If you enjoy wearing a black eyepatch, sail the high seas, and live in the UK, it's going to get a lot harder to download pirated Switch games. At least, that's what Nintendo is aiming for with its High Court Injunction against six UK internet providers: BT, Sky, Virgin, TalkTalk, and others.
There's a whole bunch of domains that Nintendo is targeting, and with this injunction they're all going to be blocked on these UK internet providers. So, if you're looking for free copies of Super Mario Odyssey, The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword, Animal Crossing: New Horizons, and more, you're going to have to find another way.
Basically, Justice Joanna Smith found that the existing websites infringed on Nintendo's trademark rites through the Trade Marks Act 1994, stating that:
“[T]here is no plausible basis to suppose that the use of the marks is merely descriptive; they are being used to denote (falsely) the origin of the games and thereby to drive traffic to the websites for the purposes of making a profit. This is not in accordance with honest practice.”
“Any interference with the rights of the public and the ISPs is justified by the legitimate aim of preventing such infringement. No complaints were made under the previous Nintendo v Sky order and there have been no reports of over-blocking or other difficulties. For these reasons, the injunction is proportionate,” Justice Smith writes.
The reason that Nintendo has gone to such extremes is that their earlier effort to contact the owners of these sites had been in vain-they haven't been able to find any contact details for these websites. While Nintendo has managed to take the social media pages down for these sites, the company thinks that the sites are still operating with none of the offending content being removed.
This news comes in the wake of Gary Bowser agreeing to pay a fine in order of $10 million to Nintendo, who really seems to have been on a tear against piracy recently. We'll have to wait and see where they go from here.
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