 Hey everyone, welcome back from the holidays. Hopefully you guys had a great weekend. I know I had a very busy weekend, some good, some bad. It's always nice to see some family. Really it was probably about a week or so ago that I actually had a little bit of a better time because I got to see some family all the way from France who I haven't seen in like 12 years. So that was pretty cool. But yeah, hopefully you guys, you know, if you didn't celebrate the holidays, did something worthwhile. Maybe you spent a weekend playing video games and if you did, hopefully it went well for you. I know the holidays can be kind of a crapshoot for some people. Sometimes it's lovely. Sometimes it's a big family argument. Welcome to dealing with families, I suppose. All right, folks. So let's get into today's stuff. Before we do, I want to remind you that we do have a giveaway going on right now for three copies of Pokemon Legends Arceus. To enter, just click on that viral sweep link down in the pinned comment or to the description. We're also on our road to 80,000 subscribers. I would really appreciate it if you guys hit that subscribe button. Drop a like, help spread the video out. All right, let's just not waste your time, right? You guys got crap to do today. I got crap I want to do today. Heck, Eric's over here sitting on a couch on a Monday. Like, what the hell's up with that, right? It says it's even podcast day. That's right, I got stuff to do. So, like, have fun. It's a foreign concept around here sometimes. We got to talk about Nintendo and potentially ending fun for some people. It's interesting because Nintendo basically obtained a high court injunction against a bunch of websites that are gonna be applied to specific service providers. So I'm confused. Let me read the article here so you understand the full context here. Now, this is applying to the UK. Obviously, these sorts of injunctions and these sorts of court-approved things could end up leaking into other countries as precedents get set. But we'll worry about right now what's happening in the UK. So Nintendo has obtained a UK high court injunction against six internet service providers in an effort to stop switch games from being downloaded illegally. The injunction means that the six UK-based ISPs, those include BT, EE, Plusnet, Sky, TalkTalk, and Virgin Media, must now block access to specific ROM portals for two years. The injunction application, which is dated for December 2nd, 2021, sees Nintendo requesting a website blocking order under section 97A of the Copyright Designs and Patents Act of 1988. The six named ISPs are requested to block access to five domains, including nsw2u.xyz, nsw2u.org, nsw2u.com, nsw2u.net, and nswrom.com. These domains, as Nintendo says, offer pirated switch ROMs. Nintendo believes these sites are commercial in nature due to the fact that they feature advertising, which generates income based on page views and pop-up ads. Nintendo also voiced concerns over explicit adult content appearing during the download process, giving the young nature of its main audience. The company also claims that it has made repeated attempts to contact the owners of the sites via solicitors in order to settle the matter out of court, and they believe all the namesites are owned by the same entity. In an order handed down by Justice Joanna Smith, it was acknowledged that the domains in question offer Nintendo copyrighted content, and that a large portion of downloads came from the UK. Justice Smith found that the sites do indeed infringe Nintendo's copyrights in the UK, and that the sites also infringe Nintendo's trademark right, contrary to the trademark act of 1994. There 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 drive traffic to the website for the purposes of making a profit. This is not in accordance with the honest practice, and these are words from the Justice themselves. Judge Smith awarded an injunction on the basis that it would be a fair balance between protecting Nintendo's rights and those of the public, as well as allowing ISPs to continue trading fairly. In other words, the ISPs obviously need to comply, or there will be further actions against them by the court system. So yeah, congratulations to Nintendo on this. Now, the reason I say this is sort of a win, but sort of a loss is obviously those of you in the UK that like pirating Nintendo Switch games to use them on your computers and stuff like that. Maybe you own legit copies of the games so you think it's morally okay to do it. Well, too bad. Nintendo's blocking one of the main ways that you guys were getting your ROMs, not that you can't obviously find them at other ROM sites and other means on the internet. This is the internet. Once things go up on the internet, they're pretty much always on the internet somewhere. So it's not as if you're not able to get them. It's just going to be harder. And Nintendo is doing all this because they are tired of Switch games being available to the public to play on hack switches and or their PCs ahead of time. It happens all the time and they've tried and tried and tried to stop it and they just can't because if it isn't from a review copy that a bad faith reviewer breaks their NDA and puts it out there, it's from a retailer that leaks copies out. And what's Nintendo gonna do? Not send copies of the game to the retail outlets to sell to consumers until after the release date of the game, Nintendo's kind of left it no man's land where they are trying to find a way to keep the spoilers down and maintain the integrity of their development teams and their sales while also not necessarily pissing off consumers too much. In general, I think if you're just an average everyday Switch consumer in the UK that buys their games and buys digitally and gifts them and all you guys don't need to worry about this has no impact on you. But for those of you that do like pirating games or do think it's justifiable if you already own a copy, just know that the distribution and downloading of ROMs is illegal in both the UK and the United States and several other countries regardless of ownership of the original product. You are allowed in most countries to make backups of your own product, AKA take the code off the cartridge you bought and put that on a computer but a lot of people don't do that because hey, it's not exactly like snapping your fingers to make that happen. You have to hack your Switch as an example or find another means to dump the files off that cartridge. So yeah, people just find it easier to download which doesn't matter if you own or not, it is breaking the law. Will you ever get in personal trouble for it? Probably not, notice that this injunction isn't about Nintendo going after people who have downloaded the ROMs but going after the providers because you need to go to the source, you can't go to the millions and millions of people that already have it. You just need to make getting them harder. So for Nintendo, this is obviously a big W as they just made it much harder in the UK for distribution to happen. Obviously other sites are gonna crop up and Nintendo will probably go after them as well as they continue the never ending battle against their current modern platforms games going up to the wild ahead of time. Anyways folks, you guys let me know what you think about this down in the comments below. Doesn't really affect me, I'm not someone who participates in that community but if you do, I'm very curious on your opinions on this. Does it even matter to you because you can just get them through other means. Is this Nintendo just covering their bases legally because they need to be able to protect their IP and if they don't fight for protection of their IP that can get into some funny copyright thing where they can lose rights to certain things or do you think this is dumb because other companies aren't doing it and they've just decided to let things be or maybe other companies are doing it because the pirating is not as bad and the Switch is actually a very easily pirated system. You're not hearing about PlayStation 5 games being pirated, are you? You barely even hear about PlayStation 4 ones so there is something to be said that Nintendo's platform is weaker and thus easier for this to happen to. So you guys let me know what you think about this down in the comments below. I am Nathan Neroblejans from Nintendo Prime. Thank you so much for tuning in and I'll catch you in the next video.