As reported by My Nintendo News, Nintendo is continuing to pursue its attempts to take down members of a Switch piracy Reddit, and more specifically the sub’s moderator, James Williams, known as Archbox. As with most of Nintendo’s court targets, he was seemingly given an opportunity to walk away and chose not to take it. As Kotaku mentioned in July 2024, Nintendo had sent Archbox cease-and-desist letters which the company alleges he chose to ignore. As a result of that, court filings were made and it seems Archbox ignored those too. Now the company is demanding $4,500,000 in a default ruling.
Nintendo’s ongoing pursuit of all involved in potential piracy of their consoles and games would be proving quite the revenue stream for the company, if it ever demanded the millions of dollars from people who could actually pay. After successfully suing Modded Hardware’s Ryan Daly last month for $2 million that he’ll never be able to give them, bringing about the eternal ruination of Gary Bowser in 2021 who will owe Nintendo $10 million for the rest of his life, and the company’s attempts to get $7.5 million from Jess Keighin last year, the Japanese behemoth is now going after Reddit moderator James “Archbox” Williams and asking for $4.5 million he won’t have. The idea, presumably, is to send shockwaves through piracy communities, given almost everyone who is targeted wouldn’t be able to pay for even Nintendo’s legal fees, let alone any money awarded.
Meanwhile, sticking your fingers in your ears and hoping it will go away rarely proves to be an effective legal response, especially if you’ve no anonymity and evidence very convincingly suggests you committed the crimes. As OatmealDome stated on BlueSky, Nintendo is coming after James Williams for $4,500,000 in damages by “default judgment.”
The Lost Cause
(Just for the sake of my colleagues, let me state right here that this article is my opinion, and not necessarily that of others at Kotaku. God knows, we disagree on a lot.)
As is always the case in all of these proceedings, aside from the simple fact that illegally downloading something is…illegal, the idea that piracy costs a company significant losses is always stated as fact but is never asked to be proven or evidenced. Courts frequently take it on face value that any downloaded ROM must automatically represent a lost sale; something that’s never been demonstrated and is clearly very spurious, no matter how widely believed it may be. Ever since the days of Napster, corporations have been using “one download = one lost sale” to work out their claimed losses, which led to the gruesome spate of rulings in the early 2000s in which individuals were being bankrupted with ludicrous damages because their kids (who obviously wouldn’t have been able to afford to buy the music if they’d not pirated it, thus representing no lost sales at all) downloaded a bunch of mp3s. Nintendo continues with the same thinking in its latest court filing, stating,
“NOA has suffered damages as a result of these breaches, including but not limited to decreased profits and a loss of profits related to reproduction and distribution of the Nintendo Switch games and related to users whose accounts NOA has terminated for violation of the EULA.”
(I really do love the argument that Nintendo is suffering losses because it terminates people’s accounts.) It also goes on to claim that these losses are directly affecting employed individuals.
“These activities have substantially damaged NOA’s overall business and intellectual property rights, as well as the business and intellectual property rights of NOA’s development and publishing partners, and further has caused harm to the many artists, game designers, programmers and others whose livelihoods depend upon the sale of authorized Nintendo products.”
I find it quite extraordinary to declare that there has been harm to the livelihoods of specific employees without providing any evidence at all, instead relying on people’s feeling that piracy surely must cost a company money. It really behooves Nintendo to demonstrate any example of one of its own employed artists, designers, or programmers as having had their livelihoods affected, but it doesn’t attempt to and certainly never will. Claims like this are commonplace and pernicious, and I believe it’s crucial to at the very least ask for proof when they’re made. (It’s especially unpleasant at a time when we’re seeing companies reporting massive profits while sacking thousands of staff, making a mockery of the entire concept.)
And please let me make clear: if you’re shouting at your screen, “Of course game piracy causes significant losses and harms!” all I am asking for is your evidence. Please demonstrate it, so I can agree with you. Of course it costs them some sales, it’s certainly not nothing, but nothing close to the ruinous amounts being claimed.
Expensive Speech
The case is unusual in that Williams is not only being sued for his making some manner of profit from allegedly charging for “pro” services, but primarily for “promoting” the piracy, directing Reddit users to his pages where Nintendo ROMs can be downloaded. This area of encouraging piracy is far more tricky in court, although historically that hasn’t been something judges have been particularly troubled by. The Nintendo filing repeatedly refers to 2007’s Supreme Court ruling in the MGM versus Grokster case, although that left a lot of ambiguity, and became overly focused on the technology rather than the principle. However, exploiting these issues would require Williams to be able to both afford a legal defense that could stand up to that of Nintendo’s, and—well—for him to acknowledge the situation at all.
Nintendo usually reserves its ire for those who are actively profiting from piracy, charging for services or access to ROMs through so-called “Pirate Shops,” at which point the criminality is far more clear. That’s really not so much the case in this latest situation where the filing instead breaks down how Williams has promoted free Pirate Shops and given people information on how to circumvent the Switch’s anti-piracy measures. It does go on to allege that Archbox created “pro” versions of these offerings, exchanging access for “donations” of eShop cards, which far more immediately suggests tangible criminality, but this isn’t the emphasis.
The filing, however, does lay out some extensive detective work, explaining why Nintendo believes Archbox has been involved at every stage of the piracy process, from being a member of the ROM dumping team to distributing circumvention software, then the creation of the distribution sites all the way to providing instructions for how to use them on Reddit and Discord. Again, Nintendo’s lawyers lay out how the “donation” schemes applied throughout, which potentially means the court won’t have to consider all the other claims and how they relate to free speech, or will more likely just handwave them through, given there’s evidence of profit.
This is all made more damning for Archbox given his own responses, or lack thereof. Nintendo’s filing claims he initially “acknowledged his conduct violated NOA’s rights and stated he would work with NOA to satisfy its demands,” but that he denied involvement with the “Shops,” and then when Nintendo requested confirmation in writing that he’d comply with its demands, “he became combative and uncooperative.” Archbox rather pointlessly deleted his GitHub and took a few of the sites offline, but Nintendo says he left LiberaShop running throughout. Nintendo says that on May 17, 2024, it gave him “a final opportunity to comply with its demands prior to litigation,” and Williams responded saying an attorney would contact them. This never happened, and later, after some rather limited communication with a lawyer stating he represented Williams in early 2025, this, too, fell apart.
Damaging Figures
The rest of the filing goes on to argue for a default ruling, lists all of its allegations against Williams while making many more spurious claims about lost sales, then cites copyright and EULA violations, before finally reaching its rather loose justification for the $4.5 million figure: because someone did the same for Bungie. The figure itself just appears to have been plucked from the air, given the document states,
“Here, the amount of money sufficient to remedy NOA’s injury would be extremely difficult to quantify; but it is indisputable that such amount would be large. Therefore, the money at stake by this Motion is nowhere near an amount that would compensate NOA for the seriousness of Defendants’ conduct.”
For all the back-and-forth, there’s obviously no doubt that distributing ROMs and circumventing piracy measures is viewed as criminal. While there are unquestionably arguments to be made about the nature of the related rulings, it would require massive financial backing to successfully argue any of this in courts, and not within the purview of Nintendo’s targets. Meanwhile, it’s essential to take on board that Nintendo does appear to give these people the chance to agree to cease and desist, although the exact terms are unclear, and only resorts to litigation after that’s refused.
No Mercy
For me, the larger issue is the nature of the punishments, which seem to defy any notion of mercy. From my scant understanding of the situation, James “Archbox” Williams seems like a fool, an allegedly leading figure in an action known to be against the law who was given a chance to get out of this situation and refused to take it. However, no matter the individual, a way to make amends is an essential part of a judicial system. Criminals are supposed to be able to “pay their debt to society,” and rehabilitation should be central to consequences. Financial debt of the magnitude Nintendo demands from individuals is obviously impossible to ever pay back, and means a permanent, life-long punishment for a crime that—given the nature of offenses for which people are routinely sentenced to years in prison, or the meaningless financial penalties given to vast corporations for their deadly negligence—is relatively minor.
Famously, Gary Bowser will have to give between 25 and 30 percent of his income to Nintendo for the rest of his life, and given that his time spent in prison makes it far harder for him to get well-compensated employment, this will likely leave him in dire straits until he dies. There’s no opportunity for reform here, no way to “pay his debt” either literally or metaphorically, and the same is true for every other individual pursued in this way.
But so long as courts allow “one download = one lost sale” to continue to be accepted without asking for any evidence at all, and let through claims that employees’ livelihoods are harmed without demanding a single example, Nintendo will continue to chase such outrageous financial penalties in its furious (and ultimately futile) pursuits. “If you can’t do the time, don’t do the crime” might be a popular (if ignorant) refrain, but when the crime is copying video games, and the time is eternity, perhaps something is dreadfully amiss.
