Microsoft is promoting stolen game ROMs on the Edge Store
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We posted yesterday on a collection of vintage games which included Pac-Man, Tetris and Mario Cart available to download from the Edge Extension Store. This was in response to a now-deleted tweet by the Edge Dev team, which can be seen below.
An investigation by The Verge has discovered that these games, which appears to be the original vintage ROMs, have been uploaded to the Edge Extension Store without permission from Nintendo or the other copyright holders.
One of the uploaders even acknowledges this, saying:
IMPORTANT: This emulator is not affiliated with nor endorsed by Nintendo. All graphics, games, and other multimedia are copyrighted to their respective owners and authors. This game is for ALL Mario fans!
In response, Microsoft, who it appears created the collection titled 90s_Games, removed most of the original games, but The Verge reports that many others can still be found if you search the store.
The news is a massive failure of curation of the store, and we obviously suggest that readers who downloaded any extensions remove them immediately, not simply because they are illegal, but that they may contain malware. It is notable that these games do not appear to be present in the Chrome extension store, suggesting the larger store may be a safer place to get extensions.
