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Nintendo takes down videos of TAS, rom-hacked games on Nicovideo
- Thread starter xk0sm0sx
- Start date
The Faceless Master
Member
the before and after of 100% freedom on 100% of titles with 100% of revenue to the sledgehammer of less creativity, less games and less money is indeed lopsided. i hope someone sues and wins.
giant_frying_pan
Member
Can't be out-shadowing Mario Maker now, can we?
Leaving aside the legality of emulation and memory editing, which is a grey area at best; I don't think actual romhacks are anywhere near as ambiguous, even if performed on legal backups.
Starwolf_UK
Member
I thought they would take our ad revenue but never our take our freedom but this is the latter. This is just as disgusting as the Shining Force thing SEGA pulled a few years ago.
In the case of automatical Mario maybe taking the ad revenue has made Nintendo paranoid they will be sued by the music industry for profiting from copyright violation but maybe that is more reason not to grab every video you can under copyright.
In the case of automatical Mario maybe taking the ad revenue has made Nintendo paranoid they will be sued by the music industry for profiting from copyright violation but maybe that is more reason not to grab every video you can under copyright.
The Faceless Master
Member
dumping roms isn't hard, disks are even easier.
half a moon
Banned
Twitch plays pokemon is essentially tool assisted input eh?
Say someone makes a 3rd party macro controller to script runs off the console. That's not illegal eh? So the real issue is emulators. Well, obviously they dislike them, but why aren't they shutting down or suing emulator devs?
Say someone makes a 3rd party macro controller to script runs off the console. That's not illegal eh? So the real issue is emulators. Well, obviously they dislike them, but why aren't they shutting down or suing emulator devs?
I would imagine they'd be regarded as a derivative work, which has its own section of legal requirements and limitations.
There's an interesting question here about where the burden of proof lies.
Vipershark
Member
Emulation is completely legal as are rom hacks.
There's no issue with distributing emulators (which is why GAF openly discusses them and there are several emulation threads) or using them, period, as long as they don't use stolen code. The legality issue comes from distributing roms. If you make and use your own backups, there is no issue.
Romhacks fall under the same category. The hack itself (ips patch or what have you) is legal to distribute since it doesn't include the rom. You apply that patch to the rom and the romhack is ready to go.
Obviously if you distribute the rom with the patch already installed, that's illegal since it contains the rom. The hack alone is your own work, though. It's no different than, say, making a Skyrim mod available for download. You can distribute or sell the installable mod itself all you want with no issues but if you try to distribute the entire game with your mod preinstalled it's illegal since you're uploading the actual game itself, just with the mod included.
The Faceless Master
Member
It's a derivative work (indeed, a video of a romhack is, I suspect, a derivative work of a derivative work). Certainly in UK law there's restrictions on how you can handle that. And I believe in UK terms it's under civil law, so the ruling is based on a balance of probabilities. In which case, I suspect a (hypothetical) jury would require the video maker to demonstrate how they created the video without breaching copyright.
That's where the question lies, for me; would a jury just take the creator's claims directly?
Hayama Akito
Member
I'm pretty sure no one in Japan will complain about it, they are like that with legal stuff, is a cultural thing. They will say "sasuga Nintendo", "kuso Kabushiki" and "wwwwwww" and will forget about the topic next day.
Pie and Beans
Look for me on the local news, I'll be the guy arrested for trying to burn down a Nintendo exec's house.
Nintendo's approach to hobbyist internet media is essentially "What if we became the digital yakuza?"
HiredN00bs
Member
I think that Nintendo becomes a better company the more people say "fuck Nintendo" in response to things like this.
Fuck Nintendo.
No online play in the new console Mario Party?
Fuck Nintendo.
Fuck Nintendo.
No online play in the new console Mario Party?
Fuck Nintendo.
Air Zombie Meat
Member
Dumb move. Generating bad press for no good reason at all.
Azure Dream
Member
Fans: "Nintendo, we don't like that you're-"
Nintendo:
Fans: "O... oh. Okay."
Nintendo:
Fans: "O... oh. Okay."
Nintendojitsu
Banned
akidnamededdy
Banned
Bad press with who? The miniscule audience that watches TAS videos?
I'm honestly finding it really hard to care about this. It's a pebble at the foot of the mountain that is my problems with Nintendo (region locking).
bad press for nintendo.
even with people who don't watch or play hacks and make or watch tas videos.
charlequin
Banned
Putting aside the question of whether or not that claim is accurate as others have covered it pretty effectively, it's also just not relevant. Anything like a TAS video of a game is going to technically qualify as an unauthorized derivative work (giving Nintendo the ability to make claims against it) unless it can be held to fall under Fair Use. Whether the creator of the video played the game in a way that violated the original license is actually not a factor in the video's legal standing in either case.
I think looking at the Fair Use standards is actually instructive here for why this is such a poor choice on Nintendo's part. The factors that go into a decision:
A TAS video is almost always produced for a nonprofit (and, at least at a stretch, "educational") purpose; it will generally skip a great deal of the game's audiovisual content, and not in any way reproduce its gameplay; and its effect on the potential market for a game will, if anything, be positive, as TAS videos often increase customer interest in more obscure games, or remind people of how much they enjoyed more prominent ones. This might well still not be enough to prove fair use, but it positions these videos far, far into the corner of harmless and unthreatening use of content.
Basically it comes down to this:
There's no actual concrete benefit whatsoever to a move like this -- it doesn't sell more games and it doesn't bolster Nintendo's case in any way against future infringements, but it does anger an influential part of their fanbase and crack the door to the possibility of an unfavorable court ruling that restricts their options in the future. The only real reason you see a company take actions like this is that they either have management out of touch enough to fundamentally misunderstand the market they're dealing with, or a staff of lawyers sitting around inventing work for themselves in order to make sure they look useful.
In PR the size of an audience isn't actually all that relevant -- what really matters is how influential an audience is. We're in the era where creators of video content are some of the biggest and most influential tastemakers in gaming, and where events like AGDQ draw enormous audiences and tons of coverage every year. The risk of something like this is that you don't just piss off the two or three guys making Mario TAS videos, but that a group of online personalities use it as a reason to alter their coverage of Nintendo.
On its own, sure, this is probably not likely to have a huge downside. But it has absolutely no upside, and Nintendo isn't in the 2008 position anymore -- they're losing money and having trouble getting traction with both fans and the media for their current offerings. Every thing they do now that feeds a narrative of Nintendo being hostile and out-of-touch makes it that much harder to turn that slide around.
KojiKnight
Member
Because those fights have already happened in the court room in favor of emulators... You're legally allowed to reverse engineer and implement software that emulates a system as long as it doesn't include any copyrighted code in it.
Nintendo would literally be throwing away money on something a judge would throw out within minutes, unless Nintendo could make some grand case that current emulators are in some way different than they were in the past and thus need to be reevaluated.
Herb Alpert
Banned
that's such a shitty move.
They need all the good will they can gather and they make moves like this.
Sometimes they deserve the situation they are in...
They need all the good will they can gather and they make moves like this.
Sometimes they deserve the situation they are in...
MonsterHunter
Member
KuroPyonyo
Banned
It really shouldn't matter if this specific thing is something you care about. It all comes from the same root of bad rusty managment. The only good thing about them are their actual devs, everything else in that anti-consumer company is outdated shit.
I wonder how much they need to bleed until change must occur.
Emulators are fine as long as they don't contain any of the copyrighted code from the original creator.
So for example, you can write a GameCube emulator, but you can't include the system menu that shows up when no disc is in the drive
Nintendo's generally very good about this stuff. They basically never send C&Ds to stuff like romhacks, fan translations, fangames and the like. Even emulators and homebrew.
It's what makes their continued fumbling with video content makers all the more baffling. I can only guess it's an issue of monetization, and when that gets involved Nintendo goes crazy.
CambriaRising
Member
How idiotic.
Sir Ilpalazzo
Member
Uh, why?
theprodigy
Member
post history is your friend
well Nicovideo does suck
but yeah I don't get it either
TheSlySoul
Member
So Kaizo Mario only so far? That is ok, at least hacks using only the SMW engine seem save.
Still Nintendo killing any good will...
Still Nintendo killing any good will...
There are probably more people who watch TAS videos than there are people who will buy WII Us this year.
TheSlySoul
Member
Not to mention AGDQ 2015 made 1.5 million in donations. Guess that means less Nintendo games in SGDQ.
QuicheFontaine
Member
Copyright infringement wouldn't be a jury trial in the UK anyway. Civil jury trials are generally only for fraud, malicious prosecution or false imprisonment.
AGDC 2015 was on real games, wouldn't be the least bit affected.
i don't think Nintendo is that stupid. if they ever messed with the GDQs, the bad press they would get would be pretty big. it would be they basically blocking charity and that's a big no-no. GDQs will proceed the same as usual.
not to mention everything in the GDQs is done on real hardware. emulators are never used there (except for official ones like Virtual console) and rom hacks are never there at all.
i still want to see Nintendo shoot themselves in the foot just to see the shitstorm.