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Comment by wetpaws | Hacker News Reader

Gentle reminder that Nintendo was never good

I mean have you met the competition? Microsoft is never NOT in the running for world's most evil corporation, and Sony made Morbius.

The competition against Nintendo is the vast array of indie devs.

They’re also not exactly allies with folks that just want to maintain video game history that they refuse to maintain themselves.

Attempting to defend your perceived rights in court isn't evil.

Intellectual property monopolists should not even exist in the first place, much less have "rights" to "defend" in court, real or perceived. The whole premise is absurd to begin with. I can't believe it got to the point where people are debating the relative morality of monopolists defending their "rights".

How is Nintendo a monopolist?

Every single owner of intellectual property is a monopolist. The government grants them a monopoly on the information for a number of years.

Patents are somewhat tolerable monopolies: they tend to last only a quarter of our lifetimes. Once they expire, the information is freed from their "ownership".

Nintendo didn't build their fortunes on patents, though. They built it on copyrights. You and I will likely be long dead before those works enter the public domain. If they ever do.

Nintendo's perceptions of their rights are far in excess of reasonable. Attempting to defend that does make them bad.

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