Costa Rican supermarket wins trademark battle against Nintendo

Most likely a reference to the boxer Rodolfo González, who was extremely popular in Japan and is frequently referenced in video games (e.g. Gato in Chrono Trigger is named Gonzalez in the Japanese release).

In any way, Nintendo suing a supermarket due to trademark violations is nonsense.

What are they claiming? That people will confuse it with a gaming console?

This is often parroted and almost never true. US courts will not kill one of the biggest and most well-recognized companies in the world because of one tiny corner supermarket.

i think hypermarkets achieve their bigness not by being bigger supermarkets, but by selling everything a supermarket sells, and then also selling everything a department store sells.

doesn't have the same ring to it, now does it ?

How did I never know this existed? Are there more secret pages like this??

You mean a diminutive.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diminutive

> A diminutive is a word obtained by modifying a root word to convey a slighter degree of its root meaning, either to convey the smallness of the object or quality named, or to convey a sense of intimacy or endearment, and sometimes to belittle something or someone.

Yeah, it's funny, a word consisting both of an augmentative (the opposite of diminutive) and a diminutive.

I think supermarché is more a type of shop that offers products that are traditionally from different shop (you've got a bakery, green-grocer, butcher, cheese-monger, electronics, etc... under one shop), while the hypermarché are really defined the "big surface" you mentioned.

So it make sense to have a superette in the corner of the street that offer everyday goods while an hypermarché have clothing, DIY materials, big appliances, etc. on sale..

> we have superette, a small surface store, branded like the super/hyper but within the city center

I think we visited a few of those when we had a family holiday to France last year. They seemed really nice.

In Mexico I’ve seen a lot of small shops (what we would call “bodegas” in US cities) called Mini-Super. Always gives me a chuckle.

That's meaningful though, at least in my experiences in France circa twenty years ago, a supermarché would be a supermarket like here in the UK, and a hypermarché would have all kinds of other stuff like clothes, back to school stationery, seasonal gear/toys, etc. - as well as other mini shops around the edge, cutting keys, McDo, etc.

Touché

The catch is, game preservation touches Nintendo's present day commercial interests, as they fully expanded their offering to "classic" games. Nintendo Online is already that, but I also wouldn't be surprised if tomorrow a playable GameBoy toothbrush was released from Nintendo.

For people looking for an entry point, Moon Channel has been covering this topic pretty in depth (author is a lawyer, but not in trademark per se I think)

https://youtu.be/7rzWR9JP1WE?si=UOk5TI9iESdAONVB

Regular reminder that LikSang was amazing, and killed mostly by Sony, but with help from other console manufacturers:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lik_Sang

I'm not so convinced it's that dangerous, but part of that is a naive sense that if they keep doing more dumb lawsuits, that just means it's more likely for a handful of defendants to actually fight them (as here) and win, which is the way to establish precedent or in the longer term actually get new laws that make things clearer. In this case, hopefully Costa Rica legal fees aren't so bad. Settlements are kind of bad in that regard though -- I'm reminded of the Youtube / Viacom fight that started in 2007 and eventually settled for an undisclosed amount. But in the meantime some bills were raised in committees about forcing site owners to implement things like what later became Content ID; what we got instead was Youtube doing their own proprietary version on their own accord (it probably did help fend off more lawsuits) and the law and courts being silent on the matter. Is that better or worse? What of the "danger"?

I guess another part of me not seeing much danger is because in the extreme, technology has for decades made this a non-problem when it comes to possibility and existence -- my old ROMs aren't going anywhere regardless of what Nintendo does or doesn't do, or what the law does or doesn't become. There's the matter of possibly lessened access and less widespread historical knowledge, which as a gamer I think is a shame, but the archives will survive and devs will continue making emulators for fun, anonymously if they have to. So long as things are available to those who seek them out, that's what I care most about, and that victory has already been won for non-service games.

I don't follow news that closely but I'm also not so sure these are all that new and unprecedented -- Nintendo's always been kind of a dick when it comes to lawfare and fan activities and work. Maybe you can point me to a piece that's looked at the frequency and types of legal activity over the years to compare? Is there anything concrete to suggest I should actually be worried at all about the future availability and development of Dolphin or bsnes or snes9x? I'm somewhat aware of them getting more aggressive with streamers, but the difference there is mainly that streaming and "content creation" are so much bigger now (it's come a long way since Zot the Avenger), so there's a lot more of it and consequently more legal related affairs. To me almost all of it falls under fair use, so whatever, but clearly Nintendo disagrees and Japan itself doesn't have the concept despite having a culture of doujin... (Sega, Capcom, Sony, and other Japanese companies all get my ire as much as Nintendo when it comes to this sort of thing at least.)

Yes, these companies are so rich, and their targets so comparatively poor, that they're not risking anything by spamming lawsuits. It's like a rich individual going to some developing country and suing poor people for their meager possessions, for no other reason than because they can.

How else are their armies of lawyers supposed to justify their existence? It's the same as having a ton of UX people on staff who have to constantly move buttons around and change color schemes to stay busy.

The law makes it a nesessity. If they don't do all they can to protect their trademark, they loose it. It's not like copyright.

And ofcourse the lawyers have to make themselves needed somehow.

Yes. We should create downsides to being petty assholes.

According to the article, the guy owns a single supermarket, not a chain.

It's a single small shop in Costa Rica

https://maps.app.goo.gl/icLLDdZxXw861bVNA

A small business owner doesn't qualify as "ordinary folk"?

I have mentioned this before - Uzi was my ISP when I lived in Raleigh and had ISDN service. Cool guy. Still won't buy a Nissan (automobile).

So you stopped ca. 30 years ago?

We don't have unregulated environments.

A copy on the wayback machine to give context as to why Nissan.com doesn't belong to the car company (despite their lawsuits): https://web.archive.org/web/20200403031920/https://www.nissa...

Notwithstanding the sassmouth and the fact it doesn't address any of my questions, that does make this more interesting. Nintendo has food trademarks, so their position against the supermarket is even more legitimate, IMO.

Interesting. Wonder if we'll get a sequel to this case someday.

Oh, it's not that I can't understand their point of view. Mario is part of our culture now, and I don't think we should let such things be under tight control of big corporations for more than a decade or so, in part also to give them some incentive to innovate.

Yeah, for some reason, I still root for them (not necessarily in silly cases like these, just when it comes to being a successful video game company).

I have way too many fond memories dating back to NES, plus they still continue to make great games.

It’s hard for me to be mad at them.

It's not automatic.

The purpose of a trademark is increasing trust and reducing fraud. E.g., when I buy lithium batteries I intend to store inside my home there's only so much I can do to audit the internals, so I rely on brand recognition to help purchase safer options. Other people and brands are welcome to sell lithium batteries, but masquerading as the brand I'm attempting to purchase from is damaging to that brand and to myself.

When other people use your trademark (even legitimately, as the courts have deemed for TFA), it's possible for that brand you've built to slowly morph into something other than just a name for your business or product. Band-aids and kleenexes are some classic examples, and the phrase "super mario" referring to more and more non-Nintendo things over time could do the trick too.

As something of a side tangent, this is philosophically related to the "heap" problem -- if you place one grain of sand at a time in a location, when does it transition from being an assortment of grains of sand into being a heap of sand? Which grain makes that transition? In much the same way, which trademark infringement dilutes the brand enough that when a court tries to go back to first principles they'll finally side with the infringer because the public doesn't actually recognize your brand name as referring to you in particular sufficiently often?

The playbook they're exercising is keeping that philosophical collection of sand very small. There isn't any legal recourse for suing a thousand infringers once public perception has shifted. Growing your brand and reducing the flow of sand to a trickle are both allowed though, and the legal half of that is the latter.

Note that the playbook says nothing about whether those are legitimate uses of your trademark. The thing you're fighting against is changing public perception, and you're trying to slow the change down as much as possible, using the courts as a cudgel.