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Nintendo Shuts Down Tool Used To Build Pokemon Fan Games (arstechnica.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Since 2007, Pokemon Essentials has been a crucial part of the Pokemon fan game community. As a free mod for the paid RPG Maker software, Pokemon Essentials offers all the graphics, music, maps, and tilesets a fan game maker needs to craft their own Poke-adventure. Fans of the tool congregated around the PokeCommunity forums and a dedicated Pokemon Essentials wiki to download files, share creations, and discuss the scene. Earlier this week, however, PokeCommunity forum moderator Marin announced that "the Pokemon Essentials wikia and all downloads for it have been taken down due to a copyright claim by Nintendo of America." That means "we will not allow Pokemon Essentials or any of its assets to be hosted or distributed on PokeCommunity," the announcement reads. "We sincerely apologize that we have to do this, but there is no going around it." Fandom, the company that hosts the wiki, confirmed to the Verge that it had "received a DMCA notice on behalf of Nintendo notifying us of content that was in violation of its copyright holdings. After carefully assessing the violations in regards to the Pokemon Essentials wiki, we came to a decision to take it down."
And now I'm going to seed it out of spite for a week or so.
Czechm8 nintendo
code audit time
Nintendo is just not thinking here. Basically, volunteers are working for them for free to create value that they can reap... and they want to shut them down?
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
Now with some tried to do this with QEMU and / or MAME? Then the case will to go to court with a big legal team to stop any chilling effects
By giving Nintendo your money you are funding their lawyers.
Gotta catch them all! The world would be better if fewer people spent so much time immersed in such childish fantasy.
Nintendo biting the hand that feeds it.
These are the people who kept this stuff relevant.
Hands up would you still be playing SMB if it were not for emulation?
They have been going after fan projects for a while. The last I heard of was Pixelmon, a long lived mod for Minecraft that added the little critters and all the commercial game dynamics (like fights) for free.
Nothing of this was for making any money, just the work of dedicated fans with programming skills across several years
But of course, it being free is the problem.
When will people learn not to put their work into proprietary systems? If I at all gave a shit about this comment, I wouldn't put it here. The owners of Slashdot can take it all away any moment. If you care about the time and effort you spend on these games, then demand an open license and hold off your investment until you get it. Don't be someone else's gardener for free. Work on your own turf.
Stop having fun with our games. They are serious business and we can't have you playing with them!
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
They were using the pokemon name and likenesses, if Nintendo, or game freak didn't come out to say, "Hey, knock that off" then they can't claim the trademark anymore. Use it/enforce it.. or lose it. Honestly I like this model (to a point of course). The outrage I'm seeing in the world just because "it's big mean corpo thugs!!!111" instead of indie du jour is dumb.
I do sort of which there was some form of statute of limitations on this sort of thing. Like if Nintendo goes under and doesn't pass off the IP to another group that will be producing new content from it.. great, it's now public. Or if they abandon it for x amount of time, also great, public domain. What's that timeframe though? 5 years, 10 years?
...or the many other countries that the high and mighty stuffed shirts would be told to go fuck themselves if they tried a C&D there.
There Nintendo, new, not your shit site.
They can't make a claim on an emulator/system unless it uses their copyrights. They can stop someone from calling a machine a Nintendo, they can stop people from distributing game copies (and hosting them) with copyrighted characters/worlds/content.
They're not avoiding MAME and QEMU out of fear of taking on a big project. They're only going after cases where they hold the rights to do so.
If you insist on eating the seed corn, don't be surprised when the next generation looks elsewhere.
How is the Riemann zeta function like Trump rallies? Both have an endless number of trivial zeros.
The difference between video games and ball sports is that ball sports aren't owned by anyone. The National Football League has never had a legal monopoly that gives grounds to prohibit USFL or XFL teams from playing and broadcasting their own matches. (Donald Trump did a good job of destroying the USFL all by himself, but that's beside the point.) Nor could the National League of Professional Baseball Players stop the rival American League from playing from 1901 to 2000 when it merged with the NL to form Major League Baseball. Even today, independent professional baseball leagues outside MLB and its Minor League farm system continue to operate.
The use of a particular ball sport league's player performances in "rotisserie" or "fantasy sports" pools, on the other hand, has been the subject of lawsuits: STATS Inc. v. NBA and CDM v. MLB Advanced Media. In the latter, a federal appellate judge upheld that the players' association, not the league, owns the right to license player names and likenesses to rotisseries, and that sport statistics are uncopyrightable facts.
Nintendo has fallen for Sega's campaign becoming Nintendont
Nintendo really needs to respect it's fans.
Me on the other hand, "Nintendo, you're a bunch of fucks and have lost a valuable partner!".
And, "Suck it!"
Who the fuck would ever use a fucking emulator if you have the original game?
Plug an authentic game cartridge that you own into a Retrode or INL Retro cartridge reader and dump the data on the cartridge to a file (which is not infringement pursuant to 17 USC 117(a)(1)), and you can play it in an emulator. This lets you play on your phone or tablet with a USB or Bluetooth game controller, your laptop, or a PC connected to a television that isn't compatible with composite video at all or with the slightly nonstandard signal timing that third- and fourth-generation consoles produce. (NES and Super NES hsync is slightly too fast; Master System and Genesis hsync is slightly too slow. Neither one is interlaced, except for one Genesis game and one Super NES game.) It also lets you use cheats or other mods, or emulator features that allegedly improve the appearance of the game (such as high-definition texture packs in HiSMS, HDNes or automatic conversion of tile pixel patterns to 3D meshes in 3DNes VR).
If I recall, Nintendo isn't the owner of Pokémon. Such a legal move should come from the Pokémon Company International. So the first thing they would have to do is prove they have standing to even make this claim!
Nintendo tried stopping second hand market selling of Nintendo games
Never give then another dollae - it's the only way corporations will learn.
If you don't like it stop buying their stuff. I have. It wasn't easy. I grew up with Nintendo. I love Nintendo games. I will not ignore the fact that they do ugly shit like this on a regular basis. They attack fans and abuse a broken copyright system. I won't support that behavior. Many do this but Nintendo is the most aggressive and abusive. If enough people said enough is enough and actually stopped buying. Nintendo's tactics would change. It always comes down to money and if it proves unprofitable they will quit.
WTF?
That when Nintendo's stocks were falling they didn't seem as heavy handed. Yet, when they start racking in the $$$ - they suddenly grow a pair?
The sooner we have a large thriving free software and free culture games industry, the sooner these types of problems will go away because games will have to be made both free culture and free software in order to make a profit.