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This specifically happened because the guy put a financial bounty on a multiplayer mod for Breath of the Wild. Nintendo has always been fairly straightforward

This specifically happened because the guy put a financial bounty on a multiplayer mod for Breath of the Wild. Nintendo has always been fairly straightforward on this sorta thing if you look at their actions: 1. Don't make them care. Don't draw attention to yourself, just do what you want to do. Relatedly, don't talk to Vice, Polygon, Kotaku or any other authoritative source because then you'll be competing with Nintendo in the press for relevance, and that'll make them upset. 2. No piracy. Nintendo has a very wide definition of piracy, which includes emulation if it has the possibility of being done through piracy (which is most emulation but not most emulation development). Specifically don't do anything that can directly enable piracy, such as dumping ROMs or say... trying to organize a Melee tournament using a Dolphin netplay mod. 3. No money. Money makes things complicated and will make Nintendo care. Just straight up - you're going to need to do it pro bono. If you expect financial benefits of any kind, just go elsewhere. 4. Don't directly compete with Nintendo - no direct sequels or remakes. Otherwise they'll turn a blind eye. This guy violated point 1 and point 3; tech blogs wrote about him and he put up a financial bounty for it.

realusername 4y ago
Those aren't up to them to decide, there's laws. Emulation, romhacks and mods are perfectly legal whatever they think.
- derefr 4y ago
  These creators are almost always benefitting from Nintendo voluntarily turning a blind eye to the creator’s use/sampling of Nintendo IP in their content without any kind of IP licensing agreement. Whether some behavior is legal or not, if Nintendo doesn’t like it, they are free to respond by taking issue with the actually-illegal thing you’re doing (using their IP without licensing it.) A.k.a. “If you don’t want to play by my rules, I’m taking my ball with me when I go home.” (Keep in mind that by a strict interpretation of IP law, everyone making gameplay videos of Nintendo’s games owes Nintendo royalties on revenue from those videos, just as much as musicians that sample other artists’ music owe those musicians royalties on revenue from that music.)
  - realusername 4y ago
    Indeed, that's another subject but I'm in favor of removing those rights as well so they have no power anymore on this aspect either, selective enforcement is just another way to substitute yourself to a legal power.
    - tinus_hn 4y ago
      Right, so you armchair lawyer about how you have all these rights, but when it’s pointed out you don’t actually have them you’re just in favor of having those rights. Nintendo spends a lot of money creating that content and we like that. That’s why we have created a framework that allows them to make money out of that investment. We limit your right to do whatever you want so they can make money.
      - realusername 4y ago
        > Right, so you armchair lawyer about how you have all these rights, but when it’s pointed out you don’t actually have them you’re just in favor of having those rights. No I was talking first about the rights to emulation, romhacks and mods. Those are perfectly legal right now, there's no ambiguity, whatever Nintendo thinks on this subject doesn't matter and their opinion doesn't have any value. > Nintendo spends a lot of money creating that content and we like that. That’s why we have created a framework that allows them to make money out of that investment. We limit your right to do whatever you want so they can make money. I'm sure Nintendo is doing fine financially selling those games, you don't need to worry about that.
        tinus_hn 4y ago
        Well, then you have nothing to fear, just ignore Nintendos supposedly empty threats and see how well your arguments do in the courtroom. Be sure to tell the judge not to worry about Nintendos financial situation and that you think they are making enough!
        4y ago
- noirscape 4y ago
  Laws don't cover romhacks and mods. Emulation (but only the emulator part - the dumping your games to a ROM process isn't) is covered but otherwise this is not the case by any stretch of the imagination. What's legal (in the US - in Europe, almost everything that doesn't directly enable piracy, so pretty much stopping short of allowing flashcards is legal thanks to a decision made in 2011) is building an emulator and making a cheating device for a game console. Otherwise there's no precedent for this (and game companies are reluctant to set one considering the previous times they tried to get one, it blew up in their faces) and the laws do lean in favor of the game publishers. Modern console modding involves both reverse engineering (something with only an interoperability exemption in the DMCA under fairly heavy conditions surrounding scope and not publishing your findings) and bypassing Technical Protection Measures (the laws term for any form of DRM, regardless of effectiveness - your DRM doesn't need to be good to be protected, it just needs to exist and you need a good legal team - this is how Spotify's security works btw), which is almost entirely illegal in the US unless you're either a registered library (which is pretty much the only preservation entity acknowledged by US copyright law) or need to do it to enable interoperability (under the same conditions as the reverse engineering restrictions, so no sharing your findings). Post-scriptum: I am not a lawyer, least of all a US one, speak to your actual lawyer for legal advice.
  - realusername 4y ago
    Romhacks and mods are shared with patches, not with the original games. Game companies have also not tried to sue those websites as you pointed out, because it's guaranteed that they would lose, the website doesn't host any of their content. For breaking the protections in place indeed it's a bit different since it depends of your area, in the EU there's some interoperability exceptions which will cover breaking any DRM. You might not need to break any of those protections for an old system though anyways, you can perfectly dump a SNES cartrige and there's no DRM preventing you to do that, you only need breaking DRM to run it on the actual console.
    - noirscape 4y ago
      That might protect their direct distribution mechanism, but it doesn't change the far bigger bugbear, which is Intellectual Property. Almost every mod or ROM hack makes use of the original IP its applied to, in order to market itself. A Kaizo Mario romhack for example will kinda inherently use the Mario IP to get people interested. IP that is owned by, in this case, Nintendo. Game companies haven't sued mostly because whenever it happens in a legal gray area (which is where romhacks and mods are - and a legal gray area is illegal if you don't want to retain a lawyer), they ended up getting blasted by their competitors (who often already do the same thing) in court. It's worth looking into the game industry's legal cases (or hell, look at the Sony complaints about the Microsoft takeover of ActiBliz) - the industry is more than glad to try and legally kneecap a competitor if they can get it through on a precedent. Almost funny really. SEGA did the same thing back in the 90s. I wasn't talking about SNES romhacks either (I said modern). Pretty much any system from the turn of the millennium onwards (which is the majority of systems nowadays) uses something comparable to a TPM, which means breaking them is needed and therefore, it's illegal.
abetusk 4y ago
I don't think this is a correct characterization. Another content creator is getting takedown requests for vanilla gameplay [0]. PointCrow also mentions takedown requests for other videos that have nothing to do with the modded multiplayer video. Nintendo has terms for this type of content, allowing usage that they're now issuing takedown requests for [1]. Maybe the bounty for the mod, or maybe it's just mods in general, that got Nintendo's attention but they're trampling over the creators other work, which looks like a bullying tactic. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FSZYpDk9Xm8&t=163s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FSZYpDk9Xm8&t=163s [1] https://www.nintendo.co.jp/networkservice_guideline/en/index.html https://www.nintendo.co.jp/networkservice_guideline/en/index...
- sleepybrett 4y ago
  It would be nice for nintendo to actually come out and SAY what they have a problem with instead of this kabuki theater of trying to find commonalities between a bunch of takedowns. However they aren't answering pointcrows emails to their legal department.
panick21_ 4y ago
So don't live with the freedom you have by right, and just live with artificial extra legal boundaries set up by a paranoid cooperation.
- noirscape 4y ago
  You basically have no rights under modern copyright law. Derivative content is extremely restricted and pretty much arbitrarily controlled by the copyright owner. This is by design. If you want to change that, don't complain to Nintendo, complain to your representatives who made the system that way to begin with. Nintendo has the rights at the moment, while you, the consumer, don't.
  - LadyCailin 4y ago
    > complain to your representatives who made the system that way to begin with Ah yes. That should do the trick.
  - bcrosby95 4y ago
    > complain to your representatives who made the system that way to begin with. I complain with my voice and vote but BigCorps will complain with their dollars, which will buy more than just a handful of votes. It's not exactly correct to say dollars = votes, but it's about as close to correct as saying we live in a democracy.
- alrlroipsp 4y ago
  > the freedom you have by right That's not how law works.
  - danlugo92 4y ago
    If that's not how law works I want off the ship.
- Gordonjcp 4y ago
  You don't have the freedom or right to make money off of other people's stuff.
zwirbl 4y ago
Just like the time Nintendo wanted Smash Melee banned from Evo. Or when they forced Smash World tour to shutdown
mid-kid 4y ago
You cannot draw a consistent line or set of rules for the actions of a company as big as nintendo, consisting of many departments, subsidiaries, and individual disgruntled lawyers who may or may not feel like picking a fight on any particular moment. Within the pokemon romhack community, people have tried figuring out a similar set of "unofficial guidelines", that generally reflect your list to a T. However, there's enough examples of "random" takedowns[1] and I know at least one person who got a seemingly random C&D for an unpublished romhack, whose takedown never reached the public ear. I'm sure there's many similar cases. [1]: https://www.pokecommunity.com/showthread.php?t=478580 https://www.pokecommunity.com/showthread.php?t=478580
- jstarfish 4y ago
  > know at least one person who got a seemingly random C&D for an unpublished romhack The list is good advice for staying off any company's IP protection radar, but "random" takedowns are often tip-offs from an aggrieved community member, competitor, or bitter ex.
ravenstine 4y ago
Nintendo has a history of getting videos taken down and entire channels suspended that didn't even violate any of those actions you described. > Specifically don't do anything that can directly enable piracy, such as dumping ROMs or say... trying to organize a Melee tournament using a Dolphin netplay mod. No offense meant towards you specifically, but if that's Nintendo's mindset then that's complete crap. ROM dumping is not a crime or YouTube content violation, nor is using one for a network tournament. Imagine a book publisher shutting down a book club on YouTube for discussing their books and sharing excerpts. Most reasonable people would find that absurd even if the law or any user agreement supported the publisher.
- softfalcon 4y ago
  I completely agree with you, it is completely absurd what Nintendo is doing. Unfortunately, Nintendo does not care what you think, does not care how this hurts their image, and does not care what damage this causes to the emulated longevity of their games lasting longer than the hardware they sell currently. It is in their financial interests to force everyone to always pay for and buy Nintendo hardware to perpetually keep having to upgrade and purchase new copies of their software from their online stores to keep playing old games. This is how they do business and by having articles, news, and social media posts constantly crying about how Nintendo did them wrong, it helps ensure that the average person keeps toeing the Nintendo line instead of exploring emulation. If a non-tech savvy person hears "Nintendo sued a guy for using emulation on his game meetup" they'll think, "eh, I think I'll just buy a Switch and not bother with emulation" when they want to play Yoshi's Island because nostalgia hit them in the feels. This whole thing is a song and dance to keep people buying real Nintendo hardware (or choosing to use already owned Nintendo hardware) to play games they could just emulate with a few quick downloads. It's why you see "Top 5 retro games you can buy on Nintendo eShop before it's gone" articles on Polygon and elsewhere every year. It's a whole schtick to get you to keep handing Nintendo money for a game you've likely already bought and paid for at least once in your life. Once again, I don't agree with Nintendo's stance, but boy oh boy is it ever profitable for them.
  - ravenstine 4y ago
frob 4y ago
This seems very Stockholmy. $BIGCORP is interpreting law beyond what is actually says and is using the automated systems of $MONOPOLYCORP to make life harder for this one person for doing things well within their rights because he decided to ask for clarification and to talk. Maybe we should just lie back and think of the mushroom kingdom?
dehrmann 4y ago
I kinda wonder how this song (and video) got by, or maybe Nintendo realized it was well into fair use. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uZeR-vxREvw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uZeR-vxREvw
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

realusername 4y ago

Those aren't up to them to decide, there's laws. Emulation, romhacks and mods are perfectly legal whatever they think.

derefr 4y ago
These creators are almost always benefitting from Nintendo voluntarily turning a blind eye to the creator’s use/sampling of Nintendo IP in their content without any kind of IP licensing agreement. Whether some behavior is legal or not, if Nintendo doesn’t like it, they are free to respond by taking issue with the actually-illegal thing you’re doing (using their IP without licensing it.) A.k.a. “If you don’t want to play by my rules, I’m taking my ball with me when I go home.” (Keep in mind that by a strict interpretation of IP law, everyone making gameplay videos of Nintendo’s games owes Nintendo royalties on revenue from those videos, just as much as musicians that sample other artists’ music owe those musicians royalties on revenue from that music.)
- realusername 4y ago
  Indeed, that's another subject but I'm in favor of removing those rights as well so they have no power anymore on this aspect either, selective enforcement is just another way to substitute yourself to a legal power.
  - tinus_hn 4y ago
    Right, so you armchair lawyer about how you have all these rights, but when it’s pointed out you don’t actually have them you’re just in favor of having those rights. Nintendo spends a lot of money creating that content and we like that. That’s why we have created a framework that allows them to make money out of that investment. We limit your right to do whatever you want so they can make money.
    - realusername 4y ago
      > Right, so you armchair lawyer about how you have all these rights, but when it’s pointed out you don’t actually have them you’re just in favor of having those rights. No I was talking first about the rights to emulation, romhacks and mods. Those are perfectly legal right now, there's no ambiguity, whatever Nintendo thinks on this subject doesn't matter and their opinion doesn't have any value. > Nintendo spends a lot of money creating that content and we like that. That’s why we have created a framework that allows them to make money out of that investment. We limit your right to do whatever you want so they can make money. I'm sure Nintendo is doing fine financially selling those games, you don't need to worry about that.
      - tinus_hn 4y ago
        Well, then you have nothing to fear, just ignore Nintendos supposedly empty threats and see how well your arguments do in the courtroom. Be sure to tell the judge not to worry about Nintendos financial situation and that you think they are making enough!
        4y ago
noirscape 4y ago
Laws don't cover romhacks and mods. Emulation (but only the emulator part - the dumping your games to a ROM process isn't) is covered but otherwise this is not the case by any stretch of the imagination. What's legal (in the US - in Europe, almost everything that doesn't directly enable piracy, so pretty much stopping short of allowing flashcards is legal thanks to a decision made in 2011) is building an emulator and making a cheating device for a game console. Otherwise there's no precedent for this (and game companies are reluctant to set one considering the previous times they tried to get one, it blew up in their faces) and the laws do lean in favor of the game publishers. Modern console modding involves both reverse engineering (something with only an interoperability exemption in the DMCA under fairly heavy conditions surrounding scope and not publishing your findings) and bypassing Technical Protection Measures (the laws term for any form of DRM, regardless of effectiveness - your DRM doesn't need to be good to be protected, it just needs to exist and you need a good legal team - this is how Spotify's security works btw), which is almost entirely illegal in the US unless you're either a registered library (which is pretty much the only preservation entity acknowledged by US copyright law) or need to do it to enable interoperability (under the same conditions as the reverse engineering restrictions, so no sharing your findings). Post-scriptum: I am not a lawyer, least of all a US one, speak to your actual lawyer for legal advice.
- realusername 4y ago
  Romhacks and mods are shared with patches, not with the original games. Game companies have also not tried to sue those websites as you pointed out, because it's guaranteed that they would lose, the website doesn't host any of their content. For breaking the protections in place indeed it's a bit different since it depends of your area, in the EU there's some interoperability exceptions which will cover breaking any DRM. You might not need to break any of those protections for an old system though anyways, you can perfectly dump a SNES cartrige and there's no DRM preventing you to do that, you only need breaking DRM to run it on the actual console.
  - noirscape 4y ago
    That might protect their direct distribution mechanism, but it doesn't change the far bigger bugbear, which is Intellectual Property. Almost every mod or ROM hack makes use of the original IP its applied to, in order to market itself. A Kaizo Mario romhack for example will kinda inherently use the Mario IP to get people interested. IP that is owned by, in this case, Nintendo. Game companies haven't sued mostly because whenever it happens in a legal gray area (which is where romhacks and mods are - and a legal gray area is illegal if you don't want to retain a lawyer), they ended up getting blasted by their competitors (who often already do the same thing) in court. It's worth looking into the game industry's legal cases (or hell, look at the Sony complaints about the Microsoft takeover of ActiBliz) - the industry is more than glad to try and legally kneecap a competitor if they can get it through on a precedent. Almost funny really. SEGA did the same thing back in the 90s. I wasn't talking about SNES romhacks either (I said modern). Pretty much any system from the turn of the millennium onwards (which is the majority of systems nowadays) uses something comparable to a TPM, which means breaking them is needed and therefore, it's illegal.

abetusk 4y ago

I don't think this is a correct characterization. Another content creator is getting takedown requests for vanilla gameplay [0]. PointCrow also mentions takedown requests for other videos that have nothing to do with the modded multiplayer video. Nintendo has terms for this type of content, allowing usage that they're now issuing takedown requests for [1]. Maybe the bounty for the mod, or maybe it's just mods in general, that got Nintendo's attention but they're trampling over the creators other work, which looks like a bullying tactic. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FSZYpDk9Xm8&t=163s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FSZYpDk9Xm8&t=163s [1] https://www.nintendo.co.jp/networkservice_guideline/en/index.html https://www.nintendo.co.jp/networkservice_guideline/en/index...

sleepybrett 4y ago
It would be nice for nintendo to actually come out and SAY what they have a problem with instead of this kabuki theater of trying to find commonalities between a bunch of takedowns. However they aren't answering pointcrows emails to their legal department.

panick21_ 4y ago

So don't live with the freedom you have by right, and just live with artificial extra legal boundaries set up by a paranoid cooperation.

noirscape 4y ago
You basically have no rights under modern copyright law. Derivative content is extremely restricted and pretty much arbitrarily controlled by the copyright owner. This is by design. If you want to change that, don't complain to Nintendo, complain to your representatives who made the system that way to begin with. Nintendo has the rights at the moment, while you, the consumer, don't.
- LadyCailin 4y ago
  > complain to your representatives who made the system that way to begin with Ah yes. That should do the trick.
- bcrosby95 4y ago
  > complain to your representatives who made the system that way to begin with. I complain with my voice and vote but BigCorps will complain with their dollars, which will buy more than just a handful of votes. It's not exactly correct to say dollars = votes, but it's about as close to correct as saying we live in a democracy.
alrlroipsp 4y ago
> the freedom you have by right That's not how law works.
- danlugo92 4y ago
  If that's not how law works I want off the ship.
Gordonjcp 4y ago
You don't have the freedom or right to make money off of other people's stuff.

zwirbl 4y ago

Just like the time Nintendo wanted Smash Melee banned from Evo. Or when they forced Smash World tour to shutdown

mid-kid 4y ago

You cannot draw a consistent line or set of rules for the actions of a company as big as nintendo, consisting of many departments, subsidiaries, and individual disgruntled lawyers who may or may not feel like picking a fight on any particular moment. Within the pokemon romhack community, people have tried figuring out a similar set of "unofficial guidelines", that generally reflect your list to a T. However, there's enough examples of "random" takedowns[1] and I know at least one person who got a seemingly random C&D for an unpublished romhack, whose takedown never reached the public ear. I'm sure there's many similar cases. [1]: https://www.pokecommunity.com/showthread.php?t=478580 https://www.pokecommunity.com/showthread.php?t=478580

jstarfish 4y ago
> know at least one person who got a seemingly random C&D for an unpublished romhack The list is good advice for staying off any company's IP protection radar, but "random" takedowns are often tip-offs from an aggrieved community member, competitor, or bitter ex.

ravenstine 4y ago

Nintendo has a history of getting videos taken down and entire channels suspended that didn't even violate any of those actions you described. > Specifically don't do anything that can directly enable piracy, such as dumping ROMs or say... trying to organize a Melee tournament using a Dolphin netplay mod. No offense meant towards you specifically, but if that's Nintendo's mindset then that's complete crap. ROM dumping is not a crime or YouTube content violation, nor is using one for a network tournament. Imagine a book publisher shutting down a book club on YouTube for discussing their books and sharing excerpts. Most reasonable people would find that absurd even if the law or any user agreement supported the publisher.

softfalcon 4y ago
I completely agree with you, it is completely absurd what Nintendo is doing. Unfortunately, Nintendo does not care what you think, does not care how this hurts their image, and does not care what damage this causes to the emulated longevity of their games lasting longer than the hardware they sell currently. It is in their financial interests to force everyone to always pay for and buy Nintendo hardware to perpetually keep having to upgrade and purchase new copies of their software from their online stores to keep playing old games. This is how they do business and by having articles, news, and social media posts constantly crying about how Nintendo did them wrong, it helps ensure that the average person keeps toeing the Nintendo line instead of exploring emulation. If a non-tech savvy person hears "Nintendo sued a guy for using emulation on his game meetup" they'll think, "eh, I think I'll just buy a Switch and not bother with emulation" when they want to play Yoshi's Island because nostalgia hit them in the feels. This whole thing is a song and dance to keep people buying real Nintendo hardware (or choosing to use already owned Nintendo hardware) to play games they could just emulate with a few quick downloads. It's why you see "Top 5 retro games you can buy on Nintendo eShop before it's gone" articles on Polygon and elsewhere every year. It's a whole schtick to get you to keep handing Nintendo money for a game you've likely already bought and paid for at least once in your life. Once again, I don't agree with Nintendo's stance, but boy oh boy is it ever profitable for them.
- ravenstine 4y ago

frob 4y ago

This seems very Stockholmy. $BIGCORP is interpreting law beyond what is actually says and is using the automated systems of $MONOPOLYCORP to make life harder for this one person for doing things well within their rights because he decided to ask for clarification and to talk. Maybe we should just lie back and think of the mushroom kingdom?

dehrmann 4y ago

I kinda wonder how this song (and video) got by, or maybe Nintendo realized it was well into fair use. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uZeR-vxREvw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uZeR-vxREvw

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]