Nintendo sues a youtuber who streamed its pre-release titles and asks the court for $7.5 million in damages

It's amazing that there are still people who would risk this kind of lawsuit with the Japanese company.

There are some certainties in the video game industry. One is that DOOM can run on any electronic device you can think of at the moment, and another is that Nintendo shows no mercy to those who break the law and pirate games.

IN 2024 there are still those who try to skirt the law and the Japanese company's intellectual property regulations, trying to exploit the privilege of having their games available before release to make some quick cash from streaming. Or worse, by distributing pirated copies of them. And Nintendo, sooner or later, will send its legal team after them.

Today's case goes in that direction. Nintendo has filed a lawsuit against streamer Jesse Keighin, known online as EveryGameGuru, for repeatedly streaming Nintendo games weeks before their official release and making use of illegal copies in illegal emulation software, as reported by 404 Media.

On at least fifty occasions in the last two years, Defendant has streamed gameplay footage of pirated copies of at least ten different Nintendo games without authorization-all before those titles were released to the public," Nintendo said in the lawsuit. "All of these streams were unauthorized and all compromise Nintendo's legitimate prerelease marketing. They also promote and encourage downloading of pirated copies of unpublished games. Defendant's streams often consist merely of him playing Nintendo's leaked games without commentary for extended periods of time."

Nintendo is reportedly demanding an amount of more than $100,000 per game streamed through this practice, which in turn leads to a sum of $7.5 million in total. The latest case in this area was Mario & Luigi: Brothership, which EveryGameGuru began streaming on 22 November, when the title was not due to hit shops until 7 November. Far from regretting this legal injunction, EveryGameGuru claims to have more than 1,000 mirror channels with which it could stream games indefinitely, if it wanted to.

What do you think, is Nintendo justified in defending its intellectual property at this level, and the regulation of content embargoed from the internet?