As far as shutting down ROM sites like in this case, I accept that this is Nintendo's right, although I think how they are handling it is antiquated and it makes them even more out of touch with their fanbase and makes them look like a greedy, authoritarian corporate entity crushing a little guy instead of a fun family company that everybody has fond memories of. I rarely see Sony or Sega running these kinds of lawsuits and I am sure that there are way better ways to handle this in the 21st century then what Nintendo does. Most of Nintendo's fanbase (including myself) don't see downloading ROMs for 20-30 year old consoles as being worse than jay-walking on a secondary road at 2:00 AM in the morning and Nintendo should tread carefully with these kinds of suites as the message of fear that they are trying to spread can really blow back on them nowadays. If I were Nintendo, I probably wouldn't touch these sites unless they were pirating games for active consoles and if I did so, I would handle it as quietly as possible and settle outside of court while showing maximum leniency to the perpretator (and certainly not levy 2 million dollars in damages against some average Joe who won't see that kind of money if they worked for a 100 years).
That said, what I have much greater issue with is Nintendo's position that you cannot even make backups of games that you own. Nintendo and other corporations are part of the reason why the legitimacy of making personal backups for archival/format shifting has been basically nullified with new rules prohibiting bypassing DRM. Stupid courts in US and Canada (thanks in large parts to suites that were launched by Nintendo) have even held that the physical shape of a Nintendo cartridge constitutes DRM and you cannot extract the ROM even if there is no digital encryption of the content, whatsoever. Honestly, this is corporate fascism and is a violation of a person's basic right to private property. In other words, retro gamers have to become criminals to be able to play any game they own from gen 5 and earlier since these carts are all 20+ years old and just playing the carts can ruin them. Case in point, I had a Star Wars Shadows of the Empire cart and a Dragon Warrior cart both fail on me this year just by powering up the ROM chip. Apart from downloading the ROM, backing up a carts is the only way that a person can safely play these titles especially since a lot of these games have not been released on eShops. Thanks to Nintendo, both downloading and backing up ROMs are both viewed the same which only makes me feel even more accepting of those who download ROMs.
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