Is this bad? Am I misunderstanding?
What financial damage does this do when Nintendo no longer manufacturers this console or actively developers for it and hasn't for years, or a decade in the N64/GameCube's case?
What financial damage does this do when Nintendo no longer manufacturers this console or actively developers for it and hasn't for years, or a decade in the N64/GameCube's case?
From enthusiast perspective - it's a boon for preservation purposes.
Sort of. It's obviously illegal to distribute, and arguably using it as a reference for re-implementation in emulators or in hardware would be a derivative work, and so also illegal. This could make things harder for emulator and hardware developers who now have to screen new contributors to ensure they have not been exposed to this material. It will probably be a fantastic resource 5-10+ years down the line, when things have cooled off, but for now, it's all fairly radioactive for people and organizations that are concerned about legal action.
You cannot prove a negative. The most a project can do is to have people signing waivers that state they have not been exposed and/or will not copy stuff, effectively discharging responsibility on the individual.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ReactOS#Internal_audit
>> "On 27 January 2006, the developers responsible for maintaining the ReactOS code repository disabled access after a meeting was held to discuss the allegations. When approached by NewsForge, Microsoft declined to comment on the incident. Since ReactOS is a free and open-source software development project, the claim triggered a negative reaction by the free software community; in particular, Wine barred several inactive developers from providing contributions[citation needed] and formal high level cooperation between the two projects remained difficult as of 2006.[33] Contributions from several active ReactOS developers have been accepted post-audit, and low level cooperation for bug fixes has been still occurring."
>> all developers were made to sign an agreement committing them to comply with the project's policies on reverse engineering. Contributors to its development were not affected by these events, and all access to the software development tools was restored
Also relevant:
>> the 2004 leaked Windows source code[38] was not seen as legal risk for ReactOS, as the trade secret was considered indefensible in court due to broad spread.[39]
This has happened in historical "hacking" cases. I remember one phone phreaking case from years ago against AT&T where the highly non-technical and non-accounting judge was convinced by the plaintiff that the defendant caused something like a billion dollars of lost revenue to AT&T and the defense argument against that damage claim revolved around securities fraud because AT&T didn't mention a billion dollar loss in their 10-K nor did they file an emergency 8-K
Emulators and near perfect ones already exist.
Sure they still sell old games on through their retro console but these can be pirated easily on existing consoles.
This wouldn’t affect the bottom line really at all since this will not make piracy easier.
The only possible loss here is due to fines from regulators or law suits from 3rd parties which had their licenses IP exposed but the latter would be a hard thing to prove or estimate it would be hard to claim that 25-30 year old SGI IP would be that valuable to their competitors today especially since SGI is dead and who knows who owns that IP right now.
They would probably sell the console and a bunch of games as a single playable kit.
Given their place in the electronics supply chain, China has an incredible ability to clone hardware.
Today you have pretty expensive high end SNES clones on the market on top of the 100/1000 games in one HDMI single SoC clones and Nintendo doesn’t seem to care.
But emulators are already available with very good accuracy so I don't know if this will actually have any actual impact on their potential sales.
I do believe that N64 emulation might benefit from the leaks, as I am under the impression the accuracy of N64 emulators has some glaring issues still.
And "just" emulation doesn't sell good, even Nintendo just adds it as an additional goody to their online service (NES/SNES).
I believe at least for Nintendo it doesn't really matter much.
I would expect a lot of NES / SNES / Gameboy games would do well on phones.
Super Mario 3 seems like it would do better than Super Mario Run.
It is illegal, but I do not see it being bad for consumers. If anything it seems that it could be good if it has been done legally from Nintendo instead of being a leak.
It seems unlikely to me, but I think that's the only real potential for damage.
With many games being outright f2p or very cheap (except AAA titles) I don't get why they all are so uptight about DRM/piracy...
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.
(It's an Asian concept that might be grossly explained to Westerners as social reputation or honor.)
(At least that's what they will most likely give as an argument)