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Nintendo Nixes YouTube Videos of Super Mario Speedruns
The Boston Globe reports (based on Kotaku's story earlier this month) that Nintendo is cracking down on YouTube videos which show speedruns of its games -- computer-guided play that skips completely human hands pressing buttons on a controller. Why? The article notes that these play-throughs "require the use of ROMs, digital backup files of the original game that can be freely passed from computer to computer, or downloaded from well-known websites. Therefore, Nintendo reasons — and YouTube is clearly sympathetic to this reasoning — there are copyright issues at play, since players aren’t using the (ancient) original game cartridges, or newer copies sold directly online by Nintendo." Legally justifiable or not, this seems unlikely to build goodwill with some of Nintendo's most nostalgic fans.
What the deuce? Yes, there are *some* people out there who use ROMs, hacked or otherwise, for their speedruns, but there are quite a few people who do them using stock consoles and vanilla cartridges. I can understand Nintendo getting upset about hacked gameplay, but they should not penalize people who glitch games or simply try to play as fast as possible.
Not only that, but there are things like Retrode ( https://www.dragonbox.de/en/63... ) that allow you to make your own ROM - file from an original cartridge that you own or just play directly from the cartridge using an emulator.
But you can dump your own ROM. Or at least, you can get the same version ROM that matches a cart you bought at the flea market. So that's not necessarily illegal, either.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
There is absolutely nothing about a speedrun being tool-assisted that requires pirated software. The Retrode I just linked, for example, is a really easy and simple way of using your own, original cartridges. Also, there are plenty of videos on the Internet where people are using original consoles and cartridges connected to automated, modified controllers -- ie. tool-assisted runs.
Or at least, you can get the same version ROM that matches a cart you bought at the flea market.
This is illegal, you know, for the reasoning described in the opinion of the court in UMG v. MP3.com . To take advantage of the necessary adaptation and backup provisions of US copyright law (17 USC 117), you have to dump the ROM yourself. And you can't just buy an NES Game Pak reader at the same flea market. Even the Retrode never supported NES format; it came with Super NES and Sega Genesis cartridge readers, and most adapters fit in one of those slots.
If you read the article you'll see that they're targeting tool-assisted speedruns, i.e.: ones that use pirated software.
They have absolutely no way of knowing if the software used is pirated or not.
They just assume that it is pirated since it is easier to use pirated software than licensed software in this case.
I also assume that Nintendo are illegally bribing politicians and should be considered a criminal organization since it is easier to get to a dominant market position that way. Just like Nintendo I don't have any proof to back my speculations up with.
Oh, come on, it's easier for young people today to get into the guts of computing than ever before. I remember as a child, the most I could do with my parent's Mac was play with Resedit or create little Forth programs that could hardly interface with the OS. All the cool stuff (C compilers, documentation) was extremely expensive. It was only in the 1990s that, thanks to the convergence of Free Software and x86, a person could get a serious dev environment for cheap. Kids these days can get a Raspberry Pi for cheap, install Linux, and immediately have access to all kinds of ways to tinker -- even quasi-professional documentation like O'Reilly books is free today thanks to torrents.
The 8-bit computers of the early to mid 80s are way simpler to understand and hack on for a kid than an Arduino or Raspberry Pi. When I was 7 there was no way I would have had any grasp on a C compiler. However, booting up my VIC-20 dumped me immediately to a BASIC interpreter where I could immediately begin to mess around. It wasn't very long before I was POKEing values into video memory to create simple animations and games based on program listings in books and magazines. Eventually I was creating my own programs from scratch with not much more than 5 or 6 simple commands and no tool chain to learn.
Modern systems might be far more capable and make it "easier" to create a sophisticated system, but there are many more layers of abstraction between you and the machine and a lot more to learn in order to make it do something useful.