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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
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
Ugh, haven't you been on Slashdot long enough to see that 'can't claim trademark' argument debunked 50 times? Ignoring a tiny non-profit fan mod project would absolutely not trigger a trademark forfeiture. There's absolutely no requirement to go after every fan who dares to do something trivial. And even if that was a concern, they could instead offer a perpetual license for a penny.
Name one trademark lost by non-enforcement in the last, oh... 80 years. 1948 or later. Not unenforceable against someone else who was using it due to laches -- totally expected and boring -- I mean lost as in unenforecable against everyone in the registered mark's jurisdiction.
Becasue let me tell you, my peers promulgating that meme, for a profit, keep using examples from the early 20th century, if not even earlier. May as well be warning the populace about marauding dire wolves.
Because people create because they want to create, the don't care that their time is wasted, they want to make something that they enjoy and are proud of.
I may go against the standard economic thinking that people will only create because there is money in it. That is clearly rubbish, true artists create because they are driven to create, they are quite willing to spend there own time and money on things that are very unlikely make them money.
It is quite clear by the way people spend that it is not based optimizing there finances but their perceived enjoyment of life, how may people who live of paycheck to paycheck borrow to buy an iPhone? Debate about which phone is best, aside there are clearly cheaper alternatives out there. They do not logically weigh up the cost and benefits to them.
Stop trying to change human nature, it is not going to happen and change the laws to take advantage of that nature. If we what more creativity all we have to do is have laws that let them.