Ordered To Pay $2.1 Million Fine.
Los Angeles resident Matthew Storman ran the ROM site ROMUniverse. And when Nintendo’s lawyers cam knocking with a multi-million dollar lawsuit, he did the sensible thing and called a lawyer decided to represent himself in court.
Storman ran ROMUniverse until Summer 2020, roughly a year after Nintendo filed suit against him; a suit which claimed mass copyright infringement, as ROMUniverse contained ROMs from many companies, but notably had ROMS from pretty much all of Nintendo’s consoles and IPs. Coincidentally, Storman wasn’t just hosting the content on his site; he was directly profiting from it. He offered premium membership accounts for payment that allowed unlimited downloads. Per the argument put forth by Nintendo’s lawyers:
This is a straightforward video game piracy case, and the material facts are undisputed. For over a decade, defendant Matthew Storman owned and operated the website RomUniverse.com. He populated the website with pirated copies of thousands of different Nintendo games and distributed hundreds of thousands of copies of those pirated games.
As such, Nintendo asked the court for a summary judgement of $15 million.
Storman, representing himself, argued that ROMUniverse broke no laws*, and that the case should be dismissed. He claimed his site did not offer pirated Nintendo games, and that he never uploaded any ROMs himself.
*
Which might be an argument that would hold water, if he hadn’t previously admitted in a deposition that he’d done that. From the judge’s ruling:
Defendant filed a declaration in opposition to the Motion wherein he declares that he ‘denies and disputes that he uploaded any files to said website and at no time did he verify the content of said ROM file’, which is directly contradictory to his sworn deposition testimony wherein he testified that he uploaded the ROM files onto his website.
Furthermore, Defendant testified at his deposition that his website ‘indicated’ that copies of Nintendo’s copyrighted video games were available for download on the website.
Coincidentally, Storman had also previously testified that he profited from the aforementioned premium accounts. In 2019, he claimed to have made between $30,000 and $36,000 from these accounts, and was making $800 a month from the site just before it closed in 2020. The site was his primary income, coincidentally, and his “only source of income at the time of his deposition was unemployment and food stamps.”
Naturally the court found in favor of Nintendo.
The Court Grants Plaintiff’s Motion for Summary Judgment as to Plaintiff’s copyright infringement, unfair competition and Lanham Act claims, and awards Plaintiff $1,715,000 in statutory damages under the Copyright Act and $400,000 in statutory damages under the Lanham Act for a total of $2,115,000 in statutory damages.
As bad as this is for Storman, it could’ve been worse; Nintendo initially sought $15 million in damages from him. The court only granted $2.1 million of that request. Furthermore, the judge didn’t grant a permanent injunction against Storman, as the site had already been shut down. The judge also refused to grant any of the further sanctions Nintendo requested.
Still, considering that the best year of the site’s operation was ~$36,000… that’s a mountain of debt.
Source: PC Gamer
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