
Will Nintendo sue? - pearjuice
https://github.com/Diogenesthecynic/FullScreenMario/issues/34
======
mjn
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) stop using the Mario assets in the procedural level
generation framework. Imo there was a decent fair-use claim in that case, but
nobody wanted to pursue it, so now it's informally referred to as the "Non-
Mario AI competition" [2]. (As a direct reimplementation of an actual Mario
Bros game, the project here seems like it would not really have a good fair-
use claim, anyway.)

That's in contrast to Blizzard's reaction to the annual Starcraft AI
competition [3]: once they found out about it, they sent a representative and
donated prizes.

[1]
[http://julian.togelius.com/Togelius2013The.pdf](http://julian.togelius.com/Togelius2013The.pdf)

[2] [http://platformersai.com/](http://platformersai.com/)

[3]
[http://webdocs.cs.ualberta.ca/~cdavid/starcraftaicomp/](http://webdocs.cs.ualberta.ca/~cdavid/starcraftaicomp/)

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

~~~
mjn
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/](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](http://graphics.stanford.edu/~mdfisher/GameAIs.html)

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networked
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 protect it, right?

Edit: Concern about trademark issues is also what apparently led to the _Super
Mario Clone_ FOSS project
([http://sourceforge.net/projects/smclone/](http://sourceforge.net/projects/smclone/),
note the URL) being renamed _Secret Maryo Chronicles_. I'm not sure if
Nintendo ever contacted them or if it was a precautionary change.

Edit 2: There's some interesting commentary from a professional lawyer on the
issue of trademarking and copyrighting characters at
[http://www.ivanhoffman.com/characters.html](http://www.ivanhoffman.com/characters.html),
though it's from 2003.

~~~
cookiecaper
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?

~~~
tedunangst
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.

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basicallydan
If anybody is interested in what this is all about, it's an OS project called
Full-Screen Mario, a clone of the original SMB using HTML5. I had a little
play, and so far it seems like a pretty good clone:
[http://www.fullscreenmario.com/](http://www.fullscreenmario.com/)

Might be worth contributing to if you are interested in HTML5 game dev or have
some experience with the potential legal issues surrounding the project.

------
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](http://pacman.shaunew.com/play/index.htm#learn)

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

~~~
dmd
> Nintendo definitely won't.

Except that they did. [http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-
switch/wp/2013/10/17...](http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-
switch/wp/2013/10/17/nintendo-says-this-amazing-super-mario-site-is-illegal-
heres-why-it-shouldnt-be/)

~~~
undershirt
Thanks for the update. I am definitely naive.

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swatkat
Here's the official stance of Nintendo on ROMs, emulators and mods:

[http://www.nintendo.com/corp/legal.jsp#helping](http://www.nintendo.com/corp/legal.jsp#helping)

But, it seems Nintendo is pretty lenient on fan-made content:

[http://kotaku.com/5585802/nintendo-doesnt-want-to-
criminaliz...](http://kotaku.com/5585802/nintendo-doesnt-want-to-criminalize-
obsessed-fans)

------
mparlane
As a Dolphin(Wii Emulator) developer, I can tell you that we haven't heard
anything from Nintendo in the 10 years we have been around.

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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.

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guest0123
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

~~~
bendmorris
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 Thrones - it
would be just about impossible. It doesn't mean they condone it.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_game_emulator#Legal_issu...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_game_emulator#Legal_issues)

~~~
tedunangst
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.)

