Nintendo Nixes YouTube Videos of Super Mario Speedruns

Posted by timothy on Sunday September 20, 2015 @02:39AM from the you-mean-they-also-buy-games? dept.

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.

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Re:A very stupid company in some ways by Cederic · 2015-09-20 04:55 · Score: 1, Interesting

Let's start by acknowledging that piracy is a major issue for companies like Nintendo and that they should do something.
No. I don't acknowledge that at all. I think they are not harmed at all by piracy, of the traditional or electronic kind.