I Don't Feel Bad About "Pirating" Nintendo ROMS Anymore...

hello guys and gals me mudahar and regardless of what the title says where i may think it's morally ethical morally okay to pirate certain games especially from nintendo uh i will have to say for the record full disclaimers piracy is illegal you shouldn't partake in it and if you don't own something you shouldn't download it like many of the commercials we saw growing up you wouldn't download a handbag you wouldn't download a car you wouldn't download an entire government now would you ladies and gentlemen now the story is actually interesting now this individual by the name of matthew storman this mad lad himself were used to run a website known as rom universe rom universe was one of the most famous rom hunting websites basically go to this website you could download whatever you wanted now nintendo basically sent a lawsuit towards this individual now this isn't really shocking to a lot of people rom sites in the past have been shut down by nintendo pretty much nintendo basically hires john wick effectively to find these sites and if one of them gained the attention then you're basically on the out so anyways nintendo sued this individual but in this case i have to kind of defend nintendo because apparently it seems as though good old stormin was such a mad lad that stormin actually decided i you not to charge premium fees so in this document right here list copies of rom files of nintendo's copyrighted video games for download so moreover plaintiff which in this case is nintendo filed a copy of a promotional advertisement from the defendant's website which in this case is stormin or rom the website that he's running for a purchase of a premium unlimited account for his website for access to thousands of game roms movies isos and ebooks for which included the nintendo switch a currently active game system the wii the 3ds slash ds so if you wanted to play nanashi no game this might be your site game boy advance and more unlimited downloads for only 30 dollars so you can imagine that running a rom site is already like walking through a minefield to be charging money for premium downloads is an even bigger minefield now in this entire situation i think the guy ended up making like 30 000. hey wait a minute it might actually be in this entire court docket yeah he's a defendant testified at his deposition that his income for 2019 was approximately thirty thousand to thirty six thousand dollars his rom universe website was the main source of the income so to understand ladies and gentlemen they even said here his monthly income from the website was apparently eight hundred dollars a month before he shut it off his only source of income was from his deposition was unemployment and food stamps so basically i've talked to a few actual like rom hosting website people who have been in the game and from what i've understood this is actually a pretty okay figure see to understand when you have people downloading from your service in terms of potential megabytes to gigabytes because rom files get larger depending on what you're emulating something on the nes would be in the kilobytes something on the playstation 2 would be in the gigabytes and of course when you're going into xbox 360 playstation 3 territory which are now the new emulators on the block then you end up getting into the multiple tens of gigabytes potentially so apparently according to all these bandwidth fees basically you're about to make enough on the website to break even and if that's that's your best option in most cases operating a website like this usually costs you money every month so i guess it's mostly a thankless affair now you can imagine this individual charging you 30 a month for premium access which if you used any recent rom website at all you'll notice that they have terrible download speeds most of them are downloading at 200 kilobytes 300 kilobytes a second and the reality of it is they have to throttle you because if you can buy a special subscription or potentially use a malware ridden launcher or a download you know program that they send then you'll gain access to even better download speeds at the cost of losing your personal security and your safety and whatever files you have on your system okay don't ever doubt always if you're ever going to go down here never download any game rom that's packaged in an exe file that is a very dangerous landmine to be stepping on but anyways let's whittle on back real quick so this guy got sued and initially nintendo wanted 15 million dollars but i guess it got whittled on down to uh like somewhere around the 2.1 million dollar range they actually worked a pretty good deal that was actually brought forward by apparently this guy according to this document so let's read this one real quick through its june 9th motion and by subsequent email on june 22nd nintendo advised defendant that he is violating the court's may third 2021 order by failing to make his required sanctions payment of fifty dollars a month yes ladies and gentlemen fifty dollars a month is basically the slap on the wrist this guy got so while he did end up getting that fine it was supposed to be paid in 50 a month increments so this is the closest you are ever going to get to dodging a bullet but here's what this mad lad decided to do the opposition does not dispute the defendant is considering in this case you know the stormin is relaunching the rom universe website to continue to distribute video game roms defendants threat to continue to operate rom universe to distribute video game roms using the same website he used for the past several years to mass infringe nintendo's copyright and trademark rights necessitates the entry of an injunction yeah this guy getting sued wasn't bad enough hey if i got sued for that amount of money and they said i only have to pay 50 bucks a month i would pucker my butthole and give up 50 bucks a month end of story especially if it's going up against a legal team like nintendo's all right those nintendo ninjas do not around if you're paying 50 bucks a month good for you that's listen his butthole is about to be goat seed okay right now the fingers are in he is if he doesn't make the 50 payment it's getting stretched if you understand now could you imagine ladies and gentlemen in the story do you think this guy kept paying 50 bucks a month yes or no look at the time bar for the video below of course he didn't no no no so recently this is a new court district court like update okay a permanent injunction against the defendant matthew storman so it's hereby ordered and this is insane listen to how far nintendo has went from engaging in directly so pursuant to 15 usc so this guy is permanently you know restrained from engaging in directly or indirectly or authorizing or assisting any third party to engage in any of the following activities in the united states of america and throughout the world so you can't even just go out of the country copying distributing selling performing displaying playing or otherwise using any unauthorized copy of a nintendo copyrighted work or any derivative thereof so basically if this guy wanted to emulate super mario brothers on the nes this permanent injunction prevents him now of course the the logic of like how many how many federal agents do you think are gonna go to this guy's house on a regular basis and be like all right matthew are you emulating games have you been emulating that legend of zelda there bud can we check her computer yeah i don't i don't know if that's gonna work the way but that's that's pretty serious now b using or inducing or enabling others to use any reproduction counterfeit copy or colorable imitation of nintendo's trademark in any manner in connection with the manufacturer printing distribution advertising offering for sale or sale of any goods or service including the use of nintendo's trademark in connection with a website see using any trademark service mark name logo design or source designation of any kind that has any connection with the goods or services and then here's the kicker beyond all of that this is already bad enough the court ordered further defendants shall permanently destroy destroy all unauthorized nintendo games or other unauthorized copies of nintendo's intellectual property including movies books and music no later than august 17 2021 a couple days ago and tomorrow by the time this video is uploaded defendant shall file a declaration under penalty of perjury with the court certifying his compliance no later than august 20th 2021 it is so ordered nintendo not only yanked the balls but they ripped that testicle straight off and threw it right into the center of the andromeda galaxy that's how hard this dude got fisted i mentioned goatsi earlier this is like one man 15 jars territory okay picture that one in your head all that shattered glass it is not pretty so yeah ladies and gentlemen this is you know i think this entire court case is basically the definition of play stupid games win stupid prizes look i hate to be defending nintendo taking down a rom site but there is no one with any shadow of a doubt that can look at this image and tell me that this guy wasn't playing with fire i mean you're already talking about the best rom site in the universe very very hard tail to have 60 000 roms free downloads and all of the copyright touchy artwork in the world yeah rom universe basically got shifted and matthew got shifted alongside with it now to understand something that's wild about this entire situation is the only reason nintendo really jumped the gun on this is because this guy was willing to profiteer off of these roms right now in this case i find nintendo's work to be a little bit hypocritical and i'll explain why so to understand ladies and gentlemen before we go even further to understand game preservation actually gets a little bit of a bonus this is the internet archive so basically the guys who run the wayback machine actually got a dmca exception to help archive vintage software basically old games on the nes right but basically it's vital to make proper archival copies of these artifacts because the life of magnetic media such as floppy disks has been estimated to 10 to 30 years time is running out to properly archive much of this large body of work for safe keeping now of course you can download nes rom packs in torrent form from these individuals again though the legalities of you downloading it is entirely different but these people have dmca exceptions that does exist nintendo as far as i know is not able to necessarily take this down now what makes us super hypocritical and weird to me is if you just go on amazon for five seconds you can basically find plenty of devices like here's something called the anbernic game console that proudly for 200 by the way just states over built in 2400 retro game console okay so they have 2400 retro games and i you not in the amazon listing alone these people are straight up telling you it includes super mario okay so they're already selling you what is one of the most widely available widely litigated roms right now on amazon so if nintendo really cared about stopping people they would actually target stuff like this now again like i said in the beginning i think it's morally okay to pirate nintendo game i think it's morally okay to pirate a lot of these games that have been out of circulation for over 20 years now earlier we looked at the idea of preserving games and the reality of it is is that i believe that emulation and roms are the best way of preserving any form of medium right now for instance here's assassin's creed the americas collection right actually a better explanation might be actually no this is a good enough explanation assassin's creed 3 is a game that has a multi-player component a component that actually has story implications and things that you can unlock in your own time unfortunately in a recent remastered version you can't really get that multiplayer bonus to better illustrate my point if you look over here in steam you can see that assassin's creed 3 remastered which doesn't even have the multiplayer whatsoever actually is the only thing on the steam storefront so actually if you look at it this is just the remaster of the game with mixed reviews and all so if you actually go if you own the game if you happen to have actually owned it in some capacity on steam like i do you're not able to purchase the original any longer so apparently it has been delisted if i go to the actual store page for it you can't buy this game anymore so even in some cases if you wanted the original experience it's slowly being phased out in the digital world so unless you own this game on disk whether it be on the playstation 3 or xbox 360 or you have an older license for a pc game this might be the only way to experience the game in its original glory alongside any features that may have been cut out in future releases see as games like this get remade and remastered for newer generations parts of the game are actually cut out and removed so by having this disk i can put it into a blu-ray drive back it up and using something like rpcs3 i can then emulate it on pc and enjoy it as if it would on its release okay so there's a definite benefit to game preservation i also play games like grand theft auto vice city on a ps2 emulator instead of a pc the pc port for vice city is already kind of broken without modification i download the ps2 version because it's out of the box it works underneath pcsx2 is an emulator and i can actually listen to the original soundtrack that has all been removed same could be said for grand theft auto 4 and to be honest with you i can go down the laundry list people ask me why i emulate games on the pc that i could just run pc versions of and the reality of it is sometimes when a game is remastered remade sometimes it can even be updated out of my control and have things removed with emulation you always have a 1.0 version of a game that you can always run underneath a program and get the original untouched experience of the way that in some ways developers expected you to experience a game even when it comes to nintendo games there are a lot of titles right now from nintendo for instance the super mario 3d all-stars collection which might as well have just been called a rom pack that you buy for 60 bucks there is nothing in that collection that you couldn't have just downloaded a ram of and experienced better underneath rom software that has existed for over a decade that's something that i wanted to look at when i talk about the moral ethical like values of piracy i look at games where developers are not profiteering off anymore and even beyond profiteering there's a case to be made that these older versions of games that aren't in circulation anymore also aren't providing any form of revenue to any of these developers or publishers something like metal gear solid 2 for instance has remasters and remakes sorry not remix remasters there's a distinction between the two and while yes you can get metal gear solid 2 on an hd collection and play the game in 60 frames all the way through with higher resolution there are game modes that have actually been removed what you're seeing on the screen is something called snakeboarding an actual game mode that was available on the subsistence re-release of metal gear solid 2 only playable on the ps2 as far as i know even the original xbox release doesn't have this and the pc release doesn't even have this at all so again a lot of these games sometimes have features that are added and removed and for a game preservationist standpoint if you go back to the rom rom website that we were looking at in question they had roms for something called the rca studio 2 a very old obscure console there's even an emulator that i found out that is available on windows 3.11 so even the most obscure system has roms and emulators to preserve and the important part about that is listen gaming is something that generations come into 40 years from now newer gamers are going to jump in and like movies and music where we have like the original untouched pieces intact for anybody to go back to we need to do the same thing with video games because rca studio twos magnavox odysseys game boys super nintendos playstation ones they're all gonna wither away as time goes on unless of course you preserve the software and the hardware in emulation form which is about the best many people can do and that's something that i hold very near and dear to me so again to tie preservationism back to all of it let's just go look at nintendo even closer as a sole pusher of a lot of these legal actions towards rom websites and why i think that's not exactly right now there's also another big reason that i have a problem with two a lot of these gaming companies like nintendo are not providing solid alternatives for instance nintendo still has an entire vault of games that are untouchable okay games like earthbound for instance one of the best rpgs that have ever been created by gaming companies exists only in the hands of emulation at this point sure you can get yourself an snes classic and that might be the one way for you to get earthbound but if that goes out of circulation then the only logical way of getting earthbound right now from what i understand is through roms that you're downloading on the internet because even services like nintendo switch online that allow you to play roms every month provided you have a license for this service will only get you the games that nintendo wants it's not an entire library that you can buy like the old virtual console days in fact if anything the old virtual console is basically dead the nintendo switch doesn't have it you can basically play whatever nintendo wants you to pay play forever for whatever you pay each month which i think is a bad way of handling business all right if nintendo allowed you to buy each of these roms for a i think a healthy price of maybe five dollars like if you wanted to buy earthbound for like 4.99 and play it on your switch i think that's a fair price if nintendo wanted you to buy like link to the past for five dollars i think that's a fair price i think if they charged you 4.99 for chrono trigger fair price that's a lot of game for five dollars for an nes game like legend of zelda if they charged you a buck for it i think that would be a fair price again if you gave the option i wouldn't even tell you guys that piracy is morally okay but they're not providing the option which is the problem look i can yell about this till i'm blue in the face but nintendo basically ruined this guy's life over the fact that he was basically like running a rom site and also finding a way to charge a premium service 30 bucks i don't know if he was charging per month is an insane amount of cash for just roms now that being said though again it goes back down to play stupid games win stupid prizes and that's pretty much where this guy's life is headed to if he still challenges nintendo kind of a dumb move on my part but that being said though i'm gonna go back to playing some assassin's creed unity on this device i just wanted to show you something on the gpd win bro they got assassin's creed unity and i got this running at like 30 frames per second i'm excited for whatever the steam deck comes into i'm getting back into gaming i'm having a good old vibe tonight ladies and gentlemen if you like what you saw please like comment and subscribe just like if you dislike it i am out

Channel: SomeOrdinaryGamers

Views: 446,292

Rating: 4.9658904 out of 5

Keywords:

Id: 8xNra8jmHVE

Length: 19min 11sec (1151 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 19 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/Yourmomsfavev4pe]

Next time your favorite indie devs can’t afford to feed themselves or their wive’s boyfriends, you have this guy to thank!! 🤬🤬🤬🤬🤬🤬

Edit: don’t worry ninty released the ninjas 😈

[u/Jack3ww]

I am a firm believer that the only time it's ok to Pirate is if the game is really old if it's a new game you should buy it

[u/owcjthrowawayOR69]

MUTA NOOOOOO