This involves sending a steady stream of cease and desist letters and takedown notices. If those don’t work, the company is prepared to take action in court.
In June 2024, it filed a lawsuit at a Washington federal court against Arizona resident James C. Williams, known online as ‘Archbox’. Nintendo accused him of operating several ‘pirate shops’ that offered large libraries of pirated Switch games to the public.
According to Nintendo, Williams promoted these shops on the SwitchPirates subreddit, where he was a leading moderator. He also allegedly helped users install circumvention software and asked for eShop gift card “donations” to buy games that were then decrypted and added to the shops.
Williams never responded to the complaint. This prompted Nintendo to request a default judgment last October, asking for $4.5 million in statutory damages as well as a permanent injunction.
Judge Grants Default Judgment
This week, U.S. District Judge Lauren King granted Nintendo’s motion in full. She stressed that the defendant was aware of the case, as he hired a lawyer to object to a Google subpoena, but he failed to answer the complaint.
Williams’ activity on Reddit didn’t help his case and is cited in the court order. These posts suggest that the defendant knew that the games were copyrighted and that he distributed them anyway.
In one post cited in the order, Williams calls himself a “pirate” who “[is]n’t going to give Nintendo $50 for a game.”
$4.5 Million Damages Award
Nintendo requested the statutory maximum of $150,000 per title for 30 games, including The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, Mario Kart 8 Deluxe and Super Smash Bros. Ultimate.
The judge agreed. At roughly $50 per game, lost sales could easily run into the hundreds of thousands of dollars, making the maximum damages request “not an unrealistic estimate” of Nintendo’s actual damages, the order reads.
This and other posts made clear to the judge that the infringing activity was willful. She therefore found the $4.5 million award appropriate, partly as punishment.
“Williams’ egregious infringement activities merit substantial punishment here,” Judge King concludes.
As a “gesture of reasonableness,” Nintendo didn’t request DMCA damages or attorneys’ fees. This did not go unnoticed by the judge, who notes that this worked in favor of granting the maximum copyright infringement damages.
Shops and Reddit Account Already Gone
In addition to the damages, Judge King also issued a permanent injunction. This prohibits Williams from distributing any pirated Nintendo game, not just the 30 listed titles, as well as any software that circumvents the protections on Nintendo’s games and consoles.
He is also barred from encouraging others to download pirated games or circumvention tools. To enforce the ban, the order requires Williams to disable his pirate shops and the accounts he used to distribute or promote them.
The order covers his Reddit account, as well as accounts on Instagram, X, TikTok, Discord and Telegram that were used for the infringing activity.
It appears that, in practice, there is little left to disable. The ‘archbox’ Reddit account is already self-deleted, and the shops named in the complaint were shut down long ago, most of them after Nintendo’s cease and desist letter in March 2024.
By filing the lawsuit, Nintendo said it wanted to “put a stop to” Williams’ activities, and presumably send a deterrent message to others. Recouping the $4.5 million will likely be hard, particularly since the defendant is unresponsive.
Although the judgment goes in Nintendo’s favor, none of the legal claims were tested. Because Williams failed to respond, the court took the allegations in the complaint as true, resulting in an uncontested win.
This outcome differs from Nintendo’s parallel lawsuit against Modded Hardware, which was filed on the same day. That case ended last year when its operator agreed to a $2 million judgment to settle.
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A copy of Judge King’s order granting default judgment and a permanent injunction is available here (pdf). The judgment can be found here (pdf).
