Nintendo Legal Department
It`s easy to blame these lawyers as if they wanted nothing more than to spoil our fun, but the reality is that they have a job to do. In their eyes, enforcing Nintendo`s copyrights means enforcing them, because if Nintendo gives in and starts letting its characters use every little product and service without permission, then (or at least legal theory) it becomes harder to defend the company`s ownership if they have to take a larger product or service to court. Perhaps those higher up at Nintendo, or at least higher up in their legal departments, could see what Game Freak had to say about Pokémon fan games in 2016 when we asked them about it at E3: The problem with copyright is that it doesn`t care about pre-evaluating older games and media that are no longer sold. Most developers would indeed exclude Nintendo, it would be nice if you pirated games they no longer sell, it`s just the law and they have no say. If I had made a game a long time ago and never sold it again, I wouldn`t care if someone hacked it. Nintendo can tell its legal department to relax. But for some reason, they`re more interested in you making a Mario pin and selling it to your friend. To report illegal use of Nintendo Trademarks or for any other legal questions or concerns, please email us at noalegal@noa.nintendo.com. To report counterfeit items on Internet auction sites, please email us at auctionpiracy@noa.nintendo.com. Help us make statutory salaries more transparent.
Get exclusive access to anonymized legal salary data. The problem is not even the legal team, but the law itself The legal team is part of the company, the company must be held accountable for the actions of all its teams. To report ROM websites, emulators, game copiers, counterfeit manufacturing or other illegal activities, please email us at piracyscene@noa.nintendo.com. But I think they have an invalid point because the legal team is what really is. Not the whole company. One gets the impression that Nintendo`s response – or at least its policies to the legal attack dogs it represents – to fan games is almost algorithmic at the moment, so unwise is it to hunt down and shut down even the most harmless projects. Nintendo needs to read the space here and realize that there`s a big difference between a stack of pirated 3DS modules on a market stall and a loving, non-commercial Pokémon game created by fans for fans. These games are tributes, not competition. Mario Battle Royale, the 100-player version of Super Mario Bros. that had to change its name to DMCA Royale last week in honor of Nintendo`s legal threats, never canabalize the sale of Super Mario Maker 2. Similarly, Breath of the NES, another promising new fan project that turned Breath of the Wild into a retro descending Zelda game, would never stop a Nintendo fan from pre-ordering Link`s Awakening.
In this article, you`ll learn how to report potential violations of Nintendo products, including ROM websites, counterfeit manufacturing, illegal use of trademarks, copyright infringement, and other piracy issues. Then they were allowed to develop it further and release it back into the wild. There you go! Super easy to implement for creators and, more importantly, super respectful from Microsoft, who doesn`t ignore their copyright responsibilities but has found an easy legal way to distinguish a fan project from their official works. I understand that it is difficult for the company given the size. Nintendo`s popularity is a double-edged sword in this case, as it`s good news when it comes to fan worship and sales, but it also means the number of tribute games in development must eclipse other video game publishers. Monitoring what they see as a tidal wave of potentially counterfeit video games must seem overwhelming. If Nintendo ever wants to solve this problem — and who knows if it will ever bother, since it`s a policy that`s been pursued for decades — it will take work, but there are precedents within the company. Nintendo had made it difficult for fans on Youtube for a while until the launch of the creators` program, where anyone who wanted to cover Mario or Zelda or other games in some way could register, get a set of rules, and then be free to create. The program wasn`t perfect, and it has since been removed and replaced by a set of guidelines – but that was something. Installation 01 is a completely separate entity from 343 Industries and Microsoft Studios, and neither 343 Industries nor Microsoft Studios officially fund or collaborate on this project. «In general, as creators, we both love creating things, and at Game Freak, we`re always looking for qualified people, so apply!» Masuda chuckled.
It wouldn`t kill them to implement a similar program for fan games, even if they are harder to follow because YouTube is a centralized platform and the world of fan games is a huge desert scattered across private forums and Discord servers. How would you rate your overall experience with this company? People most generalize Nintendo as a bad company because they dismantle fan projects that were completely harmless. Then we could expect a future where we can talk about these exciting fan projects and enjoy them at launch, rather than just worrying about how long it will take to shut them down. We have opened the original job posting in a new tab. Having trouble finding the tab? Open it here. But the most surprising thing about our exchange was when Masuda encouraged these fan game developers to join her team. «When I see that you like to create things or work on an art project. When we work on game development, we share that feeling,» Masuda said.
I agree, but I feel bad for people who work in other teams that run games and make products. They are generalized according to the actions of other teams. According to the letter of the law, all this is fine, but the letter of the law can and often does. It is the spirit of the law that Nintendo is letting itself down. The company needs to start making a better distinction between things that are trying to steal from them and make money, like Maricar, and things that are simply tributes to their legacy. Like fan games. They did not send the lawyers. They didn`t stop the game. They met with the creators of Installation 01 and made an agreement. As long as the fan game is published for free and displays this text: Yes, copyright is so bad from start to finish, it`s ridiculous Better yet, Nintendo could take a look at what some of their biggest competitors are doing in the same space. For years, a dedicated group of Halo fans have been developing a brand new game called Installation 01. The project eventually caught Microsoft`s attention, and do you know what Microsoft did? An example of this attitude is when Nintendo sued Maricar, the disguised go-kart service, which allows tourists to drive around Tokyo in Mario Kart vehicles dressed as Mario surrogate characters, with their lawyers saying, «To protect our precious intellectual property, which we have built over many years of effort, We will continue to take decisive action in the future. Nintendo respects the intellectual property of others, and we ask users of Nintendo products and services to do the same.
In accordance with the U.S. Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), the EU E-Commerce Directive (2000/31/EC), and other applicable laws, we have adopted a policy that, in appropriate circumstances and in our sole discretion, we will remove any content that appears to infringe the intellectual property rights of others.