Not sure about copyright laws. But for pokemmo, the devs say that the assets (roms) must be legal, meaning they should be bought and extracted from the cartridge you bought. Just like if you bought music and its ok to use it as your ringtone. There is arguments regarding monetary gains, I’m not sure how they got around it since they charge you for booster packs. Maybe they charge for the service of pokemmo client instead of the rom? So if you are using illegal roms from the internet, you are the one in trouble not the devs. The games itself is quite outdated so Nintendo won’t look into it much.
Nothing that they distribute is copyrighted. All they distribute is files that modify roms, but you provide the roms that get modified, not Pokemmo. As well, the items they monetize are their own assets, not anything copyrighted by Pokemon.
- @ OTHER PEOPLE ON REDDIT REFERENCE... = BS.