Strictly speaking, the logo bit wasn't about copyright, but trademark. Specifically there was certain territories that Japan had trademark treaties with, but no

Strictly speaking, the logo bit wasn't about copyright, but trademark. Specifically there was certain territories that Japan had trademark treaties with, but not copyright treaties. Taiwan if I remember correctly. So you could legally make unlicensed copies of Super Mario Bros but they couldn't be called Super Mario Bros. This is why a lot of old bootleg games change the titlescreen to say, say, "7 GRAND DAD[0]" instead of "Super Mario Bros". This behavior actually seems to persist to the present day despite these copyright loopholes having long since been fixed. Of course there were companies that got around the logo check with custom hardware[1]. And Nintendo themselves got lazy and didn't check the whole logo on the Color. So it's possible to change the boot logo on basically every Game Boy. The court case you're thinking of has to do with SEGA's Trademark Security System (TMSS) for the Genesis. Sega v. Accolade to be specific. The broad strokes are similar, though - small bits of copying to sell an original unlicensed work are acceptable because console hardware is not copyrightable just because you worked on it real hard. [0] Fleenstones? Aaaaugh... [1] The Game Boy BIOS has a TOCTOU bug. AFAIK this is also how Argonaut Software managed to get an in with Nintendo to publish X in Japan.