A federal judge in Seattle has ordered the man Nintendo says was a leading moderator of Reddit’s SwitchPirates community to pay Nintendo $4.5 million, and has permanently barred him from pirating, or helping anyone else pirate, any Nintendo game.
U.S. District Judge Lauren King granted Nintendo of America’s motion for default judgment and a permanent injunction against James C. Williams, known online as “archbox,” in an order filed September 23 in the Western District of Washington. Williams never answered the lawsuit. That matters: in a default judgment, the court accepts the well-pleaded allegations as true instead of testing them at trial.
What Nintendo alleged
According to the order, Williams, an Arizona resident, spent years obtaining thousands of Nintendo game files, used circumvention software to get around Nintendo’s protections, and ran online pirate “shops” where the games were made available. Nintendo says he was a leading moderator of the SwitchPirates subreddit, helped grow it to nearly 190,000 members, posted thousands of messages steering people to those shops, and solicited “donations” of Nintendo eShop gift cards to buy games that would then be decrypted and shared.
The order also cites an online post in which Williams described himself as a “pirate” who “[is]n’t going to give Nintendo $50 for a game.”
How the court got to $4.5 million
Nintendo sued over 30 representative games and asked for the statutory maximum for willful copyright infringement: $150,000 per game. King gave it all of that, for a total of $4.5 million. The list includes The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom and Breath of the Wild, Mario Kart 8 Deluxe, Super Smash Bros. Ultimate, Animal Crossing: New Horizons, Metroid Dread, Pikmin 4 and Super Mario Bros. Wonder.
King reasoned that at roughly $50 a game, Nintendo’s lost profits “could easily reach the hundreds of thousands of dollars,” making the maximum “not an unrealistic estimate” of its actual damages. She also noted that statutory damages are meant to punish as well as compensate, writing that “Williams’ egregious infringement activities merit substantial punishment here.”
Nintendo pointed out that it wasn’t asking for everything it could. It limited its damages request to those 30 games, skipped statutory damages under the DMCA and didn’t pursue attorney’s fees, which it called a “gesture of reasonableness.”
What the injunction does
The money is only half of it. The permanent injunction bars Williams from running pirate shops, distributing circumvention software, distributing unauthorized copies of any Nintendo game (not just the 30 in the damages claim) and encouraging others to pirate. He also has to disable the shops and the accounts tied to the operation, a list that covers Instagram, X, Reddit, TikTok, Discord servers, Telegram accounts and e-commerce sites.
How it got here
Nintendo sent Williams a cease-and-desist letter in March 2024 and filed suit that June. He never answered the complaint, though he did hire an attorney for the limited purpose of responding to a subpoena Nintendo served on Google. After the court entered default, Nintendo moved for a default judgment, which King has now granted.
Whether Nintendo sees much of that $4.5 million is another question. TorrentFreak, which published the order, reports that the archbox Reddit account had already been deleted and that most of the shops shut down after the 2024 cease-and-desist letter, and it expects collecting the full amount to be difficult. It also notes that a parallel Nintendo lawsuit against Modded Hardware, filed the same day, ended last year with a $2 million settlement judgment.
For anyone keeping score on Nintendo’s anti-piracy push, the message of this one is less about the dollar figure than the injunction: it covers every Nintendo game, not just the ones named in court.
