Most media companies end up in legal disputes over their intellectual property at some point, but it’s Nintendo’s claims against its own fans that raise your blood pressure. Often their strategy seems quite old-fashioned, the corporate equivalent of the old man yells at the cloud.
In 2013, for example, the company discovered “Let’s Plays,” videos of people playing through a particular title.claim ad revenue in any video with images of their games. Then, two years later, he presented the strange and unprecedented in the industry:Nintendo Creators Program. Creators could continue to use Nintendo content in their videos if they gave the company 40 percent of the ad revenue those videos generated (or 30 percent if they signed up their channel for the program). Youtubers boycottedwhich generated a significant amount of ill will at a time when the Wii U was floundering and the company could have used an easy promotion.
“Nintendo has positioned its action as a softer approach; Instead of trying to ban content related to Nintendo games, they just want to make money by changing the video someone uploaded.” Cory Doctorow wrote in Boing Boing in 2015. “Yeah, uh guys, that’s not much better. It also seems cheap and lazy: instead of creating content for YouTube that fans and gamers want to watch, Nintendo is just taking over other people’s content.”
nintendo finally changed his mindleaving the program in 2018 for a new set of “ground rules” that allowed Let’s Plays and other similar videos. If those rules were followed, Nintendo said, “we will not object to your use of game images and/or captured screenshots of games for which Nintendo owns the copyright.” While the reversal suggested that Nintendo decided that squashing swarms of Let’s Plays from the internet was untenable, critically, nothing legal changed.
Although Nintendo has he was not given a direct reason for his copyright against Morino’s YouTube videos (and he did not respond to requests for comment), it seems apparent that it was his posting of images featuring the mods and emulators, and his incitement to create of mods, which provoked Nitneod’s reaction. In the past, the company has denounced the use of game emulators, calling them “the biggest threat to the intellectual property rights of video game developers to date” and shut down everything from popular rom sites to modified Super Smash Bros. tournaments
In his video response, Morino claimed that the mod he was using fell under the protections of fair use, the concept in US law that allows the use of a copyrighted work “for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship, or research.” How US courts, including, currently, the supreme court, the law will apply varies on a case-by-case basis, and the four-factor test judges use to determine whether something qualifies for fair use protection: the purpose and character of the work, the nature of the copyrighted work, the quantity and size of the portion. taken, and the effect of use on the potential market – is very open to interpretation. This is not a problem with a mathematically clear solution; need proof.
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