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7 TIMES NINTENDO ENDED UP IN COURT

19/6/2018

9 Comments

 
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Oh, Nintendo. You have such a friendly public face, but deep down you're pure sod. You're like a kind clown with a short temper, who will occasionally kick a dog up the bottom so hard that its colon pops out of its mouth, making it look like it's blowing a kiss.

Admittedly, most big corporations end up in a courtroom sooner or later, but Nintendo has a particularly knee-jerk history when it comes to inflating its legal balloon... as well as often being on the opposite end of the statutory balloon-bounce from others.

Here are 7 times Nintendo felt the need - the need for speed (to unleash its lawyers).
NINTENDO vs GAME GENIE
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You might remember when cheat cartridges were a bit of a thing; you'd plug them into your console's cart slot, and by inputting a code you could alter the game to give extra health, or infinite ammo, or make your trousers fall off.

Nintendo sued Galoob, the makers of Game Genie, for copyright infringement, stating that modifying its existing games constituted creating a derivative work. 

After a year of debate - during which time the Game Genie wasn't allowed to be sold - the judge ruled in Galoob's favour, likening the Game Genie to "skipping the pages of a book", or something. Nintendo was ultimately forced to pay $15 million to Galoob to account for its 12 months of lost revenue. 

Silly Nintendo.
NINTENDO vs BLOCKBUSTER 
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I miss Blockbuster. It's not the same, looking for things to watch on Netflix. I'd always find a film to rent, no matter how terrible it was, and - having spent money for it - I'd make damn sure I'd watch the thing through to the end. Admittedly, I only ever rented games a handful of times, but given the prohibitive cost for paupers of buying games outright, game rental offered an important alternative.

​Like Nintendo was ever going to care about the paupers.

In 1989, having already succeeded in getting video game rentals banned in Japan, Nintendo turned its beak to the rest of the world - and tried to get Blockbuster Video to stop renting out its games.

​Nintendo lost the case, but won a small concession; Blockbuster wouldn't be allowed to bundle original manuals with its rentals, thus customers had to make do with dreadful photocopied reproductions, and a hand-drawn image of some chard. 
NINTENDO vs UNIVERSAL STUDIOS 
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Nintendo and Universal Studios are best friends these days; they're working together on bringing a Nintendo land to Universal theme parks, at which you'll be able to try on a pair of massive elastic underpants with the word "Mario" written on them - in caulk!  

It wasn't always the case. In 1982, Universal sued Nintendo, alleging that its Donkey Kong character infringed upon the King Kong movie franchise. The judge ruled in Nintendo's favour, stating that the rights to King Kong - created by RKO in the 1930s - did not reside with Universal in the first place, and actually belonged in the public domain.

"Donkey Kong's particular expression of a gorilla villain and a carpenter hero (with or without a fire hat) who must dodge various obstacles (whether bombs or fireballs) while climbing up ladders (whether complete or broken) and picking up prizes (umbrellas or purses) to rescue a fair-haired (whether knotted or pigtailed) hostage from the gorilla is protractible against Universal and its licensees," he screamed, like a terror-stricken swine (with or without a fire hat).
NINTENDO vs ATARI
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This 1989 case saw Atari - and its subsidiary Tengen - suing Nintendo, accusing them of unfair business practises which had led to a monopoly.

According to Atari, game makers were forced to "yield to coercion from Nintendo, so that Atari and other manufacturers of video game consoles are unable to obtain many popular games for use on their own systems".  

The complex case revolved around who had the rights to release Tetris on the NES - Nintendo or Tengen.

Atari objected to Nintendo's policy of only allowing official licensees to make games for its machines. Nintendo launched a countersuit, which prevented Tengen from releasing games on its systems without an official Nintendo license. The judge ruled in Nintendo's favour, forcing Tengen to destroy almost 270,000 copies of their version of Tetris, and allowing Nintendo to release a less-good version of the popular Russian block-dropper.
NINTENDO vs URI GELLER 
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In 1999, believing that the spoon-wielding Pokemon Kadabra (known in Japan as Un-Geller) was a cruel parody of himself, "psychic" bender Uri Geller hit Nintendo with a £60 million lawsuit.

​He claimed: "Nintendo turned me into an evil, occult Pokémon character. Nintendo stole my identity by using my name and my signature image."

​Geller additionally claimed that markings on Kadabra's body were antisemitic in nature.

​Astonishingly, the case has yet to be resolved, almost 20 years on. Consequently, Kadabra has been quietly retired from Pokemon titles and media, while Geller has gone on to threaten others with stealing his likeness - including IKEA, which released a table with bent legs that it dubbed "Uri".
NINTENDO vs THE ELDERLY 
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In 2013, Nintendo was successfully sued by iLife Technologies, a company responsible for creating a device which detected when elderly people had fallen over. A jury awarded iLife $10 million, stating that Nintendo had appropriated its technology for use in it Wii controllers. 

Ironically, upon receiving the news of the company's defeat, many Nintendo executives immediately fell over.
NINTENDO vs THE FANS 
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Whether it's hobbyist developers making unlicensed version of Nintendo titles, or YouTubers with their so-called "Let's Play" videos, Nintendo has a reputation for getting heavy with fans of its games.

Following legal threats by Nintendo, creators may no longer live stream Nintendo games through YouTube - even if they have registered with its controversial Nintendo Content Creators program (which allows YouTubers to a share of advertising revenue - split with Nintendo - providing they adhere to Nintendo's terms).

Frankly, this may be the most heinous peak of Nintendo's legal fatuity.
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9 Comments
Col. Asdasd
19/6/2018 09:43:33 am

Not that the article isn't interesting, but I just want to complain boorishly about how much worse the upscaled graphics from Phoenix Wright are compared to the original sprites.

Something in the range of 1000-1200% worse.

ps is that really still the case regarding streaming Ninty games on Youtube? I'd be staggered if it were; their games are streamed all the time on Twitch and big releases always make the front page for a few days.

I did a quick check and Splatoon 2 is the 16th most popular game being streamed live on YT right now: https://gaming.youtube.com/game/UCpaAZmDzeE5SW7ZQh5QXWdw

If that's their official policy, it doesn't seem like they're enforcing it.

Reply
Spiney O'Sullivan
19/6/2018 01:15:09 pm

Strictly speaking, their Creators partners program (where you sign up to be a Nintendo-only Youtube channel showing only games from a whitelist of approved Nintendo games) is still active and basically the only way they allow people monetising Youtube content with their game footage. And even then, streaming has specifically disallowed for Creators since late 2017, probably due to it turning out that pretty much every single high-profile streamer ends up saying THAT word at some point for some reason, making livestreams way too big a risk for them to be officially associated with.

We don't hear a lot about them enforcing takedowns etc, so I suspect that despite their eternal desire to basically ignore the existence of the internet and focus all the money they could spend on decent online services (and apparently now a proper Virtual Console) on creating a time machine to go back to 1990 (next Labo kit?), Nintendo are just aware enough of how the internet works that they know that enforcing takedowns every single day would be (a) too time-consuming and (b) really bad PR. They'll probably just do a sweep every now and then for major offenders and leave it at that.

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Rashy Tim
19/6/2018 09:55:46 am

I have a mysterious rash on one side of my face and I got 3 hours sleep for the past 4 nights and some lady in the office keeps wearing far too much perfume because she stinks, but this cheered me up

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mrak
19/6/2018 12:35:19 pm

For additional colour it should be noted that Universal itself had previously been sued by RKO over use of its Kong IP but it was Universal that had already proved in court that King Kong was public domain and it was same fat idiot who tried to get Back To The Future renamed to "Spacemen From Pluto" that instigated the lawsuit.

Also, for less colour, part of Galoob's argument defending the Game Genie was that playing the same game on a black and white telly also modified the game. Swit-swoo!

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Ste Pickford
19/6/2018 01:30:06 pm

Isn't Kadabra in Pokemon Go? That doesn't sound like, "quietly retired".

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colincidence link
19/6/2018 02:33:51 pm

Quietly retired from the Trading Card Game. And maybe the anime, like Porygon?

Reply
colincidence link
19/6/2018 02:34:36 pm

Mario Party 1 injuries something something (didn't go to court but did cause a great expense?)

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Robobob
19/6/2018 08:32:21 pm

Be funny if Uri Geller hit back with his own brand of Pokemon-like characters.

Reply
Alex Darby
21/6/2018 12:00:11 am

Interesting addendum:

The Game Genie was actually invented by Codemasters and licensed to Galoob - Codies got quite a lot of million quid out of suing Nintendo and in fact that's what kickstarted the expansion in the PlayStation days.

AFAIK it's essentially what seeded the development of Micromachines V3, Colin McRae, and ToCA touring cars.

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