They issue a takedown for a 34 year old game, ported to a system that's 37 years old. That takes a while to digest. I have noticed that every now and then, youtubers complain about Nintendo being real dicks regarding let's plays or even just using trailer footage in videos, which I can't really understand since it's basically free publicity. But OK, at least those cases are probably related to recent games, so it might make someone at Nintendo think they will lose money because people will watch let's plays instead of buying the game.
But this one is just ridiculous. What are they trying to accomplish? Stop this one dude who's most recent video game system is a C64 from playing super Mario bros for free?
And why wouldn't those people use a nes emulator and the original ROM then, if they seriously wanted to play the game? Anyone loading this on an emulator just wants to check it out for being a port, not for experiencing the actual game.
Copyright enforcement "wisdom" is that if they don't stop this they lose some of their power at stopping the next copyright infringement.
It does circle back though that Copyright was (constitutionally, in the US) meant to only be a temporary reprieve from the public domain/public access with the express purpose to make it likelier to entre the public domain/public access afterwards, but at this point we've pushed "temporary" beyond the span of a human lifetime for the benefits of inhuman entities (corporations).
Why should 30+ year old things remain in copyright? Corporations collect nice rents on even 30 year old properties. I'm sure Nintendo appreciates how many people need to (re-)buy Super Mario Brothers every couple of years on a new console's "Virtual Console" store every few years to play it legally. Recent game Super Mario Maker even provides a legal way to remix Super Mario content in Nintendo-approved ways. But what is our culture missing out on that public domain won't see access to Super Mario until sometime nearing the end of this century (under current laws, who knows if someone might fight to expand them again), and subsequently outside the lifetimes of many of the folks that played Super Mario Brothers around its original release? Would people even remember Super Mario Brothers? Would what is left to turn back over to the public domain be archived well enough to even be useful to the public domain at that point?
And even then, that's more or less just so you can claim unused trademarks. Just because you decidede not to act on one such infringement doesn't immediately revoke your trademark, especially if there is no financial gain for the infringing party.
You are technically correct ("the best kind of correct").
The DMCA has noticeably muddied the waters. Copyright shouldn't legally work that way [in that selective enforcement weakens further enforcement], but among other parts of the DMCA over-reach, it's the increasing gray area confusion between trademark law and copyright law that the DMCA seems particularly to exacerbate. That's partly because providers (such as YouTube) often handle DMCA takedowns as all or nothing, and technically do not allow selective takedowns or make exceptions hard to handle.
That's also partly because the courts seem to have allowed corporations themselves to confuse and comingle copyright and trademark laws. Recent arguments that Disney has not bothered to extend the copyright term again because they think they've bulwarked Mickey Mouse trademarks enough at this point to continue to control the properties when they expire from copyright, and that idea seems to stem from this increasingly muddy water.
The laws seem clear that the water shouldn't be this muddy and trademark is not some magically stronger copyright (and copyright is not just some subtly weaker trademark) in an ouroboros of self-correlation fed by DMCA logic and corporate rent seeking. It may take some serious casework in the next few decades to fix such problems, however.
Just to play devils advocate: Hollywood and the games industry pump out a lot of shovelware. If there are millions or billions in profits available for making worthwhile IP of lasting value, they might fund riskier, more worthwhile 'art' projects (taking video games to be an art form in this context). It encourages thinking longer time horizons than 'opening weekend' or 'initial Xmas sales', even if just to have an opportunity to make a series of sequels.
That said, 100 years is a bit crazy. Nobody actually plans on that scale, and nobody's bonus depends on projected sales 87 years from today. I think 20-40 years would be equally effective in practice.
> If there are millions or billions in profits available for making worthwhile IP of lasting value
There aren't - not through increased copyright length, anyway. The value of proprietary IP decays very quickly over time, until the vast majority of works entirely falls hostage to transaction costs of all kinds (see the whole issue with "orphan works", which may or may not be copyrighted but no one knows for sure, and thus no one can effectively make use of them) and their value is entirely destroyed as long as copyright protection persists.
The Mario Bros game is actually a very rare exception, and even then its value is really only as a representation of Nintendo's best known franchise, i.e. nobody really cares about the game itself, and there are comparable-quality games that are totally free these days.
That is the point of copyright, yes, that a limited monopoly on an intellectual property provides benefits to the creator to tackle other risks.
It's definitely the question of how limited that monopoly is that is at hand. Scale is exactly the question. The current copyright terms are outside of human scale in that they extend past a human lifecycle (explicitly in the case of single, clear authored works as the current copyright is author life plus it's number of years). The original US copyright allowed for 7 years with one possible extension for an additional 7 (for a total of 14 years). That's relatively a lot more human of a scale. (That scale still covers the current 10 year scale of the Marvel Cinematic Universe to date, for example. That's 3 MCU planning "Phases" of 3-5 year planning horizons. Imagine if it were only roughly four more years before, say, Iron Man 1 might expire from copyright.)
It doesn't seem likely that we will see copyright terms reduced back down to human scale, but it's a shame.
You could. Maybe not by the commonly available ROM patching tools. But you could write a program that takes as input the NES ROM and outputs the C64 ROM, such that that program contains nothing copyrighted by Nintendo. It would convert the level layouts and tile/sprite artwork and sound effects and music and so on (maybe even the 6502 assembly routines for jumping and physics and such), from the NES ROM to whatever the C64 port will use natively.
Well, Nintendo just lost a customer. There's only a certain level of petty bigotry that I can handle, and they've gone way, wayyyy lower than that. It's like the cops arresting a ten year for operation a lemonade stand without a license FFS (and that actually happened in my home town!).
I mean, playing devil's advocate, you've got Nintendo protecting a product that they still sell and distribute (3DS Virtual Console, Wii U Virtual Console, Nintendo Switch Online NES, NES Mini, and various other ports) — and this port is literally just the exact same game: same graphics, music, levels, mechanics. Even if the makers of this clone aren't making a profit from it, the free distribution undermines Nintendo's continued ability to sell a game that people, evidently, still wish to purchase. It isn't as though the developers of the clone couldn't have changed the graphics, music, and level design to make a brand new game for the C64.
I mean, that's just devil's advocate.
To me, Nintendo still makes the most delightful, charming, and enduring games in the industry. Stopping being their customer over one business practice with which you mightn't agree seems like missing the forest for the trees.
I understand your advocacy, but their art loses it's charm when I think of the nastiness that their lawyers are wreaking. It's not like they are in a survival or scarcity environment. They are a large, multinational, multibillion dollar company. And they are loosing their million dollar lawyers on some guy for possibly damaging an incredibly small portion of their income. It's just so dirty; the more I think about it, the less happy I am playing their games. So I'd say the forest is already tarnished and dying in my eyes, unfortunately.
> on some guy for possibly damaging an incredibly small portion of their income
No, they're maintaining the precedent that piggy-backing off the fruits of their labour without consent is unacceptable. When they go easy on one thing, that gives carte blanche to the next.
It's not dirty, it's business.
> but their art loses it's charm when I think of the nastiness that their lawyers are wreaking
> the more I think about it, the less happy I am playing their games
The issue is with the copyright game, not the players who see no alternative but to play it. They have shareholders' investments to protect and must be seen to take action.
All I can say is that Nintendo's lawyers have been doing things like this since the NES, and if Nintendo's art wasn't tarnished in your eyes back then, then this really does sound like a knee-jerk reaction.
Piggybacking? I didn't realize he was selling anything. Profiting from their work is definitely not okay!
And I've only ever read about them attacking people who were actively profiting, which doesn't bother me at all. I don't follow game industry news often, so there's nothing knee jerk about this.
Why not embrace the idea and hire them as a one shot contract for a special port (with some tweaks from Nintendo designers ?). They used to be very collaborative in the NES/SNES days .. (based on SimCity port).
On the one hand, I do agree that this is absolutely insane and an indicator that DMCA needs serious reformation.
But at the risk of causing outrage, let me play devil's advocate. To me, this is like spending years building a small model version of a Saturn V rocket to painstaking detail and then not being able to distribute it publicly.
You just spent years on a hobby with little extrinsic value. What could you expect from spending so much time and energy on porting a video game created by a company that isn't owned by you onto a platform that isn't owned by you?
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 62.4 ms ] threadj/k Super Mario Bros shouldn't even be under copyright anymore. Our copyright laws are horrible and abusive.
But this one is just ridiculous. What are they trying to accomplish? Stop this one dude who's most recent video game system is a C64 from playing super Mario bros for free?
And they released that "new" NES just a few years ago.
In other words they want to keep exploiting this work of copyright, which they own.
They're arguing about if a) if it ought to be a breach of copyright, and b) if Nintendo ought to be taking this down.
It does circle back though that Copyright was (constitutionally, in the US) meant to only be a temporary reprieve from the public domain/public access with the express purpose to make it likelier to entre the public domain/public access afterwards, but at this point we've pushed "temporary" beyond the span of a human lifetime for the benefits of inhuman entities (corporations).
Why should 30+ year old things remain in copyright? Corporations collect nice rents on even 30 year old properties. I'm sure Nintendo appreciates how many people need to (re-)buy Super Mario Brothers every couple of years on a new console's "Virtual Console" store every few years to play it legally. Recent game Super Mario Maker even provides a legal way to remix Super Mario content in Nintendo-approved ways. But what is our culture missing out on that public domain won't see access to Super Mario until sometime nearing the end of this century (under current laws, who knows if someone might fight to expand them again), and subsequently outside the lifetimes of many of the folks that played Super Mario Brothers around its original release? Would people even remember Super Mario Brothers? Would what is left to turn back over to the public domain be archived well enough to even be useful to the public domain at that point?
The DMCA has noticeably muddied the waters. Copyright shouldn't legally work that way [in that selective enforcement weakens further enforcement], but among other parts of the DMCA over-reach, it's the increasing gray area confusion between trademark law and copyright law that the DMCA seems particularly to exacerbate. That's partly because providers (such as YouTube) often handle DMCA takedowns as all or nothing, and technically do not allow selective takedowns or make exceptions hard to handle.
That's also partly because the courts seem to have allowed corporations themselves to confuse and comingle copyright and trademark laws. Recent arguments that Disney has not bothered to extend the copyright term again because they think they've bulwarked Mickey Mouse trademarks enough at this point to continue to control the properties when they expire from copyright, and that idea seems to stem from this increasingly muddy water.
The laws seem clear that the water shouldn't be this muddy and trademark is not some magically stronger copyright (and copyright is not just some subtly weaker trademark) in an ouroboros of self-correlation fed by DMCA logic and corporate rent seeking. It may take some serious casework in the next few decades to fix such problems, however.
That said, 100 years is a bit crazy. Nobody actually plans on that scale, and nobody's bonus depends on projected sales 87 years from today. I think 20-40 years would be equally effective in practice.
There aren't - not through increased copyright length, anyway. The value of proprietary IP decays very quickly over time, until the vast majority of works entirely falls hostage to transaction costs of all kinds (see the whole issue with "orphan works", which may or may not be copyrighted but no one knows for sure, and thus no one can effectively make use of them) and their value is entirely destroyed as long as copyright protection persists.
The Mario Bros game is actually a very rare exception, and even then its value is really only as a representation of Nintendo's best known franchise, i.e. nobody really cares about the game itself, and there are comparable-quality games that are totally free these days.
It's definitely the question of how limited that monopoly is that is at hand. Scale is exactly the question. The current copyright terms are outside of human scale in that they extend past a human lifecycle (explicitly in the case of single, clear authored works as the current copyright is author life plus it's number of years). The original US copyright allowed for 7 years with one possible extension for an additional 7 (for a total of 14 years). That's relatively a lot more human of a scale. (That scale still covers the current 10 year scale of the Marvel Cinematic Universe to date, for example. That's 3 MCU planning "Phases" of 3-5 year planning horizons. Imagine if it were only roughly four more years before, say, Iron Man 1 might expire from copyright.)
It doesn't seem likely that we will see copyright terms reduced back down to human scale, but it's a shame.
I mean, that's just devil's advocate.
To me, Nintendo still makes the most delightful, charming, and enduring games in the industry. Stopping being their customer over one business practice with which you mightn't agree seems like missing the forest for the trees.
No, they're maintaining the precedent that piggy-backing off the fruits of their labour without consent is unacceptable. When they go easy on one thing, that gives carte blanche to the next.
It's not dirty, it's business.
> but their art loses it's charm when I think of the nastiness that their lawyers are wreaking
> the more I think about it, the less happy I am playing their games
The issue is with the copyright game, not the players who see no alternative but to play it. They have shareholders' investments to protect and must be seen to take action.
All I can say is that Nintendo's lawyers have been doing things like this since the NES, and if Nintendo's art wasn't tarnished in your eyes back then, then this really does sound like a knee-jerk reaction.
And I've only ever read about them attacking people who were actively profiting, which doesn't bother me at all. I don't follow game industry news often, so there's nothing knee jerk about this.
That's not how copyright works. They can let anything they want slide, and still sue the next one into nothingness.
You may be thinking of a trademark, which requires constant defense to maintain.
But at the risk of causing outrage, let me play devil's advocate. To me, this is like spending years building a small model version of a Saturn V rocket to painstaking detail and then not being able to distribute it publicly.
You just spent years on a hobby with little extrinsic value. What could you expect from spending so much time and energy on porting a video game created by a company that isn't owned by you onto a platform that isn't owned by you?