Nintendo yet again wins a lawsuit over copyright infringement, this time against RomUniverse. A California court ruled in favor of Nintendo, requiring the defendant to pay over $2.1 million in damages.

First reported by TorrentFreak, Nintendo took to court the owner of the RomUniverse website, Matthew Storman, over copyright infringement allegations in September 2019. Storman had uploaded at least 28 ROMs, files used to play video games using emulators, on the website. What's worse, Storman profited off this venture, charging fees for premium accounts with unlimited download capacity. According to Storman, this service allowed him to earn somewhere between $30,000 and $36,000 in revenue in 2019.

Storman, who appeared in court without a lawyer, represented himself during the trial. He claimed in his defense that he didn't upload any of Nintendo's copyrighted material to the website, and thus has not violated any laws. He also asked the court to junk the case.

However, Storman himself contradicted himself. In his sworn deposition testimony, Storman testified that he himself uploaded the files on the Internet. His defense didn't sufficiently establish the content of these files, and hence puts his claims into question.

The judge ruled that Storman has violated copyright laws, and decided to grant Nintendo $1,715,000 in statutory damages under the Copyright Act and $400,000 in statutory damages under the Lanham Act. This adds up to a total of $2,115,000 in statutory damages.

Up until Summer of 2021, the website continued to operate. The website's operator finally took the website down after a talk with Nintendo's legal team.

$2,115,000 may not be a big deal for Nintendo, given how much they made during the fiscal year 2020-2021. However, winning cases like this will make pirates and emulators think twice about using Nintendo's copyrighted material for profit.