
Nintendo Issues DMCA Takedown for Super Mario Bros. Commodore 64 Port - headalgorithm
https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2019/04/nintendo-issues-dmca-takedown-for-super-mario-bros-commodore-64-port/
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iforgotpassword
They issue a takedown for a 34 year old game, ported to a system that's 37
years old. That takes a while to digest. I have noticed that every now and
then, youtubers complain about Nintendo being real dicks regarding let's plays
or even just using trailer footage in videos, which I can't really understand
since it's basically free publicity. But OK, at least those cases are probably
related to recent games, so it might make someone at Nintendo think they will
lose money because people will watch let's plays instead of buying the game.

But this one is just ridiculous. What are they trying to accomplish? Stop this
one dude who's most recent video game system is a C64 from playing super Mario
bros for free?

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WorldMaker
Copyright enforcement "wisdom" is that if they don't stop _this_ they lose
some of their power at stopping the next copyright infringement.

It does circle back though that Copyright was (constitutionally, in the US)
meant to only be a temporary reprieve from the public domain/public access
with the express purpose to make it likelier to entre the public domain/public
access afterwards, but at this point we've pushed "temporary" beyond the span
of a human lifetime for the benefits of inhuman entities (corporations).

Why _should_ 30+ year old things remain in copyright? Corporations collect
nice rents on even 30 year old properties. I'm sure Nintendo appreciates how
many people need to (re-)buy Super Mario Brothers every couple of years on a
new console's "Virtual Console" store every few years to play it legally.
Recent game Super Mario Maker even provides a legal way to remix Super Mario
content in Nintendo-approved ways. But what is our culture missing out on that
public domain won't see access to Super Mario until sometime nearing the end
of this century (under current laws, who knows if someone might fight to
expand them again), and subsequently outside the lifetimes of many of the
folks that played Super Mario Brothers around its original release? Would
people even remember Super Mario Brothers? Would what is left to turn back
over to the public domain be archived well enough to even be useful to the
public domain at that point?

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jammygit
Just to play devils advocate: Hollywood and the games industry pump out a lot
of shovelware. If there are millions or billions in profits available for
making worthwhile IP of lasting value, they might fund riskier, more
worthwhile 'art' projects (taking video games to be an art form in this
context). It encourages thinking longer time horizons than 'opening weekend'
or 'initial Xmas sales', even if just to have an opportunity to make a series
of sequels.

That said, 100 years is a bit crazy. Nobody actually plans on that scale, and
nobody's bonus depends on projected sales 87 years from today. I think 20-40
years would be equally effective in practice.

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WorldMaker
That is the point of copyright, yes, that a limited monopoly on an
intellectual property provides benefits to the creator to tackle other risks.

It's definitely the question of how limited that monopoly is that is at hand.
Scale is exactly the question. The current copyright terms are outside of
_human_ scale in that they extend past a human lifecycle (explicitly in the
case of single, clear authored works as the current copyright is author life
plus it's number of years). The original US copyright allowed for 7 years with
one possible extension for an additional 7 (for a total of 14 years). That's
relatively a lot more human of a scale. (That scale still covers the current
10 year scale of the Marvel Cinematic Universe to date, for example. That's 3
MCU planning "Phases" of 3-5 year planning horizons. Imagine if it were only
roughly four more years before, say, Iron Man 1 might expire from copyright.)

It doesn't seem likely that we will see copyright terms reduced back down to
human scale, but it's a shame.

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nullsmack
Its the feel good story of the year.

j/k Super Mario Bros shouldn't even be under copyright anymore. Our copyright
laws are horrible and abusive.

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craftinator
Well, Nintendo just lost a customer. There's only a certain level of petty
bigotry that I can handle, and they've gone way, wayyyy lower than that. It's
like the cops arresting a ten year for operation a lemonade stand without a
license FFS (and that actually happened in my home town!).

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zapzupnz
I mean, playing devil's advocate, you've got Nintendo protecting a product
that they still sell and distribute (3DS Virtual Console, Wii U Virtual
Console, Nintendo Switch Online NES, NES Mini, and various other ports) — and
this port is literally just the exact same game: same graphics, music, levels,
mechanics. Even if the makers of this clone aren't making a profit from it,
the free distribution undermines Nintendo's continued ability to sell a game
that people, evidently, still wish to purchase. It isn't as though the
developers of the clone couldn't have changed the graphics, music, and level
design to make a brand new game for the C64.

I mean, that's just devil's advocate.

To me, Nintendo still makes the most delightful, charming, and enduring games
in the industry. Stopping being their customer over one business practice with
which you mightn't agree seems like missing the forest for the trees.

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craftinator
I understand your advocacy, but their art loses it's charm when I think of the
nastiness that their lawyers are wreaking. It's not like they are in a
survival or scarcity environment. They are a large, multinational,
multibillion dollar company. And they are loosing their million dollar lawyers
on some guy for possibly damaging an incredibly small portion of their income.
It's just so dirty; the more I think about it, the less happy I am playing
their games. So I'd say the forest is already tarnished and dying in my eyes,
unfortunately.

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zapzupnz
> on some guy for possibly damaging an incredibly small portion of their
> income

No, they're maintaining the precedent that piggy-backing off the fruits of
their labour without consent is unacceptable. When they go easy on one thing,
that gives carte blanche to the next.

It's not dirty, it's business.

> but their art loses it's charm when I think of the nastiness that their
> lawyers are wreaking

> the more I think about it, the less happy I am playing their games

The issue is with the copyright game, not the players who see no alternative
but to play it. They have shareholders' investments to protect and must be
seen to take action.

All I can say is that Nintendo's lawyers have been doing things like this
since the NES, and if Nintendo's art wasn't tarnished in your eyes back then,
then this really does sound like a knee-jerk reaction.

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naikrovek
> When they go easy on one thing, that gives carte blanche to the next.

That's not how copyright works. They can let anything they want slide, and
still sue the next one into nothingness.

You may be thinking of a trademark, which requires constant defense to
maintain.

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warent
On the one hand, I do agree that this is absolutely insane and an indicator
that DMCA needs serious reformation.

But at the risk of causing outrage, let me play devil's advocate. To me, this
is like spending years building a small model version of a Saturn V rocket to
painstaking detail and then not being able to distribute it publicly.

You just spent years on a hobby with little extrinsic value. What could you
expect from spending so much time and energy on porting a video game created
by a company that isn't owned by you onto a platform that isn't owned by you?

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agumonkey
Why not embrace the idea and hire them as a one shot contract for a special
port (with some tweaks from Nintendo designers ?). They used to be very
collaborative in the NES/SNES days .. (based on SimCity port).

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tinus_hn
I think there is a court case that shows it is legitimate to distribute
something like this as a patch that requires the original rom.

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zapzupnz
Except that you couldn't make a patch for a NES game that produces a C64 ROM.
The patch would effectively be the entirety of the C64 ROM.

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T-hawk
You could. Maybe not by the commonly available ROM patching tools. But you
could write a program that takes as input the NES ROM and outputs the C64 ROM,
such that that program contains nothing copyrighted by Nintendo. It would
convert the level layouts and tile/sprite artwork and sound effects and music
and so on (maybe even the 6502 assembly routines for jumping and physics and
such), from the NES ROM to whatever the C64 port will use natively.

