| You might be missing the concept of "face" [0]. This is only bad in that it causes Nintendo to lose face, and Nintendo hates losing face. For example, examine Wikipedia; Nintendo's page about legal disputes [1] is whitewashed to reword all of Nintendo's abuses towards Free Software and the public domain as "protection" of Nintendo's "property". Face allows Nintendo to take their holier-than-thou attitude. It is why they feel that they are allowed to both destroy the community's own work [2][3][4] and steal it for themselves [5][6]. We profess love for Mario, Zelda, Pikachu, and Metroid, and in return, they are socially empowered to abuse us. Imagine a world where copyright were only 14 years, as in the original, or 2 years, as in my back-of-napkin estimation of how long it takes to publish something and have it fully saturate the world market. In such a world, Nintendo's back catalog would no longer have the force of law behind its monopoly; they would still publish excellent games, but they would not be able to prevent others from enjoying them. Indeed, there is not any reasonable claim to financial damages, just facial damages. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Face_(sociological_concept) [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nintendo#Intellectual_property... [2] https://github.com/github/dmca/blob/4dbf90f837296db72ca959e1... [3] https://github.com/github/dmca/blob/master/2016/2016-12-27-N... [4] https://github.com/github/dmca/blob/master/2017/2017-06-22-N... [5] https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2017-01-18-did-nintendo-d... [6] https://old.reddit.com/r/emulation/comments/9as2ii/did_ninte... |
You oversold both examples.
2, 3, and 4: That's a hosted(?) emulator distributing, or at least referencing, Nintendo IP, and not in a fair-use context.
You're mildly right about 5 and 6. Nintendo stole the header of ROM files of content that was stolen from Nintendo. The author of the header would have a claim against Nintendo, but seeing how they'd have to explain how the ROM got distributed in the first place, and it's not clear there's enough information in the header for it to be eligible for copyright, I doubt they'd say anything.