Mario and Luigi’s lawyers are on the attack (Nintendo)
Yet another overconfident streamer has found out that Nintendo does not mess about when it comes to suing people over alleged piracy.
Nintendo is known for being ruthless when it comes to tackling what it deems to be piracy, having shut down various Switch emulators this past year.
The company is particularly litigious when it comes to streamers who broadcast emulated Nintendo games, having recently issued copyright strikes against a YouTuber who promoted devices which allowed Switch software to run on PC.
Nintendo has now filed a lawsuit against another streamer, named Jesse Keighin, claiming he has streamed various pirated Switch games since 2022.
According to the lawsuit filed last week in Colorado, Keighin, who goes by the name Every Game Guru on streaming platforms like YouTube and Twitch, has broadcast leaked versions of 10 Switch games prior to their release, including Mario & Luigi: Brothership, The Legend Of Zelda: Echoes Of Wisdom, and Super Mario Party Jamboree.
Nintendo claims Keighin has promoted links to emulators, including the recently shut down Yuzu and Ryujinx, which the company describes as ‘trafficking’ in ‘unlawful software’.
According to Nintendo, the company has ‘submitted at least 30 takedown notices’ to various platforms over Keighin’s streams and has directly reached out to him, but he ‘continues to stream infringing content on any platform he can find’.
Zelda: Echoes Of Wisdom was among the pirated games streamed (Nintendo)
The lawsuit highlights one alleged exchange on October 24, 2024 after Nintendo issued copyright strikes against his videos, where he apparently sent the company a letter ‘boasting that he has ‘a thousand burner channels’ to stream from and ‘can do this all day”.
Keighin is also accused of ‘continuing to seek to profit off his unauthorised streaming of Nintendo games’ by adding a CashApp handle to his streams after his monetised YouTube channel was ordered to be shut down.
Nintendo is seeking $150,000 damages ‘with respect to each copyrighted work’. It’s unclear, however, whether this means per game or per stream. According to the lawsuit, Keighin has streamed the 10 games ‘more than 50 times in total’, so the overall amount could be either $1.5 million (£1.1 million) or $7.5 million (£5.8 million).
The company is also seeking $2,500 for each ‘act of circumvention’, which includes every time he ‘loaded unauthorised copies of games into Ryujinx, Yuzu, or another emulator and streamed them’, and for every time he provided public links to emulated games.
As reported by Polygon, Keighin has not responded to a request for comment.
This isn’t the only lawsuit Nintendo has in the fire. Earlier this year, the company took legal action against Palworld developer Pocketpair over its similarities to Pokémon – specifically in its monster catching mechanics.
Nintendo has a long track record of brutal lawsuits. In 2022, Gary Bowser was sentenced to 40 months in prison and fined $4.5 million for selling Switch hacking devices, while the company ordered an American couple in 2018 to pay $12.2 million over pirated ROMs.
Nintendo has crashed the emulator party (Nintendo)
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