Streamer faces $7.5 million lawsuit from Nintendo over alleged piracy, leaking unreleased games
In context: Nintendo, a company known as much for its iconic games as for its litigious nature, is once again sending its rabid lawyers after someone. This time, the firm has filed a lawsuit against a streamer accused of broadcasting pirated Nintendo games, often before their official release. He’s also accused of pointing viewers to Switch emulators and other piracy tools.
Jesse Keighin, who streams under the name Every Game Guru, is named in a lawsuit filed by Nintendo last week. The suit claims that Keighin has streamed ten then-unreleased games over the past decade, including Mario & Luigi Brothership, The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom, and Super Mario Party Jamboree. He’s alleged to have streamed them at least 50 times in the last two years.
Nintendo also says that Keighin instructed viewers on how they could obtain and play the pirated games using “circumvention devices.” Nintendo included screenshots of these actions in its lawsuit. One shows a post of a step-by-step guide Keighin wrote on how to play illegally downloaded ROMs. He also posted links leading to the Ryujinx, Yuzu, Suyu and Sudachi Nintendo Switch emulators, ROMs distribution websites, and a website offering Switch decryption keys.
Nintendo is certainly no stranger to sending out cease-and-desist letters and takedown requests, threatening to sue people into oblivion if they don’t reply. This tends to work, but Keighin responded to the copyright notices by opening new channels on other platforms. Keighin even taunted Nintendo by sending the company an email claiming he had “a thousand burner accounts” and that he could “do this all day.”
Keighin has streamed on YouTube, Discord, Twitch, TikTok, Trovo, Kick, Vaughn, Dlive, Picarto, Nimo, Facebook, and Loco. Some of the other titles he’s accused of streaming before their release date include Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door, Mario vs. Donkey Kong, Super Mario RPG, Super Mario Bros. Wonder, Pikmin 4, Splatoon 3 and Mario Strikers: Battle League.
Nintendo is asking the court for $15,000 for every instance that Keighin violated its copyright and $2,500 for each contravention of its anti-circumvention and anti-trafficking provisions in the Copyright Act. It is also seeking “actual damages” for lost revenue, an amount it intends to “prove at trial.” With at least 50 instances of Keighin streaming pirated games, the total amount could reach more than $7.5 million.
Furthermore, Nintendo wants the court to take down Keighin’s streams and videos, and seize emulators, hacked devices, and hard drives where the alleged illegally obtained games are stored.
“Streaming leaked games prior to their publication normalises and encourages prerelease piracy – Defendant is signaling to viewers that they too should acquire a pirated copy and play the game now, without waiting for its release and without paying for it,” Nintendo’s lawyers wrote in the filing.
“Pre-release piracy harms law-abiding Nintendo customers who may have been waiting for a particular game release for months or years, and then may see gameplay and spoilers online that ruin their own surprise and delight when experiencing the game.”
