More specifically, Nintendo vise le subreddit SwitchPirates (with an evocative name to say the least), a community with more than 216,000 members. Nintendo is therefore directly attacking the moderator, but also wishes to obtain information allowing the justice system to trace all the people who may have actively participated in illegal activities.
In particular, we learned that the defendant was active on numerous Discord servers linked to pirate stores. We also learned that the defendant was the primary moderator of the Reddit community “SwitchPirates” and was apparently the owner of a Github account directly linked to these activities. In almost all of these capacities, the defendant operated under the name “Archbox” or some close variation of that name. During our investigation, we also became aware of several other online actors who appeared to play a role in the pirate stores. However, we have not been able to determine the identity and location of these other actors with a sufficient degree of certainty to name them in the initial complaint. Nintendo of America therefore did not include these individuals in the suit in the hope that discovery (…) would reveal the identity and location of these actors, can we read in the file.
Nintendo therefore turned to Cloudflare, Discord, GitHub, Google and Redditas well as companies specializing in domain names such as Namecheap, GoDaddy ou encore Tucows. The goal is to eventually find traces of these other hackers and be able to name them in order to obtain subpoenas. In reality, this case is directly following the closure of Modded Hardwarewith whom James “Archbox” Williams was associated. It remains to be seen the reaction of the companies mentioned, who are often reluctant to provide this type of data except by order of the courts. One thing is certain, Nintendo does not intend to let pirates sleep peacefully.
