Nintendo Wins $4.5 Million Default Judgment Against Reddit Moderator “Archbox” in Switch Piracy Case
The U.S. District Court for the Western District of Washington entered a $4.5 million default judgment against James C. Williams on September 25, closing out a Nintendo copyright lawsuit that named him as the operator behind several Nintendo Switch piracy shops and a leading moderator of the r/SwitchPirates subreddit. Judge Lauren King’s ruling comes more than two years after Nintendo filed the case, and Williams, who went by the alias “Archbox,” never filed a formal answer to the complaint.
Who Is Archbox, and What Was He Selling
Nintendo’s complaint, filed in June 2024, accused Williams, an Arizona resident, of operating multiple online storefronts, including shops named Jack-in-the-Shop, Turtle in the Shop, NekoDrive, and LiberaShop, that sold access to unauthorized libraries of Nintendo Switch games. According to the filing, Williams solicited donated Nintendo eShop gift cards from customers, which he used to purchase games before decrypting and redistributing them. Nintendo also identified Williams as a leading moderator of r/SwitchPirates, a subreddit the company says had grown to more than 190,000 members, where he allegedly promoted his shops and offered technical guidance on circumventing the console’s protections.
Nintendo’s lawsuit centered on games sold for modified Nintendo Switch consoles rather than the hardware itself.
How Nintendo Arrived at $4.5 Million
Rather than pursue actual damages, which are difficult to prove for undocumented piracy sales, Nintendo requested statutory damages of $150,000, the maximum allowed for willful copyright infringement, for each of 30 Nintendo Switch games named in its filing, including The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom. That math produced the $4.5 million total the court ultimately awarded. Nintendo didn’t seek additional damages under the DMCA’s anti-circumvention provisions or attorney’s fees. In her order, Judge King pointed to well-documented evidence that Williams knew the games were copyrighted and infringed anyway, concluding that “Williams’ egregious infringement activities merit substantial punishment here.”
Mario Kart 8 Deluxe was among the roughly 30 Nintendo Switch titles Nintendo cited in its complaint against Williams.
What the Injunction Requires
Alongside the monetary judgment, the court issued a permanent injunction ordering Williams to stop distributing pirated Nintendo games or circumvention tools and to disable every online shop and the Reddit, Instagram, X, TikTok, Discord, and Telegram accounts he used to advertise them. Nintendo filed a companion case the same week in 2024 against Ryan Daly, who sold MIG Switch cartridges and modded consoles under the name Modded Hardware, but that suit played out differently after Daly contested it, ending in a separate settlement rather than a default judgment. Williams, by contrast, is now on the hook for the full $4.5 million awarded by default, though actually collecting on it is likely to be another matter entirely.
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Picture Source: Nintendo
