Since November 2024, streamer Jesse Keighin, known online as EveryGameGuru, has been in a legal battle with Nintendo for streaming pirated material. Keighin, who repeatedly taunted the company throughout the lawsuit, once stated he could “do this all day.” However, a final judgment reported by TorrentFreak has proven that he could not, in fact, do so — a Colorado federal judge has ordered Keighin to pay Nintendo $17,500 in damages.
This lawsuit is by no means surprising, as Nintendo has never been shy about suing when it comes to copyright infringement. From their lawsuit against Palworld for infringing on the Pokémon franchise to the takedown of the Yuzu emulator, the company’s stance has always been very clear. According to the initial judge’s recommendation, “On at least fifty occasions, [Keighin] has live streamed gameplay footage of at least ten different games without authorization and before the games were released to the public.”
The recommendation names games like Mario & Luigi: Brothership, Pikmin 4, and many more titles that were pirated and streamed early. When served with takedown notices from Nintendo, he didn’t back down, instead telling his viewers to continue supporting him on loco.gg if his other accounts were banned. Whenever Keighin was removed by a platform for his content, he’d simply make a new account, at one point emailing Nintendo stating, “I have a thousand burner channels.”
The lawsuit wasn’t only concerned with the streaming itself, but Keighin’s open promotion of emulators and pirated game keys. During the entire debacle, it seems as though the streamer came to view himself as a sort of Robin Hood-esque figure taking on a big corporation on behalf of the little guy. In a social media post mentioned in the recommendation, Keighin said that he “can’t wait for more new games to stream and give away for free.”
Keighin ignored the many attempts made to serve him with the lawsuit, and eventually the case proceeded without him via a default judgment — the legal action taken when a defendant doesn’t engage with a case. Keighin was ordered to pay all damages, but the three-part injunction included in the suit was only partially affirmed. An injunction prohibiting him from infringing on Nintendo copyright was approved, but both an injunction against unnamed abetting “third parties” and an order to “destroy all circumvention devices” were denied.
As draconic as Nintendo comes off in this case, things honestly could’ve gone much worse for Keighin — this is the company currently embroiled in a 4.5 million dollar lawsuit with a Reddit mod. Considering the fairly low sum demanded by the video game company, this lawsuit was much more about sending a message of anti-piracy than it was about recouping profit losses. In one of Keghin’s social media posts shared by TorrentFreak, the streamer stated that “You might run a corporation. I run the streets,” but all that matters is who runs the courtroom — historically, Nintendo always wins.
