Ah, looked more into it and yes, it appears I was mistaken. What got Bowser though is that it appears that they also set up access to roms though I don’t know if this was included in the purchase of the device.

This was from one of his e-mails:

“I [am] going to be busy setting up the ‘underground’ stuff (rompacks, coverarts, emulators) on maxconsole forums, that will also help on ‘grey side’ of the device for those wishing to play more than original snes cartridges,” Bowser wrote in an email quoted in the indictment against him.

“We have a plan in the works to have secure links to these retro rompacks on a protected server, so it will not be a problem,” Bowser said in another quoted email.

Here’s an article that has more details on what happened.

Didn’t they monetize the website through subscriptions?