Portal 64 taken down by Valve [video] | Hacker News Reader

Portal 64 taken down by Valve [video]

youtube.com

25 pointsskibz10 comments

I also don't buy the idea that Valve "had to" force James to take the project down, they could've just ignored it without supporting it?

They have to protect their trademark at least, it's use it or lose it.

If that's even relevant in this case, surely they would've just asked for the game to be renamed, not taken down?

And if trademark was the issue, where does the libultra stuff come in?

They can always grant projects like this a non-commercial licence.

Also, the aggressively protect your trademarks or lose them thing is a myth.

> Also, the aggressively protect your trademarks or lose them thing is a myth.

It's not. For example, Bayuer lost their trademark for aspirin due to genericization.[0]

For more context about copyright, trademark and patent protection by videogame companies and their motivation - I recommend this excellent on-topic video essay by a real lawyer[1].

[0] - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generic_trademark

[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i13hrynnGNY

I am aware of trademark becoming generic words and losing protection. But that is a process of a trademark becoming so wide spread in usage that courts find that it is just a common word now. Courts look a common usage, not a tally of all the times the trademark holder didn't defend the trademark.

A trademark might still be generic-ified even if the holder attacks every use of it.

If Valve ignores this one, and decides to attack some other project selling something with a Portal trademark on it, the courts won't look at this case and say "but you didn't do anything that time".

The whole premise of "defend it or lose it" is a misunderstanding of how trademarks becoming generic.

The video implies that they were amenable to allowing the project until they found out it used proprietary Nintendo libraries. Which unfortunately meant they couldn't ignore it.

That's what I'm not buying. It's not like they had officially committed to supporting it or made it an official Valve product.

Sad to see such a cool project canceled. But looking forward to the new game! The experience and inventions made while working on Portal 64 were definitely worth the effort.

It seems they are using unallowed nintendo SDK tools.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com