How do these people get away with selling devices loaded with ROMS?

Hello duders,

I've been seeing a lot of products lately that claim to be loaded with all these old school ROMS. You know the ones I'm talking about. The Gameboy Advance/DS/Steam Deck clones that are all advertised with tons of ROMS.

Now, it's obvious that all these ROMS are illegally downloaded, so how are people getting around selling them and not getting in trouble?

I'm asking because I'm about to sell my DS Lite that has a flashcard with it, with all my obviously pirated ROMS from like 09. I'm probably going to sell it without the SD card because it'd be selling someone elses IP, which isn't cool

So how are these companies getting away with it?

I think it's because the scale of the market is so huge (Chinese industry) that the companies affected don't have the resources to take them all out. It's a hydra; take out one, five more appear on the market next week. All those companies would have to open new law departments dedicated solely to taking them out, and that's very expensive.

Same argument why they don't frequently go after lone sellers selling handmade crafts based on their works - it's too much to go after one person, because then you have to devote a massive chunk of resources to going after all those crafters.

When I bought my first Kindle second-hand off eBay, the seller sent me two home-burned discs FULL of illegal e-books. This wasn't on the original listing iirc. Some of them were legal though, public domain stuff. I don't think whoever buys your DS would mind if they got a flash cart full of roms, saves them the trouble of doing the exact same thing themselves.

... I'm fully prepared for this post to get moderated under the community guidelines, but we'll see. Worth noting a lot of the affected companies make little to no effort to preserve much of their catalogues.

Like all crime, it's only illegal if you get caught.

You'd be assuming all crime gets punished as someone who spent a get deal of time in retail this is absolutely not the case.

Not all crime is worth pursuing, too. If these devices started hurting bottom lines, sure. Say for example a fake Switch turns up that comes packaged with Switch roms. Even then, it would need to sell and be promoted to a degree Nintendo would sound the alarm over it.

China Don't Care...

Really it just comes down to that. Nintendo can sue the big operations because the Chinese judicial system could not keep up with every were electronics manufacture hidden down alleyways - nor do they give a crap what Japan thinks. Amazon, Aliexpress, and other shippers can just say, "Hey, WE don't sell them it is the 'drop shippers' from China.

It's no like Nintendo does nothing, but what they can do it target the big fish operating out of the US, Canada, Europe and Australia, but everything else is like punch at ocean waves...