Nintendo Is Dropping the Legal Hammer On Switch Hackers
Nintendo files a pair of lawsuits aimed at Switch hackers on Friday, hoping to put a stop to illegal software breaches that allow piracy.
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Nintendo is cracking down on Switch hackers with two new lawsuits that were filed on Friday. The long-running console manufacturer has gone after these types of criminals in the past, who use special tools to bypass Nintendo’s protection measures in order to copy Switch software and sell it on unauthorized websites, which in turn allows people to play pirated games on the system.
This isn’t the first time Nintendo has found its most recent console compromised by malevolent codebreakers this year, as up to 160,000 Nintendo Switch accounts were broken into last month after hackers exploited an unfixable flaw in the console’s Nvidia Tegra X1 processor. Over in China, players are choosing to buy black-market versions of the Switch, although this is partially due to Nintendo’s official version being in such low quantity to begin with. The recent cases of hackers pirating Switch software, on the other hand, are through no fault of Nintendo, and they are now seeking legal action against the ones behind them.
As reported by Polygon, Nintendo is filing a pair of lawsuits against the groups committing these illegal Switch hackings last Friday. The first one is against Ohio resident Tom Dilts Jr, who supposedly operates a piracy website called UberChips – which, incidentally, seems to currently be offline due to “scheduled maintenance.” The second is against a number of websites which are reportedly selling kits to hack Nintendo Switches from an anonymous group called “Team Xecuter.” Nintendo is currently seeking up to $2,500 per trafficking violation in all of these cases, as well as the complete shutdown of these websites via a legal injunction.
Nintendo has dealt with this sort of legal situation before, having successfully challenged the owners of a pair of Nintendo ROM emulator sites back in 2018. Likewise, the company won a case against a California resident named Sergio Mojarro Moreno last December, after he had been selling pirated Switch games and modded NES Classic Edition consoles alongside mod devices made by the aforementioned Team Xecuter.
It’s only natural for Nintendo to want to protect its software and network security, especially with the Switch suffering from shortages and reduced sales in the wake of the still-ongoing coronavirus pandemic and a number of underground resellers. After all, any system or game that is pirated is money out of the protects of not only Nintendo but the countless highly talented workers tasked with developing them. There is still no word yet on whether any of the defendants in the two Nintendo lawsuits are planning to settle, but given the company’s past successes in this sort of legal endeavor, it seems like the most likely outcome.
Link Source : https://screenrant.com/nintendo-lawsuit-switch-hackers-software-piracy/