Saturday, September 26th 2026
Court Orders Reddit Moderator to Pay Nintendo $4.5 Million Over Switch Piracy
A federal court in Washington has ordered Reddit moderator James "Archbox" Williams to pay Nintendo $4.5 million in damages over alleged Nintendo Switch piracy. US District Judge Lauren King granted Nintendo's motion for default judgment in full on September 23, along with a permanent injunction barring Williams from distributing pirated games or circumvention tools. Nintendo filed the lawsuit in June 2024, accusing Williams of running a network of so-called "Pirate Shops" offering libraries of pirated Switch games to the public.
According to the complaint, Williams promoted these shops through the r/SwitchPirates subreddit, where he served as lead moderator, and allegedly solicited eShop gift card donations to fund additional pirated titles. Williams never responded to the lawsuit. The court noted he had hired an attorney at one point to contest a Google subpoena, but he did not answer Nintendo's claims. Since he failed to respond, the court treated the complaint's allegations as true, which is standard for default judgments rather than a ruling on contested evidence.
The $4.5 million figure reflects the statutory maximum of $150,000 per title across 30 Switch games named in the suit, including The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom and Mario Kart 8 Deluxe. This is not new territory for Nintendo either. Nintendo previously sued the Yuzu Emulator team for circumventing its software encryption and facilitating piracy. The order in this new judgment also requires Williams to shut down any remaining pirate shops and disable accounts tied to the case, including on Reddit, Discord, and Telegram, many of which already appear inactive.
Sources:
Judgment, TorrentFreak
According to the complaint, Williams promoted these shops through the r/SwitchPirates subreddit, where he served as lead moderator, and allegedly solicited eShop gift card donations to fund additional pirated titles. Williams never responded to the lawsuit. The court noted he had hired an attorney at one point to contest a Google subpoena, but he did not answer Nintendo's claims. Since he failed to respond, the court treated the complaint's allegations as true, which is standard for default judgments rather than a ruling on contested evidence.
81 Comments on Court Orders Reddit Moderator to Pay Nintendo $4.5 Million Over Switch Piracy
See Titel 3. Versäumnisurteil;
(Translate if necessary!)Civilprozeßordnung vom 30. Januar 1877
Regards,
Fred.
heck, I bet it's also possible that they are using a stolen identity, so they didn't care to respond to the court
Not attacking just you lex, its just that you are like the umpteenth person to jump on that bandwagon...
Me personally, I'm probably the worst of all. I absolutely recognize it as theft, offer no excuses or justifications, yet I do it anyway with older movies and music for example.
I do also understand some of it - although usually only a tiny TINY percentage - is weights and measures in balancing the wellbeing of the individual with the letter of the law. ← probably the strongest argument/excuse pirates have come up with even though it only really applies in a tiny minority of edge cases. And, most of those edge cases are covered under "fair use" anyway!
When someone rejects any shared or objective moral guiding ideal whether grounded in reason, human nature, tradition, religion, or universal principles they remove a common standard for distinguishing better from worse, right from wrong. And without that anchor: individual choice and desire tend to become the only remaining measure. Preferences, power, or momentary feeling fill the vacuum. Social coordination becomes harder. Shared expectations about honesty, fairness, non-aggression, or mutual respect lose their force once they are treated as optional or purely personal. The result can correctly be described as moral nihilism (nothing is truly obligatory or forbidden) or strong relativism (right and wrong are only local or subjective). Historically and philosophically this has been linked to an increased vulnerability to manipulation by the strongest, to cycles of retribution, or to the replacement of persuasion by force.
This is a long-standing observation across traditions: if no ideal stands outside pure will or appetite, then “might makes right” or pure preference easily becomes the practical rule. It does not mean every person who questions a particular moral code immediately becomes destructive; it means that systematically denying any guiding ideal removes the conceptual tools that restrain both personal rationalization and collective drift. Societies that retain some workable, revisable moral framework tend to fare much MUCH better at sustaining cooperation and limiting predation than those that treat all such frameworks as illusory - which very often begins with ideas and claims like "what is "wrong" isn't exact, or simple".
The persistent gap between any stated moral ideal and actual human behavior is real, nearly universal, and does not by itself invalidate the ideal.