Known as the "strongest legal department in the Eastern Hemisphere", Nintendo has been on the front line of rights protection since the last century. Every year players see Nintendo winning cases large and small.
On the occasion of this new year, Nintendo's legal department has recently achieved new results in safeguarding intellectual property rights. Gary Bowser, a member of the hacking group Team Xecuter, was sentenced to 40 months in prison by the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Washington for "selling cracked versions of Switch and selling crack kits."
The ultimate charge was manufacturing and selling "console hacking software and hardware for playing pirated Nintendo Switch games," a felony in the United States.
As a member of the hacking group, Gary Bowser began its own activities back in 2013, and over the years the group profited tens of millions of dollars by selling cracked versions of Switch and selling crack kits, and caused more than $150 million in financial damage to Nintendo.
Nintendo was furious and has been following Gary Bowser closely since his arrest in September 2020. And at last year's trial, Nintendo received $4.5 million in damages.
But the lawsuit isn't over, just two of the eleven charges against Gary Bowser, who was asked to pay an additional $10 million in fines to Nintendo for his involvement in selling a host cracked chip.
It was only after Gary Bowser agreed to pay a $10 million fine last December that Nintendo settled the lawsuit against him, when in fact the sentence Nintendo initially wanted to see was five years.
Of course, for Nintendo, this victory is just a trivial small lawsuit in the process of defending its own copyright. Many cases in the past have highlighted the degree of authenticity of the "strongest legal department in the Eastern Hemisphere".
Not long ago, a netizen's self-made Pokémon game trial video exploded on the outside network, and the most important reason why this game can attract so much attention is that Pokémon is regarded as a villain, and players need to shoot them out.
This was originally just a joke made by the game makers, but it wasn't long before Nintendo ordered the other side to delete the videos, otherwise it would take legal measures. The game's developers sensibly removed the video because he didn't want to annoy the "strongest legal department in the Eastern Hemisphere" for a game that might not bring him any revenue at all. ”
In 2013, YouTube carried out a large-scale autonomous regulation, and the cause of the incident was due to The announcement by Heaven that it would identify copyrighted content through the ContentID system, and the advertising revenue of all videos containing Nintendo's copyrighted content would be owned by Nintendo.
The release of this statement has hit many anchors and UPs a big blow, and Nintendo is second to none in the world in terms of protecting its own rights and interests. It is foreseeable that Nintendo will continue to walk firmly on this road in the future.