Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Will Nintendo sue?

github.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 23 posts

Re: Will Nintendo sue?

#11

Post by mjn »

girvo wrote: post #10
mjn wrote: post #6

If they notice, they'll probably complain. Nintendo is fairly hardline on this kind of thing, afaict. An academic conference in my area used to host an annual "Mario AI championship", where competitors submitted either Mario-playing AI controllers, or systems to procedurally generate Mario-like levels [1]. After a few years someone at Nintendo found out, and demanded that we: 1) stop using the name "Mario", and 2) st…

Although the SC AI guys are still stuck with BW, not SC2 :'(

Nobody's hacked up a straightforward way to hook into SC2 externally afaik. It's less likely to happen in a stable way with a currently active game, because bot hooks can be used by cheaters, so game companies tend to change around interfaces in patches to thwart them. Whereas SC/BW is old enough that BWAPI has been stable for years now, and Blizzard hasn't moved to disable it (either legally or technically): http://code.google.com/p/bwapi/

I have seen one SC2 bot, based on the rather impressive feat of intercepting raw DirectX calls and reconstructing game state from them: http://graphics.stanford.edu/~mdfisher/GameAIs.html

Re: Will Nintendo sue?

#12

Post by undershirt »

Nintendo definitely won't.

Namco on the other hand appears to still be somewhat reliant on sales of their 30-year-old Pac-Man game. They issued a DMCA on my silly Pac-Man project last year [1][2]. My goal was to archive and educate people about the internal mechanics of the game.

[1] http://pacman.shaunew.com/play/index.htm#learn

[2] http://pacman.shaunew.com/play/index.htm#cheat_pac

Re: Will Nintendo sue?

#13

Post by gonnakillme »

I wonder if a possible solution here is to distribute a Makefile or something that extracts the assets (sprites, music) from a ROM. I think this would make hosting a live version somewhat dubious, but the code should always be able to be distributed.

N.B. I am not a lawyer.

Re: Will Nintendo sue?

#14

Post by cookiecaper »

networked wrote: post #4

The developer uses Nintendo's trademark "Mario" in the title of his video game project. (Edit: As pointed out in the comment below, the name "Mario" itself is not trademarked, so to be correct the previous sentence should instead read "The developer uses Nintendo's trademark Mario in his video game project.") I'm not a lawyer but as far as I understand (unlike with copyright) Nintendo is legally obliged to react and…

When people claim they're legally "obliged" to enforce their IP, they're saying that if they don't enforce it, it could possibly be argued that their ownership rights are diminished because the work was orphaned, just as abandoned physical property can lapse to the city if the owner is absent and the property unmaintained. They're not actually "obliged" to do anything with their property.

Most of the time that argument is a convenient cop-out. You'd have to abandon your trademark pretty hard to lose the rights to it; leaving a few obscure online projects unmolested won't matter.

The real deal is that companies are very protective of their IP because they don't want anything to potentially impact their brand(s), and lawyers are eager to bill for as many hours as they can. It's possible that IP owners could commit a small team of goodwill ambassadors to filter alleged infringements and send licenses instead of (or quick on the heels of) C&Ds to good projects, but who's going to do that?

Re: Will Nintendo sue?

#15

Post by tedunangst »

cookiecaper wrote: post #14
networked wrote: post #4

The developer uses Nintendo's trademark "Mario" in the title of his video game project. (Edit: As pointed out in the comment below, the name "Mario" itself is not trademarked, so to be correct the previous sentence should instead read "The developer uses Nintendo's trademark Mario in his video game project.") I'm not a lawyer but as far as I understand (unlike with copyright) Nintendo is legally obliged to react and…

When people claim they're legally "obliged" to enforce their IP, they're saying that if they don't enforce it, it could possibly be argued that their ownership rights are diminished because the work was orphaned, just as abandoned physical property can lapse to the city if the owner is absent and the property unmaintained. They're not actually "obliged" to do anything with their property. Most of the time that argume…

I believe the concern is that one obscure project becomes two obscure projects becomes four obscure projects becomes a not at all obscure project. Then somebody has to decide what dilutes the brand name and what doesn't. Zero tolerance policies, for all their other flaws, do provide a very simple decision tree.

Re: Will Nintendo sue?

#16

Post by tedunangst »

bendmorris wrote: post #7
guest0123 wrote: post #3

ianal, but given that you can play almost every gamecube, n64, snes, gameboy, gameboy color, and gameboy advance game that has ever been made online for free via ROMs/ISOs, they should be fine

It's legal to download and use ROMs or console BIOS dumps if you own the original hardware/game [1] (although this is controversial and officially disputed by Nintendo). But that doesn't give you permission to modify and redistribute them - the games are still under copyright. I think the reason Nintendo doesn't stop you from playing ROMs is similar to the reason HBO doesn't stop everyone from downloading Game of Thr…

The citation for that comes from the Game Genie case, which is a little different. You're free to copy and modify the game hardware you own. But strictly speaking, I'm not sure that extends to a copy of similar game hardware. (i.e., if you and I both own a DVD and you rip it, can you give me that rip? It's a copy of your DVD, not my DVD. I don't know if this has been settled one way or the other.)

Re: Will Nintendo sue?

#18

Post by pbhjpbhj »

Weltan wrote: post #8
networked wrote: post #4

The developer uses Nintendo's trademark "Mario" in the title of his video game project. (Edit: As pointed out in the comment below, the name "Mario" itself is not trademarked, so to be correct the previous sentence should instead read "The developer uses Nintendo's trademark Mario in his video game project.") I'm not a lawyer but as far as I understand (unlike with copyright) Nintendo is legally obliged to react and…

They're not obligated to do so, but they do have the right to do so. The name Mario is not a trademark itself since common names cannot be trademarked, although product names containing the name Mario are trademarked by Nintendo, such as Super Mario. I think Nintendo has sufficient grounds to sue because this project uses the name Mario in concert with an actual rework of a Nintendo product which itself is copyright.…

Common names can be used as trademarks.

"Mario" is a current EU trademark held by Nintendo for categories 9, 28, 38 and 41.

- http://esearch.oami.europa.eu/copla/trademark/data/007061501 ;

- [UK:] http://www.ipo.gov.uk/tmcase/Results/1/UK00001182493.

The USPTO TESS db shows "Mario" is a character mark held by "Mario Camacho Foods, LLC".

It may be that the protection afforded is far less as people generally in TM law have an [near] absolute right to trade under their given name.

Re: Will Nintendo sue?

#19

Post by dmd »

undershirt wrote: post #12

Nintendo definitely won't. Namco on the other hand appears to still be somewhat reliant on sales of their 30-year-old Pac-Man game. They issued a DMCA on my silly Pac-Man project last year [1][2]. My goal was to archive and educate people about the internal mechanics of the game. [1] http://pacman.shaunew.com/play/index.htm#learn [2] http://pacman.shaunew.com/play/index.htm#cheat_pac

> Nintendo definitely won't.

Except that they did. http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-switch/wp/2013/10/17...

Re: Will Nintendo sue?

#20

Post by undershirt »

dmd wrote: post #19
undershirt wrote: post #12

Nintendo definitely won't. Namco on the other hand appears to still be somewhat reliant on sales of their 30-year-old Pac-Man game. They issued a DMCA on my silly Pac-Man project last year [1][2]. My goal was to archive and educate people about the internal mechanics of the game. [1] http://pacman.shaunew.com/play/index.htm#learn [2] http://pacman.shaunew.com/play/index.htm#cheat_pac

> Nintendo definitely won't. Except that they did. http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-switch/wp/2013/10/17...

Thanks for the update. I am definitely naive.
Post reply on HN