Nintendo Issues Potentially Massive Lawsuit To Streamer For Pirating Unreleased Games

Nintendo has recently sued gamer and streamer Jesse Keighin, or Every Game Guru, for continuously pirating and streaming Nintendo games before their release date.

The lawsuit has been filed in a Colorado court earlier this month by Nintendo as they accuse Keighin of pirating and streaming at least 10 Nintendo games prior to their release. This includes titles such as Super Mario Party Jamboree, Mario & Luigi: Brothership and The Legend of Zelda: Echos of Wisdom. In addition to streaming these games, Nintendo has also accused Keighin of telling his audience how to obtain the non-released games themselves.

Along with his streams, Keighin provided links to the emulators Yuzu and Ryujinx for his audience members. Since 2022, Keighin has pirated and streamed unreleased content from Nintendo at least 50 times, providing emulator links alongside each offense. Nintendo claims that these actions should be considered “trafficking” through illegal “circumvention devices.” 

The lawsuit describes Nintendo’s perspective on the matter as it reads:

“Streaming leaked games prior to their publication normalizes 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. Prerelease 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. In turn, prerelease piracy causes Nintendo tremendous harm, including millions of dollars of monetary harm from lost video game sales both of Nintendo’s and its licensees’ copyrighted games, and loss of goodwill.”

Before this course of action, Keighin had ignored several takedown notices from Nintendo regarding the pirated streams, and currently, his Twitch and YouTube channels are offline because of these repeated copyright strikes. The lawsuit specifies that Keighin had sent a letter to Nintendo about the matter in Oct. in which he boldly proclaimed that he had access to “a thousand burner channels” for his streams to continue and that he could “do this all day.”

Needless to say, all of this has put Keighin in massive trouble with the video game empire. Nintendo has not only demanded the seizure and destruction of all Keighin’s devices and emulators, but they are also asking for $150,000 for each instance of violation against Nintendo under the Copyright Act and an additional $2,500 for each violation that would appear under the violations of the anti-circumvention and anti-trafficking provisions within the Copyright Act. 

All of this legal jargon means that Keighin’s accumulated violations may cost him about $7.5 million. Nintendo will also likely ask for “actual damages” which would be proven at trial.