Nintendo secures $4.5m default judgment and injunction against Switch piracy figure
Nintendo has won a $4.5 million default judgment against James Williams, an individual who operated online under the handle Archbox, after he failed to respond to a copyright lawsuit the company filed in 2024. US District Judge Lauren King granted Nintendo’s motion for default judgment in full and issued a permanent injunction preventing Williams from engaging in further piracy-related activity.
According to Nintendo’s lawsuit, Williams ran, managed or promoted a network of online “Pirate Shops” that distributed extensive libraries of pirated Nintendo Switch games. The company also alleged he was a leading moderator of the SwitchPirates Reddit community, a group that grew to roughly 190,000 members before the case was filed.
Nintendo cited 30 of its first-party titles in the complaint and sought the statutory maximum of $150,000 per game, arriving at the total of $4.5 million awarded by the court. Judge King ruled that this figure was not an unreasonable estimate given the potential lost sales involved.
The judge also rejected any suggestion that Williams could claim to be unaware of the lawsuit, noting he had previously hired a lawyer to challenge a Google subpoena connected to the litigation. That detail undercut any argument that he had simply missed the proceedings against him.
The ruling, first reported by TorrentFreak, is based on the allegations set out in Nintendo’s complaint rather than facts established at trial, since Williams never filed a response to the lawsuit. As a default judgment, the claims were treated as unopposed rather than tested through cross-examination or evidence presented by the defence.
Alongside the financial award, the permanent injunction bars Williams from distributing pirated Nintendo games or software designed to circumvent the console’s protections, and from encouraging others to download such material. The order represents a sweeping legal response to one of the more visible hubs of Switch piracy activity, and arrives amid continuing industry-wide tension over DRM enforcement and the distribution of cracked games.