Nintendo Issues DMCA Takedown for Super Mario Bros. Commodore 64 Port

The DMCA has noticeably muddied the waters. Copyright shouldn't legally work that way [in that selective enforcement weakens further enforcement], but among other parts of the DMCA over-reach, it's the increasing gray area confusion between trademark law and copyright law that the DMCA seems particularly to exacerbate. That's partly because providers (such as YouTube) often handle DMCA takedowns as all or nothing, and technically do not allow selective takedowns or make exceptions hard to handle.

That's also partly because the courts seem to have allowed corporations themselves to confuse and comingle copyright and trademark laws. Recent arguments that Disney has not bothered to extend the copyright term again because they think they've bulwarked Mickey Mouse trademarks enough at this point to continue to control the properties when they expire from copyright, and that idea seems to stem from this increasingly muddy water.

The laws seem clear that the water shouldn't be this muddy and trademark is not some magically stronger copyright (and copyright is not just some subtly weaker trademark) in an ouroboros of self-correlation fed by DMCA logic and corporate rent seeking. It may take some serious casework in the next few decades to fix such problems, however.

It's definitely the question of how limited that monopoly is that is at hand. Scale is exactly the question. The current copyright terms are outside of human scale in that they extend past a human lifecycle (explicitly in the case of single, clear authored works as the current copyright is author life plus it's number of years). The original US copyright allowed for 7 years with one possible extension for an additional 7 (for a total of 14 years). That's relatively a lot more human of a scale. (That scale still covers the current 10 year scale of the Marvel Cinematic Universe to date, for example. That's 3 MCU planning "Phases" of 3-5 year planning horizons. Imagine if it were only roughly four more years before, say, Iron Man 1 might expire from copyright.)

It doesn't seem likely that we will see copyright terms reduced back down to human scale, but it's a shame.

There aren't - not through increased copyright length, anyway. The value of proprietary IP decays very quickly over time, until the vast majority of works entirely falls hostage to transaction costs of all kinds (see the whole issue with "orphan works", which may or may not be copyrighted but no one knows for sure, and thus no one can effectively make use of them) and their value is entirely destroyed as long as copyright protection persists.

The Mario Bros game is actually a very rare exception, and even then its value is really only as a representation of Nintendo's best known franchise, i.e. nobody really cares about the game itself, and there are comparable-quality games that are totally free these days.

No, they're maintaining the precedent that piggy-backing off the fruits of their labour without consent is unacceptable. When they go easy on one thing, that gives carte blanche to the next.

It's not dirty, it's business.

> but their art loses it's charm when I think of the nastiness that their lawyers are wreaking

> the more I think about it, the less happy I am playing their games

The issue is with the copyright game, not the players who see no alternative but to play it. They have shareholders' investments to protect and must be seen to take action.

All I can say is that Nintendo's lawyers have been doing things like this since the NES, and if Nintendo's art wasn't tarnished in your eyes back then, then this really does sound like a knee-jerk reaction.