Slashdot Mirror
Nintendo Threatens Suicidegirls Over IP Use
An anonymous reader writes "Suicidegirls (a not safe for work adult community) posted a nasty letter they received from Nintendo demanding they remove a member's page on their site because the member listed Metroid and Zelda as their favorite video games." Update: 10/28 02:49 GMT by Z : BoingBoing has an update to the story (probably where the reader saw it in the first place), saying the law firm that represents Nintendo Seattle is looking into it.
Microsoft learned this the hard way thanks to a certain Mike Rowe's Software company.
I am not quite sure what the Nintendo executives think they're doing, but a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of 1% of people would have been offended by a couple of this Suicide Girls' favorite games being "Zelda" and "Mario." And yet, they expect far, far more people to buy their new Nintendo portable system. I was just thinking today about how much I wanted this new system... but this unnecessary anal retentive actions has given me a sour taste in my mouth, if only for its blatant stupidity.
I'm currently reading guide to dumbest events in television history by David Hofstede and there's an excellent chapter on how NBC tried to sue David Letterman after his "defection" to CBS claiming that there is intellectual property owned by NBC in Letterman's "Stupid Pet Tricks". After a lot of ridicule and mockery, even from their very own Jay Leno, NBC finally backed off. I wish Nintendo could be at least that smart...
But it isn't a problem when playboy uses (nude) nintendo characters?
The Yasashii Syndicate ||
The email came from StopInfringement@PerkinsCoie.com.
Does that look like the email address a multinational corporation would use? Nintendo's sure to have their own in-house lawyers for stuff like this. It just looks to me like some random law firm is looking for suits to file and then hoping Nintendo will pay them for the favor. I'm sure I heard something about laws in certain European countries making this common practice.
They hired a company like BayTSP to search for them, and BayTSP spiders through things looking for likely strings. Nintendo probably assumed that they were hosting NES roms.
If you haven't seen at least one anti-pirate bot in your web logs, then you aren't connected to the internet.
PS Offtopic: Anyone know the user agent string for the BayTSP bot? Or better yet which subnet it's on?
It sounds like nintendo are more concerned with their game being mentioned on a porn site, and when they aim their console at kids you can see their point. Although, i think a letter asking the blog owner or site admin to remove the reference with a good excuse, like kids stumbing onto it, would have been better received than a cease and desist order.
Paul
From: Stop IP Infringement
Next take a peak at the actual To addres:
To: "'spooky@suicidegirls.com'"
The From address isn't from an individual. It certainly makes me think it's a bot. The To address contains the actual recipient address in quotes. I've never seen a MUA automatically use the email address in the double-quoted area. I've seen mass mailers do this before though.
"spooky@suicidegirls.com" is also the administrative contact address for the domain "suicidegirls.com." Their site's help page contains many other contact addresses, yet the one from WHOIS was what they used. It's easy for a bot to harvest an address from WHOIS. It's next to impossible to find the right address on some random website.
In addition to that the form letter notes the ARIN contact address of suicidegirls.com ISP. Again this is easily harvested via WHOIS.
The form letter also makes no attempt to name the site administrator by name or even address the letter to common responsible roles. Instead it repeated the address it harvested from WHOIS.
I say it's a bot, plain and simple. I'd contact a lawyer for some free advice. They'll probably tell you to ignore it. I'd also make sure your ISP also realizes it's a bot and that what your site member is doing is certainly not illegal (not even remotely, even in communist China). That would be my IANAL advice.
SG has had a bad rep for years over aggressively "protecting" their IP.
There is a major difference between uploading copyright protected Suicide Girls pictures to a usenet group and posting that you like the Suicide Girls website.
In fact, it's the same difference between posting Zelda to a warz site and posting that you like to play Zelda.
McDonald's would have no case against someone who avers to liking Big Macs (alhtough their taste might well be in question), but if someone opened a diner and called their burgers 'Big Macs' McDonalds would, quite justifiably, come down on them like a ton of bricks.
Are you suggesting that SG has a history of getting all bent out of shape by people publicly recommending their site, or merely that they get bent out of shape by people reposting their pictures without permission?
KFG
What the hell are you talking about? I do not ask lightly.
Here is a story.
I photograph flowers for a living. Have a website devoted to it. Have photographed some exotic flowers over the years, and I charge to let botonists see my collection.
Someone takes those photos and pretends they made them. Makes them publically available. I take legal action, as this hurts my legitimate business.
A third party happens to mention on my site that a set of specific varieties of daisies prefer a specific fertilizer. Then I get a nasty letter from the fertilizer company for mentioning their product.
Under your reasoning I'm supposed to be like 'Fuck, my fault for aggresively pursuing those who were ruining my business"?
Unless you are anti IP across the board (which I doubt) this position makes no sense.
Additionally I'd like to defend SG a bit by saying that aggresive protection of their photos is completely reasonable. Your average hard core porn site probably does not have a personal relationship with their models, nor is their much expectation of trust. Spreading their work is a legal issue only.
But Missy knows many of her models personally. They've posed under conditions where they have creative control over how they look and who sees them. Missy has every right to aggresively protect the spread of naked pictures of her friends for god's sake. SG has nothing but a good reputation in the indie adult community, and it is for exactly this kind of "aggresive protection" that they deserve it. I would expect nothing less from Missy, from Eolake Stobblehouse (of domai.com) or Alex Firestone (firegirls.com).
Honestly, I imagine that Nintendo doesn't want to be associated with, say, child porn, drugs, etc, and runs a webcrawler that matches the use of certain terms ("Mario") with other terms ("boobs") and then emails the admin when it matches This is pretty clear from the email that at best, SG was only looked at by a human eye for about 30 seconds.
I attended a booksigning for the new hardcover coffee table book of the Suicide Girls portraits about a month ago at Powell's City of Books in Portland Oregon.
It was different than I thought it would be. The Suicide Girls concept actually is not porn-oriented. The young woman who developed the idea and took the original photos said that she wanted to capture the unique spirit of the women that she knew and hung out with in Southeast Portland. The Suicide Girls concept is about sharing the self-actualization of women in Portland's post-punk subculture. Suicide Girls was developed to be a celbration of attitude of young women rather than specifically providing a visual stimulation for male sexual climax.
The Suicide Girls website is primarily designed to provide a place for other women who share the same lifestyle throughout the world to find each other. It's not intended to be a porn site although it has the secondary effect of invoking male sexual arousal. It does that rather well and that goes a long way to pay the overhead costs, but it is not the site's main purpose.
That's what gives the Suicide Girl photos the ambience that they are mocking male sexuality as opposed to the standard porn approach of manipulating male sexuality for profit.
Many of the original models attended the event since the website started here in Portland and they live here. Talking to them afterwards they seemed just like ordinary people, not porn stars.
As for the 'ownership' of the name, the author said that it just "came from an old song".
Nintendo should just lighten up and forget this nonsense. I suspect that the name probably originated somewhere else because a Japanese Nerd video game giant corporation would not be likely to come up with a name like this. Personally, I suspect that William Burroughs thought it up, and a search of his novels from the 1950s and 1960s would find it as a casual reference.
No, I am not a 'Suicide Girl' myself.
Give me a break. Sure it sounds like Nintendo is barking up the wrong tree, but let's not just beat up on them for no reason.
the email they received was unsolicited and therefore SPAM
That may be your way of looking at spam, but that is unacceptable for most people. Say your Uncle Sal, whom you haven't spoken with in 10 years because he lives on the other side of the country, happens across your email, say on a University board or something. Is his email Spam?
that stupid ass disclaimer on the email just makes the sender look like a moron.
That "stupid ass disclaimer" is SOP for most professionals such as lawyers, doctors, accountants and anyone who deals with confidential messages. It doesn't make him look like a moron, in fact he would look like an asshole if he DIDN'T have it on there. All the email I receive from doctors or lawyers (and my IT company specializes in the Health Care Industry) have a very similar disclaimer on them. It's just an automatic signature.
I don't really get it. SG advertises on Slashdot. I've been to the site a few times, but I'm not into uber-goth looking chicks. The site is cool, I kinda like the concept, but these girls don't do it for me, and there is zero diversity - they all look alike, as another reply points out.
/. into this sort of look? What is with the strange association between geek news site and goth chicks? I don't get it. I'm all for slightly funky girls with some spice, but I also like a bit of class, somebody I can take out to a nice restaurant with and not get thrown out on the street. You know, not the first psychological wreck of a pincushion that comes my way.
Is everybody on
Geek guys tend to like goth women. Don't know why.
I sort of agree. I have talked to a few people who do nude or adult modelling who have reached a point of maturity about the issue to where they are happy with what they do and are not bothered by the fact that a significant portion of their audience is, well, lusting after them.
/. from work (for better or worse).
They are very appreciative of the portion of their audience that appreciates them as human beings and not objects; that's the same portion of the audience that gets off by enjoying the pornographic atmosphere in a deep way, rather than just ogling over eyecandy. SG actually tries to cater more to that type of person than the pr0n-hoarding AOL'er.
But, I don't think a link belongs on slashdot, given that MANY people read
I also think it's unfortunate that a fair bit of the amateur porn out there is a bunch of desperate girls in college who can't afford their tuition, but, I'm not really sure what to do about that social issue, and I don't thing censuring porn (and thus pushing it farther underground, which some claim is a factor in the harm of voyeuristic child abuse (kiddie porn) and teenage drug use.. err... somehow that didn't come out right (legalizing those things doesn't make them harmless, obviously), but I hope you know what I'm trying to say) is going to fix the problem, though...
--TheOrangeSquid Is it any wonder things seem so awry? We swim in a sea of confusion and don't have to think to survive
Is there any evidence that this is true?
OK, someone claims to be a law firm claiming to represent Nintendo. Clearly not a violation of the law. Oh, and the law firm is sending, um, Email. That's kind of weak, isn't it? Not even on a letterhead?
This story sounds very much like a way to generate web site traffic of Slashdot proportions.
Aside from the fact that such disclaimers have ZERO legal weight. You cannot bind someone to any agreement without their consent. This is why the SG site has no fear of posting the email even though the text at the bottom says they must not disclose the contents.
I could send you an email saying you have to flap your arms and cluck like a chicken. Or that you have to pay me 25 cents for each email I send. But it means nothing, because you were never in on the negotiations. You never signed a thing. I can't obligate you without your informed consent. And so I think the OP is correct: it does make the sender look like a moron, because she is a lawyer or representative for a lawyer, and yet she doesn't seem to understand a fundamental, basic premise of the law.
My Greasemonkey scripts for Digg &
That's not the point. I know they are in no way or shape binding, however, it shows the clients (who presumably receive emails) that the professional at least looks like he cares about their privacy. It's just standard courtesy.
NOTICE: This communication may contain privileged or other confidential information. If you have received it in error, please advise the sender by reply email and immediately delete the message and any attachments without copying or disclosing the contents. Thank you.
I don't see anything in there that suggests that there is any punishment or liability to not following the instructions. That's like saying I have a "please wipe your shoes before you come in" sign on my house or a bumper sticker that asks drivers to be considerate. That fact that no contract has been made and there are no legally binding situations doesn't make me look like a moron.
A lot of posters seem to think there's no basis for the email -- some even said it was frivolous -- but there is a very good legal basis for it: it's called trademark dilution (see subsection (c) of the linked section 1125)). It's one of the more questionable additions to trademark law, but it's not new (though relatively young). Essentially, an owner of a famous trademark can sue people who make commercial use of the mark for tarnishing the mark (like sullying the "good name") or impairing the connection between the owner's product and the mark it represents (called "blurring").
Here, the argument would be that Zelda, etc. are famous marks, that suicidegirls's use of the mark is a commercial use, and that associating a site like suicidegirls with the marks dilutes the marks (n.b. Nintendo is particularly strongly associated with children's games, more than Playstation or Xbox).
Certainly there are arguments to be made on the other side (e.g., not a famous mark, not a commercial use, there's no actual dilution, etc.), but there's no doubt there's a good legal basis for the cease & desist.
Actually, from what I understand, Playboy v. Welles involved more than just trademarks vs. free speech. It also involved the right one has to put work experience on a resume, basically. Among performing artists of any kind - actors, models, and such - there is an explicit legal right to list previous work in one's portfolio.
Which is to say, Playboy were (and probably still are) even bigger shitheads than Nintendo, but that's hardly news either.
Given that moderator points are (supposedly) distributed at random, and that hundreds, if not thousands, of mod points are spent in the making of post ranks... I would say this is likely a good indicator that there are a bunch of porn lovers out there, and not as many porn haters. ;) ;)
You could consider this a clue, but it is not mandatory.
Self-referential sigs are rarely entertaining.
I'm against what's happening here, and I doubt they have a legal leg to stand on, but consider what's happening around the web.
It's likely that Nintendo pays these lawyers to look around for their trademark being used to promote pornographic sites. Consider the case of John Zuccarini, who was using domain name typos (like 15 variations of "cartoonnetwork.com) to lure children to porn sites. He got a commission for each "click", although the clicks were cauased by pop-up hell. He brought in around $1,000,000 in his last year of business.
It doesn't take more than a couple of minutes on Google to find someone using Nintendo's trademark to get search engine hits to their porn site. I often hit such sites while searching for information on other famous trademarks. Here's a site which uses "linux" as one of the search keywords, and it has nothing to do with Linux.
Anyway, overzealous lawyers, yes, but they do have a legitimate job.
Do you have ESP?
Mattel has a reputation for writing blank checks to attorneys who treat litigation as war. One of the common tactics that Mattel uses is to kill forests and try to bury opponents on the resulting paper.
That is why Barbi Leigh surrender her prior domain BarbieFlasher.com. In the Miler case, they spent over a year litigating it, and even made the one of lawyers in the case want to quit law -- because the tactics of Mattel and it's attorneys.
Fight Spammers!
You think there should be a "line" for what consenting adults do in their own privacy? Are we a fan of small government... so small it fits into the bedroom?
I'm pretty sure we need a line. I don't think it has much to do with S&M, but what happens when wackjob 1 convinces wackjob 2 that he should consent to having his arm cut off. It has happened, and if that doesn't cross your line then we're all in big touble.
the name suicidegirls actually comes from the Chuck Palahniuk book "Survivor", nothing in particular to do with the act itself. I can't remember the exact quote right now though, unfortunately.
Nintendo didn't, the letter is FAKE!
7 58210&tid=95&tid=4 0 6259&tid=155&tid=4
Suicidegirls have been on slashdot more than
once time claiming to be "sued" by someone. The say that they have been sued to generate traffic and profit. See here: http://ask.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/11/26/1
and http://ask.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/11/27/1
Somebody ougth to tell the original story poster....