Nintendo Trumpets Major Piracy Win As Significant For Entire Games Industry

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We can talk until we’re blue in the face about the actual effects of software piracy, but it’s not hard to understand why companies like Electronic Arts and Nintendo get up in arms about it. Nintendo in particular has been highly aggressive in its efforts to scourge the web of unofficial ways to acquire and play its games, and it has just won a major court battle in France toward that end.

The Judicial Court of Paris ordered web file host Dstorage to pay €935,000 in damages back in 2021, but Dstorage appealed the judgment multiple times, eventually taking it all the way to France’s highest court. The case is now closed, though, and Dstorage lost, being forced to pay Nintendo the awarded damages as well as the company’s legal fees.

Dstorage operated popular file host 1fichier, which any pirate will be well familiar with. 1fichier operated without many restrictions on download speed or membership, allowing users to download hosted files at full speed without even so much as a login. This made it a popular place to upload pirated content, but it looks like those days are probably over. As Nintendo says, “the French Supreme Court leaves no doubt that sharehosting providers like 1fichier.com are not a safe haven for storing and sharing illegal content.”
nintendo statement to eurogamer

A portion of Nintendo’s statement to Eurogamer.

Ultimately, this victory means that Nintendo has the backing of the European legal system when going after pirates. Its takedown requests will now carry the weight of this prior judgment, and companies in Europe who are found to be hosting Nintendo material without authorization could be subject to similar huge fines in the future.

While this judgment still doesn’t criminalize piracy outside of Japan, it’s one more step toward that goal. In its statement to Eurogamer, the Japanese game publisher goes on to talk about how pirating Nintendo games “increases the risk that this will interfere with the functionality and experience that playing legitimate Nintendo games on authentic Nintendo hardware provides.” We’d love to hear the explanation for how that justification makes any sense. 
In reality, this is about protecting Nintendo’s bottom line and nothing else. In the end, all this does is make it that much easier for Nintendo to control access to its back catalogue. Thanks for nothing, France.

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