Nintendo in the fight against piracy, and Google reaching a new agreement in favour of Italian press publishers

Good morning everyone. Hope you all had a good weekend and a good start to the week. For this week’s IP news:

Nintendo requests the removal of infringing AliExpress links

Nintendo has for many years been one of the most active game manufacturers in fighting piracy. With a strong in-house anti-piracy team, this has resulted in lawsuits against ROM sites (where games once in a cartridge and protected by technological measures are hacked and uploaded online) and stores offering Switch hacks and chips.

A while back, we reported that Nintendo was after Team-Xecuter, a team producing a device called RCM Loader containing a software allowing to circumvent the Nintendo Switch protection measures. Nintendo is going after all resellers of the RCM and has now asked Google to remove any link offering this device or anything similar. Recently, Nintendo has identified several links for the online stores Carousell and AliExpress that were leading to RCM loaders. According to Nintendo, all these links lead, directly or indirectly, to software and devices designed to bypass technological protection measures in Nintendo Switch video game systems, and allow users to play unauthorised copies of games that are offered illegally on the internet.

Google advances in its negotiation with press publishers: after France, Italy

Google announced last week that they have signed licensing deals with numerous Italian media publishers to pay for news content. This agreement will give the Italian publishers access to the Google News Showcase programme, which pays outlets for a selection of enriched content.

This follows an agreement struck with some French publishers earlier in the year over "neighbouring rights", which were introduced by the new EU directive and call for payment for showing snippets of news content as part of internet searches (press publishers' right).

If you are interested (and speak Italian) you can read the full statement here.

And this is all for this week. We will see you next week.