4 ms·

> a reputation of petty litigation with dubious claims. True but recently they've turned much worse by launching a major campaign of unprecedented legal attack

> a reputation of petty litigation with dubious claims. True but recently they've turned much worse by launching a major campaign of unprecedented legal attacks across the historical preservation, retro emulation and fan creation communities. While Nintendo has always been protective of its IP rights, it was mostly limited to piracy of current titles and protecting their trademarks from commercial infringement. The greatly expanded scope of their recent legal campaign now threatens aspects of non-profit historical preservation and adjacent fan activities unrelated to Nintendo's present day commercial interests. This is new, different and dangerous. Previously, Nintendo's lawyers made at least some effort to distinguish between non-profit or fan hobby activities and piracy or commercial trademark protection. Nintendo changing to now aggressively pursue non-profit retro preservation has made me swear off buying anything from them again.

makeitdouble 2y ago
The catch is, game preservation touches Nintendo's present day commercial interests, as they fully expanded their offering to "classic" games. Nintendo Online is already that, but I also wouldn't be surprised if tomorrow a playable GameBoy toothbrush was released from Nintendo. For people looking for an entry point, Moon Channel has been covering this topic pretty in depth (author is a lawyer, but not in trademark per se I think) https://youtu.be/7rzWR9JP1WE?si=UOk5TI9iESdAONVB https://youtu.be/7rzWR9JP1WE?si=UOk5TI9iESdAONVB
- djtango 2y ago
  This is the Disney play book - they would only release their classic movies on VHS for limited time before removing them from the shelves, look up the Disney Vault. The long backward compatibility we enjoyed as kids was a bug not a feature
  - ghssds 2y ago
    Unsure why you want to make it a "we" thing as lot of us grew playing NES and then SNES, which didn't have backward compatibility.
RajT88 2y ago
Regular reminder that LikSang was amazing, and killed mostly by Sony, but with help from other console manufacturers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lik_Sang https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lik_Sang
Jach 2y ago
I'm not so convinced it's that dangerous, but part of that is a naive sense that if they keep doing more dumb lawsuits, that just means it's more likely for a handful of defendants to actually fight them (as here) and win, which is the way to establish precedent or in the longer term actually get new laws that make things clearer. In this case, hopefully Costa Rica legal fees aren't so bad. Settlements are kind of bad in that regard though -- I'm reminded of the Youtube / Viacom fight that started in 2007 and eventually settled for an undisclosed amount. But in the meantime some bills were raised in committees about forcing site owners to implement things like what later became Content ID; what we got instead was Youtube doing their own proprietary version on their own accord (it probably did help fend off more lawsuits) and the law and courts being silent on the matter. Is that better or worse? What of the "danger"? I guess another part of me not seeing much danger is because in the extreme, technology has for decades made this a non-problem when it comes to possibility and existence -- my old ROMs aren't going anywhere regardless of what Nintendo does or doesn't do, or what the law does or doesn't become. There's the matter of possibly lessened access and less widespread historical knowledge, which as a gamer I think is a shame, but the archives will survive and devs will continue making emulators for fun, anonymously if they have to. So long as things are available to those who seek them out, that's what I care most about, and that victory has already been won for non-service games. I don't follow news that closely but I'm also not so sure these are all that new and unprecedented -- Nintendo's always been kind of a dick when it comes to lawfare and fan activities and work. Maybe you can point me to a piece that's looked at the frequency and types of legal activity over the years to compare? Is there anything concrete to suggest I should actually be worried at all about the future availability and development of Dolphin or bsnes or snes9x? I'm somewhat aware of them getting more aggressive with streamers, but the difference there is mainly that streaming and "content creation" are so much bigger now (it's come a long way since Zot the Avenger), so there's a lot more of it and consequently more legal related affairs. To me almost all of it falls under fair use, so whatever, but clearly Nintendo disagrees and Japan itself doesn't have the concept despite having a culture of doujin... (Sega, Capcom, Sony, and other Japanese companies all get my ire as much as Nintendo when it comes to this sort of thing at least.)

makeitdouble 2y ago

The catch is, game preservation touches Nintendo's present day commercial interests, as they fully expanded their offering to "classic" games. Nintendo Online is already that, but I also wouldn't be surprised if tomorrow a playable GameBoy toothbrush was released from Nintendo. For people looking for an entry point, Moon Channel has been covering this topic pretty in depth (author is a lawyer, but not in trademark per se I think) https://youtu.be/7rzWR9JP1WE?si=UOk5TI9iESdAONVB https://youtu.be/7rzWR9JP1WE?si=UOk5TI9iESdAONVB

djtango 2y ago
This is the Disney play book - they would only release their classic movies on VHS for limited time before removing them from the shelves, look up the Disney Vault. The long backward compatibility we enjoyed as kids was a bug not a feature
- ghssds 2y ago
  Unsure why you want to make it a "we" thing as lot of us grew playing NES and then SNES, which didn't have backward compatibility.

RajT88 2y ago

Regular reminder that LikSang was amazing, and killed mostly by Sony, but with help from other console manufacturers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lik_Sang https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lik_Sang

Jach 2y ago

I'm not so convinced it's that dangerous, but part of that is a naive sense that if they keep doing more dumb lawsuits, that just means it's more likely for a handful of defendants to actually fight them (as here) and win, which is the way to establish precedent or in the longer term actually get new laws that make things clearer. In this case, hopefully Costa Rica legal fees aren't so bad. Settlements are kind of bad in that regard though -- I'm reminded of the Youtube / Viacom fight that started in 2007 and eventually settled for an undisclosed amount. But in the meantime some bills were raised in committees about forcing site owners to implement things like what later became Content ID; what we got instead was Youtube doing their own proprietary version on their own accord (it probably did help fend off more lawsuits) and the law and courts being silent on the matter. Is that better or worse? What of the "danger"? I guess another part of me not seeing much danger is because in the extreme, technology has for decades made this a non-problem when it comes to possibility and existence -- my old ROMs aren't going anywhere regardless of what Nintendo does or doesn't do, or what the law does or doesn't become. There's the matter of possibly lessened access and less widespread historical knowledge, which as a gamer I think is a shame, but the archives will survive and devs will continue making emulators for fun, anonymously if they have to. So long as things are available to those who seek them out, that's what I care most about, and that victory has already been won for non-service games. I don't follow news that closely but I'm also not so sure these are all that new and unprecedented -- Nintendo's always been kind of a dick when it comes to lawfare and fan activities and work. Maybe you can point me to a piece that's looked at the frequency and types of legal activity over the years to compare? Is there anything concrete to suggest I should actually be worried at all about the future availability and development of Dolphin or bsnes or snes9x? I'm somewhat aware of them getting more aggressive with streamers, but the difference there is mainly that streaming and "content creation" are so much bigger now (it's come a long way since Zot the Avenger), so there's a lot more of it and consequently more legal related affairs. To me almost all of it falls under fair use, so whatever, but clearly Nintendo disagrees and Japan itself doesn't have the concept despite having a culture of doujin... (Sega, Capcom, Sony, and other Japanese companies all get my ire as much as Nintendo when it comes to this sort of thing at least.)