In June, Nintendo won a massive court case against the video game ROM-hosting website RomUniverse. The scale of the lawsuit was unprecedented, with Nintendo's team of powerful lawyers overwhelming RomUniverse's owner, Matthew Storman, who defended himself in court. The court ultimately awarded Nintendo $2.1 million in damages due to RomUniverse's copyright and trademark infringement. However, Nintendo didn't stop there. It's since successfully pursued an injunction against RomUniverse that could prevent the website from ever going online again.
As part of Nintendo's initial court case against RomUniverse, it argued for a permanent injunction to keep the ROM website from distributing Nintendo games again. The court disagreed, saying that Nintendo had failed to prove it was suffering irreparable harm. Nintendo didn't settle for that, however, legally pursuing an effort to have the court reconsider. That push has proven fruitful, with the court reevaluating the situation and siding with Nintendo -- in part due to RomUniverse's owner's own words on the matter.
RomUniverse was taken offline during the initial court case, but Storman later admitted that they could bring the website back online. This statement directly led to the court's grant of a permanent injunction, with the judge saying that RomUniverse demonstrated a "threat of continued infringement" by acknowledging he may relaunch his website. The court says that if the website relaunched, there's a realistic chance of Nintendo suffering irreparable harm.
Oddly enough, the permanent injunction doesn't actually state RomUniverse can't be brought back online. However, Storman will have to effectively remove all traces of illegal copyrighted work from RomUniverse -- and from his life. The court ordered Storman to permanently stop copying, distributing, selling, performing, displaying, or playing any "unauthorized" Nintendo work in their position. That includes even haphazardly doing such actions through RomUniverse, or any other means even tacitly connected to Storman.
As part of the permanent injunction, Storman has been ordered to destroy all unauthorized Nintendo games or other Nintendo intellectual property that they may have in their possession. That includes not just Nintendo game ROMs, but any Nintendo movies, books, or music that they may also have. They also only gave Storman 12 days to do it, ending August 17, which could mean Storman would be forced to wipe RomUniverse's servers, since scouring it for individual Nintendo games would be incredibly time-consuming.
It should be noted that the permanent injunction against Storman is actually very limited in nature. It's specifically about "unauthorized" Nintendo intellectual property. In other words, RomUniverse could be brought back online so long as it didn't have any Nintendo material. And Storman himself is still able to play Nintendo games, so long as he buys them legally. The injunction simply ensures Storman doesn't distribute Nintendo's ROMs specifically ever again, something Storman was unlikely to do anyway given his $2.1 million bill to Nintendo.
Source: US Courts