"That would be silly. The whole "defend it or lose it" applies to trademarks. And it's not a punishment to force you to sue people, it's just a natural consequence that if your word or symbol becomes a general part of the language and culture (like using the word "kleenex" to mean "any paper I use to blow my nose on") that it can no longer be enforced because you can't claim to own general ideas like that. "
Er. You make a very good argument here for exactly why trademark law forces companies to sue people using their IP, art assets, and whatnot without permission here. No company wants their multimillion or multibillion dollar franchise to become a generalized term, it devastates the work they put into creating and branding new IP. Becoming the next Kleenex or Xerox terrifies them all. I think it's Lego that strictly mandates the term 'Lego brick' to describe their objects, to avoid generalization.
Nintendo currently sells classic games that are being used in romhacks.
They also just released what is probably their biggest hit of the year, using those same assets.
They may very well have a legal obligation to their investors to show that they are cracking down on piracy and romhacks to protect their trademark until a court of law DOES toss this nonsense out, which is why they quickly did this right before the release of mario maker and then... has there been a second round sense then? They might just have needed to hit a corporate checkbox of 'did due diligence to appease investors,' which would include <a href=http://kotaku.com/nintendo-investor-i-do-not-understand-video-games-1599625657>this guy, because Nintendo is invested in by shareholders that don't understand why they talk about video games, I kid you not.
(Guy probably wishes they were making pachinko machines to get a higher return on investment. I wonder if he invests in Konami?)
That might explain a lot of anti-consumer bad behavior, if they're in thrall to anti-consumer idiots. It's a horrible move from start to finish and completely inexcusable, but it's important that we understand that when shareholders have some control over corporations, those companies have to prove they are being responsible with the digital assets they control. We probably see a lot of horrible misguided DRM implemented just to avoid being exposed to a lawsuit from investors that the business is negligently missing out on potential profits. (This might also explain why the Nintendo Youtube program is only a Youtube program - that's where the money is. You can make a monetized video on literally any or every other platform, Nintendo has no policy to police you. The inconsistency that it is a Youtube creators program, not a web or video creators program, is interesting).
I'm not disagreeing that this was a wretched thing for Nintendo to do. All of the points made hold true. Nintendo has no proof of wrongdoing, no copyrights were in danger, this wouldn't hold up in a court of law. But they DO need to defend their trademarks, and they have to go as far as their shareholders demand, which won't stop until they get challenged in a court of law and beaten. Which would probably come as a relief to EVERYONE.
What we really need is to shake up our environment for distributing digital video here. Nintendo isn't our only bad actor here - Youtube has a huge market share of web video, always sides with the company over the user, abuse is never acted on quickly or goes to a proper trial, etc. If Youtube stops permitting and encouraging this behavior, we win. If they don't, they open the door to EA, Ubisoft, Activision, and all our other favorites doing the same thing, or even worse, getting shareholders that demand they regulate Youtube the way they do DRM on PC.
