Back in January 2018, a hacking group known as Team-Xecuter announced Nintendo Switch hack that would allow people to play pirated games. It didn’t take long for Nintendo to catch wind of this, so in December 2018 they filed a lawsuit against a California man and other unnamed defendants. Nintendo alleged they had sold Nintendo Switch mod devices made by Team-Xecuter, as well as memory cards with pirated Nintendo games and a modified NES Classic with 800 pirated games on it. The California man was eventually revealed to be Sergio Mojarro Moreno.
On December 30, 2019 all parties involved in the case agreed to settle, and a California court handed down a permanent injunction, which restrains Moreno from dodging Nintendo’s technical protection measures or offering any kind of service or device that helps others dodge them. Additionally, Moreno is restrained from “selling, renting, offering, or distributing unauthorized copies of Nintendo’s copyrighted works, infringing its trademarks, or using the Internet ‘or any digital network’” to help promote copyright infringement of Nintendo’s works, according to TorrentFreak and the court documents.
Moreno is also required to provide written verification to Nintendo stating that no software or devices that could be used to circumvent their technical protection measures and/or illegal copies of games were in his possession on the date they settled the case. If there were any left, Moreno must verify he has destroyed them.
The court has ordered all involved parties to handle their own legal costs and attorneys’ fees. The other unnamed defendants were dismissed from the case.
This lawsuit comes after several others filed by major gaming companies in recent months, including Nintendo. Back in September, Nintendo filed lawsuit against RomUniverse for copyright infringement. Epic Games sued two Fortnite Chapter 2 testers for allegedly leaking information about the game before its release during the fall. Similarly, the Pokémon Company International sued four individuals for allegedly uploading leaked information from Sword and Shield to the internet before the game released.