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Nintendo has filed a lawsuit against an individual it says is a moderator on Reddit, accusing him of piracy and facilitating a network of websites that offered pirated Nintendo Switch games. The video game publisher is seeking $4.5 million in damages from James C. Williams, who went by the username “Archbox” on the social media site. (That account has since been suspended.) “Williams not only copied and distributed Nintendo game files without authorization; he actively promoted their distribution and copying to thousands of others across a variety of websites and online ‘communities,’ and knowingly trafficked in unlawful software products aimed at circumventing Nintendos technological measures protecting against unauthorized access,” Nintendo alleges in the lawsuit. The filing claims Williams used Reddit to send thousands of messages, steering people to piracy websites and to help people modify their Switch consoles. In exchange for his services, he asked for “donations” of Nintendo eShop gift cards, the company alleges. Nintendo says it initially sent a cease-and-desist order to Williams in March of 2024, telling him to “shut down his pirate shops.” But Williams ultimately denied involvement with the sites and became “combative,” eventually deleting his posts, many of which were on the subreddit “SwitchPirates,” where Williams was cited as a moderator, the suit alleges. Williams is alleged to have made “hundreds or thousands of copyrighted Nintendo Switch Games” available for download. In its filing, Nintendo lists 30 specific titles that were pirated. While $4.5 million is a significant sum, Nintendo says in the filing that it could easily have demanded more. It based the amount it is seeking on other piracy cases, including one in which Bungie Software, creators of the Halo franchise, were awarded millions in damages for piracy sales. “Here, the amount of money sufficient to remedy NOAs injury would be extremely difficult to quantify; but it is indisputable that such an amount would be large,” the filing reads. Nintendo is serious about piracy Nintendo has taken an aggressive stance against piracy for years. Dolphin, an open-sourced emulator for the Nintendo Wii and GameCube, was a target of the gaming giant in 2023 when its developers announced plans to put its emulator on the Steam game distribution platform. Nintendo sent a cease-and-desist order to Valve, which pulled the listing. Days later, Dolphins developers announced, with much disappointment, that it had postponed the Dolphin release indefinitely. Nintendo is committed to protecting the hard work and creativity of video game engineers and developers, a spokesperson for Nintendo told the gaming news website Kotaku in May of 2023. Last year, Nintendo successfully shut down the Yuzu emulator, saying the team behind it had “facilitate[d] piracy at a colossal scale. The Yuzu team agreed to pay $2.4 million and ended all operations. Earlier this year, Nintendo updated its user agreement, informing Switch owners that if that console is found to contain pirated games or modifications, Nintendo has the right to remotely render the system useless. Should users “bypass, modify, decrypt, defeat, tamper with, or otherwise circumvent any of the functions or protections of the Nintendo Account Services,” the update read, Nintendo might make that “applicable Nintendo device permanently unusable in whole or in part.”
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First came the burning of the Library of Alexandria. Then came the news Snapchat is constructing a paywall around Memories. The company announced last week that its capping users free Memories storage at 5GB. Those who have spent the better part of a decade cultivating massive personal archives on the app will now be forced to either export those Memories or sign up for one of Snapchats new Memories Storage plans in order to preserve them. The promise of free unlimited storage has been a big part of Snapchat’s identity. For many, it has long served as something of a time capsule, where users could store and revisit old Snaps long after they expired from the apps ephemeral main feed. In the US, storage plan costs will be $1.99 a month for 100GB of storage, 250GB with a Snapchat+ subscription, or 5TB with Snapchat Platinum. If users exceed the limit but choose not to sign up for a plan, their oldest Snaps will be saved. The most recent ones, however, will be deleted to stay within the storage limit. The news that users will soon have to pay for what they had long enjoyed for free was met with backlash online. The only reason I have snapchat in my phone is bcs it stores all the memories, i had no idea snapchat would betray us like that, one X user wrote. Just ordered a usb stick so i can transfer 10 years worth of snapchat memories onto it, another added. An online petition with almost 9,000 signatures at the time of writing dubbed the charge a “memory tax”, pointing to the declining availability and affordability of physical media in an increasingly digitized world. For the buy everything, own nothing generation, an ever-mounting number of subscription fees are increasingly required to access everything from their own data and memories, to music and movies. Funny how i had to explain to my mom, 2 days ago, that you cant buy music anymore because theyve [put] subscriptions in place for us to pay for the rest of our life, until we die, one TikTok user wrote. And now I hve to transfer all my Snapchat memories from my teenage years on a hard drive. While most social media platforms dont charge for data storage (yet), Snapchat Memories can be positioned more like a personal photo album than a public profile. Companies like Apple and Google, which are also commonly used for photo storage, all currently charge for cloud storage once a user reaches a limit. High stakes for Snapchat For many loyal Snapchat users, the stakes are high. Users have saved more than 1 trillion “Memories” since the feature was launched in 2016, according to Team Snapchat. “Its never easy to transition from receiving a service for free to paying for it, but we hope the value we provide with Memories is worth the cost, the company said in a news release last week. Thank you for trusting us with some of your most precious moments. These changes will allow us to continue to invest in making Memories better for our entire community.” For those unwilling to pay, they are left with two options to rescue their Memories from deletion. First is to manually download Snapchat Memories to the camera roll. This is limited to batches of 100 at a time, which can be a gargantuan taks if users have years worth of saved Snaps. Another option is to use Snapchats Download My Data tool to save the Memories archive and have it emailed over in a .zip file. Either way, the company has given users with more than 5 GB of Memories one year to upgrade before the storage limits come into effect.
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E-Commerce
Dell on Tuesday nearly doubled its annual profit growth target for the next four years, betting on robust demand for its servers that power artificial intelligence workloads. The company, whose customers include Elon Musk’s AI startup xAI and CoreWeave, lifted its expectations for annual growth in adjusted earnings per share to at least 15% from around 8%. Dell also said it expects compounded annual revenue growth between 7% and 9% for the next four years, up from its prior view of 3% to 4%. Insatiable demand for servers that provide the computing power needed to run services such as ChatGPT has turned Dell into one of the biggest winners of the generative AI boom. Its strong profit growth expectation may also ease investor concerns about the margin hit from competition in AI servers and the high costs of building the products. “Dell has a volume advantage due to its scale, established supply chain, and relationships with major buyers, compared to rivals like Super Micro,” Emarketer analyst Jacob Bourne said. Dell also reiterated its third-quarter and annual forecasts. It had raised its expectation for AI server shipments in August to $20 billion for fiscal 2026. “Customers are hungry for AI and the compute, storage and networking we provide to deploy intelligence at scale,” CEO Michael Dell said, adding that the company was in the early stages of AI adoption despite two years of progress. Dell expects long-term compounded annual revenue growth of 11% to 14% for the infrastructure solutions group – home to its storage, software and server offerings. That compares with its earlier expectations of 6% to 8%. The company continues to expect revenue growth of 2% to 3% for its client solutions group, which includes personal computers. Strong competition in the consumer market has hit the business in recent years, even as Dell keeps a strong position among enterprise clients. Jaspreet Singh, Reuters
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E-Commerce
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