Crossed perspectives12 Oct 2026
Case law › European Union
Nintendo v. PC Box
CJEU, 23 January 2014, case C-355/12
A video game is “complex matter” protected by copyright, and console protections may be defended, to a proportionate extent.
- Court
- CJEU
- Date
- 23 January 2014
- Reference
- case C-355/12
- Parties
- Nintendo Co. Ltd et autres v. PC Box Srl et 9Net Srl
Key takeaways
An Italian company sold chips that made it possible to run unofficial programs on the Wii and DS. Nintendo saw this as a circumvention of its protections. The Court of Justice partly agreed.
It began with a now famous clarification: a video game is not just a program, it is “complex matter” whose graphic and sound elements have their own creative value. Console protections can therefore be defended in the name of copyright. But not at any price: the court must check that the protection remains proportionate, looking in particular at what the chips are actually used for, lawful uses or copying.
The question concerned Article 6 of Directive 2001/29, which protects “effective technological measures”. The Court accepted that this protection covers a system split between the game's medium and the console itself. It then set out what the national court must examine: the cost of the various possible measures, their technical aspects, their comparative effectiveness, and evidence of how buyers actually use the circumvention devices.
The ruling has another, more discreet consequence. By holding that the game, taken as a whole, falls under the general copyright directive and not the software directive alone, it paved the way for Tom Kabinet and Valve on the absence of resale of digital games.
