Full Screen Mario Takedown Notice
fullscreenmario.com
fullscreenmario.com
Simple steps to protect yourself:
* Try not to clone commercial products to the pixel
* Pay attention to software licenses. Sometimes they matter
* If prominent news websites accuse you of doing something illegal, consider what they have to say
Of course not...part of the appeal of fullscreenmario and any other remake is from the psychological appeal of characters that the big bad corporation spent decades and millions to burnish. It's a cool project but don't play it off as Nintendo being the parasite
So, if you take the perspective that Nintendo are doing you a favour by pushing your next phase of development away from derivation and instead into creation, and if you do indeed re-factor the codebase to do something else, then you will have experienced a positive effect from this experience. If all you do is take it down and not think about the next generation of product that you can base on your proven, demonstrated working technology, then I think you will have kind of missed an opportunity. Of course, easier for some random stranger on the internet to say this: but if you roll your own content on top of this layer, then you'll have really made something ..
It's already not derivative other than cosmetically, I can understand trying to find silver lining but the whole DMCA thing is a ridiculous grey fluster cuck.
Appearance matters, form matters the moreso I'd say.
If the appearance and level structure and such didn't matter there would have been no reason to duplicate them would there?
Precedent is a slippery slope. Once you allow the "first" to copy your product, its so much harder to fight the 2nd or 3rd attempt.
The word "theft" is unproductive, because as this case shows, it might be more descriptive to claim that copyright is theft, as society was deprived of value for no good reason at all. Nintendo won't make more and better games because this website does not exist. People won't enjoy a single nice thing. Copyright stole this value from everyone.
I don't think someone has much right to complain if they blatantly violate the law as it stands today and then get minimally called on it, though.
It's easy for a general to consider the optimal strategy for storming a fortified position. He's not going to be the cannon fodder who gets sent in first with little chance of survival.
Without proper Trademark law, it is impossible to build up a "trustful" relationship between a company and its customers. You are NOT allowed to copy another person's brand that they have spent many years and much money developing. Its just not fair.
I disagree. This can still be achieved with the right (non legal) infrastructure to protect your brand i.e. an official Twitter account or domain name that can be used to identify the "legitimate" products from a company. It would be a much better tradeoff to the current cannibalistic nature of our current trademark laws that cripple the development of truly wonderful games like Pokemon Generations [1] while they milk the brand to death by regurgitating the same game with new Pokemon year after year.
[1] http://www.indiedb.com/games/pokemon-generations/news/change...
Trademark law protects you from domain camping and false identities.
Trademark law requires you to provably build a brand from the ground up. Hire your own artists, hire your own creativity. Are you honestly telling me that you are so uncreative that you can't create your own brand? Don't recreate "Mario", create your own damn characters!
And that is how the world gets better: when you reward creativity. It is virtually impossible to recreate a character, a brand, or anything and actually violate trademark law if you actually built a brand from scratch.
the law says it is not,case closed.
Note, virtually all works are derivative works, except that now, we're only allowed to derive from stuff created at an arbitrary point when copyrights became perpetual.
If this mario game was allowed to benefit the many users it did -- would Nintendo lose their incentive to create new games? Would it make Mario not profitable to develop retroactively?
I think the answer to these questions is clear. As is the fact that society is deprived of a huge amount of value here.
I think the answer is obviously not. Therefore, depriving society of this value in order to incentivize Nintendo with higher profits is a bad deal.
In these situations in general it is best to think about extremes in both ends. At one extreme there is round corners on the phone - requires no effort at all to "research". Not allowing to duplicate such work is absurd to anyone who has common sense. On the other end - drug formulas. Requires many scientists' hours, expensive equipment and years of testing to come to market, but can be very easily taken apart and duplicated once it is done. It is clear that it would be unfair if he who researched this formula needs to compete with all the copycats who may only be investing in drug reverse-engineering and mass production. It's really hard to draw the line imo, more so to make a law that could not be abused somehow.
http://christianengstrom.wordpress.com/2011/03/09/an-alterna...
Maybe the point is that the copyright laws are wrong.
If the website is correct, and Mario debuted in 1983, it means he has been a character for 30 years now. Mario (the character/the game) is part of our collective culture.
If anything, the website was an expression of that.
I don't think anyone is arguing that Nintendo doesn't have the legal right to shut down the website. The question is should they have that right?
Handled like a pro. Josh, I admire your dignity.
$ git bundle create one-file.git --all
$ git clone one-file.git new-repo
Do those laws apply even now when github are going to be on very thin ice arguing they had no knowledge of the infringement or their hosting of copyright infringing content - seems like they'd be an easy target for a contributory infringement suite?
A cynic might imagine that they're waiting for the usage statistics to go up so as to inflate the claim.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Millennium_Copyright_Ac...
Literally, as nice as this was, it has nothing to offer Nintendo (that wasn't taken from them to begin with).
Well, apparently he had 2.7 unique visitors in a month. That's a lot of advertising they could have had for their current product range, and I don't imagine most of those people are going to go out and buy some new gear from Nintendo just so they can play a nostalgic game of Mario.
No doubt Nintendo could have developed a similar web-based implementation of Mario if they'd wanted to, but the facts appear to be that they didn't and someone else did. They could probably have benefited from that, and maybe earned a bit of goodwill from the community in the process, for the cost of a mid-level rep spending a few minutes talking with legal and writing a couple of e-mails.
I see your point, though i'd still contend Nintendo doesn't need eyeballs or goodwill when it comes to their flagship products. They can pretty much stick Link or Mario onto anything and it will still sell. You can play the original Mario officially on newer platforms. One of my favorite desk toys is a power-up mushroom I got from Hot Topic that had candy in it which I immediately poured into the trash because the thing it came in was so cool. The popularity of Full Screen Mario demonstrates that - people love Mario, especially the old 8-bit version. It's quite possible that Nintendo discovered there was a market to be tapped with browser-based games that they were unaware of (or unaware of the scale of), but they own Mario anyway, and they don't need to do Josh Goldberg any favors.
Although I completely agree that a great deal of potential creative value is being lost by not allowing classic games to be legally remade (I would love to take a crack at some Intellivision games, especially the old TSR adventures) that's an abstract issue. Nintendo's not an indie game factory that needs to build cred within the gaming community, and while the discussion about the value of derivative works and copyright is worth having, this outcome was pretty much a fait accompli.
That fact is that this project is now public domain, it's right there on Github and any of us can take the source code and build it. Of course it's illegal to host it, but that doesn't mean that those more techincally inclined couldn't run the game locally.
How about picking a less well known, but just as entertaining platform game? Many for the Sega Master System are either abandonware or close enough.
HN is one of the better forums on-line, and it would be a shame if it started getting associated with illegal activities, however much you personally might feel that law is wrong.
They could. But it's highly unlikely and probably in some jurisdictions they would fail.
But isn't it Watterson's right to do this? He's an artist, and he wisely saw that the crass commercialization of his beloved creations would, in the long run, reduce their nostalgic value. Hell, maybe he isn't even thinking in that way. In any case, I think it's possible that C&H holds such a special place in our consciousness because of Watterson's reluctance to license his characters, and good for him.
Now imagine a situation in which a hard-working t-shirt maker puts the images of C&H on shirts -- shirts for which he risks a tremendous amount of capital to produce -- and makes a boatload of money selling $8 t-shirts? Is Watterson harmed financially? For some people, the answer is "No", because Watterson was not making money off of C&H t-shirts in the first place. And copying static images certainly doesn't remove them from Watterson's possession.
Yet I would argue again that Watterson's artistic intent has been damaged...and that even though he hasn't been physically robbed, a well-intentioned t-shirt maker has watered down the value of Watterson's creation.
Is this not the same situation as the OP here? Is it different because Nintendo is a big corporation that should be doing better things with its time? Perhaps...size does matter. But the principle is arguably the same, and for anyone to say that Nintendo is going overboard and doesn't need to protect its intellectual property, that requires making a huge assumption about Nintendo's strategy on how it wishes Mario Bros. to be experienced, same as it's a huge assumption to say that Bill Watterson doesn't know what he's doing when he refuses to license the use of C&H.
More context. This is Watterson's opinion on turning C&H into a film:
http://www.salon.com/2013/10/17/calvin_and_hobbes_creator_bi...
> Watterson also confirmed that an animated “Calvin and Hobbes” movie won’t happen: > > > The visual sophistication of Pixar blows me away, but I have zero interest in animating Calvin and Hobbes. If you’ve ever compared a film to a novel it’s based on, you know the novel gets bludgeoned. It’s inevitable, because different media have different strengths and needs, and when you make a movie, the movie’s needs get served. As a comic strip, Calvin and Hobbes works exactly the way I intended it to. There’s no upside for me in adapting it.
Watterson is incredibly protective of his own creation, so far as to not even give Pixar -- legendary artists in their own right -- a chance to entertain millions of people with the goodness of C&H. Yet I don't think that makes him a copyright-villain.
To pick another comic from the era, the Far Side doesn't have a central character or set of characters like Calvin & Hobbes. There may be a recurring cast of similar bovine, but they aren't characters in the same way Calvin and Hobbes are. Is C&H more worthy of copyright protection? Copying any one comic would be violation of copyright, but if I make another comic with talking cows, no one will say that I sole from the Far Side... well they may say it, but it would be hard to prove.
Once published, these original works become part of our culture. If someone draws a young boy with a stuffed tiger and makes no claim that the characters are to depict Calvin and Hobbes, how can someone claim that they are protected from copyright anymore so than taking cows?
If I have the choice of buying a t-shirt that Bill Watterson illustrated, or some knock-off imitation that claims to be illustrated by Bill Watterson, Bill should be able to sue to protect his name. But if the illustration makes no claim to have been authored by Bill Watterson, why shouldn't this be allowed? Side by side on a clothing rack, I'd buy the official C&H design over an imitation, provided that the official design was the funnier shirt. If the "imitation" design is funnier, then do we as a culture not benefit from what would today be categorized as copyright infringement?
With Full Screen Mario, no claim is made that this is created by Nintendo. If you recolored the art, so that Mario had purple overalls and a yellow shirt, is that sufficiently different? At what point has something been altered enough so that the derivative work isn't a "copy?" Can Nintendo lay claim to the color palette chosen?
The reality is that the line drawn between what is the original and what is copyright infringement is indefinable. More to the point, it is a legal question answered by a court, and therefore an objective decision. Characters are just as much a part of the culture as are the style and format. It just so happens that our current laws favor the protection of characters. If your character is overwhelmingly recognizable in "derivative" works, copyright holders can claim infringement, even when copying wasn't a part of the creative process. Even if the "derivative" work is substantially different in terms of how the asset is used.
As a culture, we really need to reflect upon why we have copyright protection in the first place. I'm convinced that it is causing more harm than good. Copyright is meant to expire so that the culture can build upon concepts and ideas that are still relatable to the culture in which the original was established. 25 years is more than ample time for the original copyright owner to have benefited from an idea. There is no harm to our culture if those ideas are allowed to flourish under the stewardship of others. With the accelerated pace or society evolves today, 25 years is downright ancient.
Full Screen Mario is obviously intended to look and feel like the original game Nintendo published 30 years ago, but so much has changed since then. If Nintendo created Super Mario Brothers today, and they were just getting into the gaming industry, I don't think they would have even built the game using web technologies... they probably would have created a game that runs on cellphones and tablets and they would have called the game Angry Birds.
Rovio understands current copyright law as much as anyone, which is why their games have recognizable characters. Sling shots can be replaced with catapults and birds could be replaced with squirrels, and no one would mistake that game for Angry Birds, even with similar game play mechanics. If you were to put a red bird with a yellow beak in a racing game, I would be terribly surprised if the creators of the driving game weren't sued. Has our culture been harmed in either instance? Has Rovio been damaged in one instance more than the other? Does our culture benefit from any of this copyright debate?
But now, it seems you can't make anything newsworthy anymore. (Or when you end up in the news, it's because of some silly takedown like this one.)
I agree with @kamjam that it would have been great if Ninty put it on their site but I didn't have the expectation from them to let anyone use their whole game.
EDIT: Hmm, I've touched a nerve. Good. When proponents of Nintendo need to resort to "They invented the thumbstick" as an example of their innovation, it becomes obvious that they're not innovating in modern times, else it would be easy to give examples. Nintendo has no recent innovations when compared to other game companies. (The Wii isn't recent, and the WiiU is dead.)
Valve is not at Nintendo's (or Sony's or Microsoft's, for that matter) scale.
For consoles, they're about to be.
http://www.joystiq.com/2013/09/27/recap-valves-trio-of-steam...
For PC gaming, Valve is the gorilla. No one else comes close.
Valve has every chance to change things as much as Ouya. Unfortunately, but like everyone else, they don't control their destiny -- the consumers do. Consumers don't always pick the best or the most innovative technology as the winner. Only time will tell.
Only time will tell, sure. But until Valve or Ouya or any other company actually achieve something that big, they are just newcomers.
The DS was also huge. Remember, it had a touchscreen and came out three years before the iPhone. Everyone thought dual screens was a crazy idea.
The 3DS remains a crazy idea that hasn't worked out as well as one might hope, but you can't say it's not innovative.
Nintendo's efforts on the N64 are also often underestimated. They invented the modern analog thumbstick. Also, Mario 64 was an incredible achievement that has influenced game design ever since.
Are you joking? Making a PC that hooks up to your living room television is a good idea, but doesn't scream "innovative" to me. Valve is, just now, trying to do what Nintendo has been doing, successfully, for almost half a century.
In the annals of gaming, Valve has a long way to go to catch up to Nintendo.
Of top of my head and I am sure there are plenty more.
- D-Pad (1982 on donkey kong)
- L-R buttons on SNES
- redefining handheld console as we know it today (gameboy)
- Analog stick on a joypad (N64 had it first)
- Rumble actuator on a joypad (N64 had it first)
- revitalization of game and game console market with NES
- Touch screen interface on handheld consoles with dual screen (before iphone)
- portable handheld console with 3D without glasses
- 'portable' 3d console (virtual boy)
- (re)defining 2d platformer genre as we know it today
- (re)defining 3d platformer genre as we know it today (N64 super mario)
- vast collection of super brands of games and characters
- Wii and that whole thing with motion controller
- Wii U with separate screen on a controller
.... many many more
So, what has Valve done exactly? They created a marketplace for games which has revitalized PC gaming (debatable on revitalized - more like set direction) and several popular games. Don't get me wrong, Valve is successful and likable company now (remember when everybody hated Steam?). They are just not in the same category with Nintendo as far as innovation goes, not technically nor creatively. Maybe some day they will be, but they are definitely not there yet.
The Wii U is dead. It completely flopped. The original Wii may as well be ancient, in terms of game industry time.
Nintendo was innovative. But they haven't been for awhile. When they have to resort to lawyering their fans, it's a bad omen. And they don't seem to have anything else up their sleeve right now, as Yahtzee elucidates: http://www.escapistmagazine.com/videos/view/zero-punctuation...
It's interesting that most people aren't recognizing what Valve's controller represents. The future of console gaming is Valve. I'll be happy to refer back to this comment in five years. Shall we bet $10?
Regarding Valve, its controller may or may not represent a lot of things. But until it defines at least one generation, we can't say anything. Other than that, what have we seen from them that is so innovative?
EDIT: Also, "resort to lawyering"? It's not like they are suing the guy. They are just politely letting him know that what he is doing is illegal.
The future of console gaming is Valve
I don't bet because I am strongly opposed, for personal reasons, against gambling. We can bet on proverbial 'I told you so' if you will. Even though I haven't alluded that I think Valve isn't the future of console gaming in any way, now that I think about it I am sure it won't be. There's a possibility they will be a major player in console market, but I don't see that happening any time soon. I am quite sure they will disrupt PC gaming market once again... console gaming? no.
So if you will, we can bet on that and come back to this 5 years from now for an 'I told you so' moment :)
PS
As long as I remember (and I remember back to the dinosaurs age) Nintendo has been regarded as 'soon to be dead'. Same with PC gaming. It just didn't happen over and over again.
So if you will, we can bet on that and come back to this 5 years from now for an 'I told you so' moment :)
You're on! :)
Believe me, I wanted to love Nintendo after the Gamecube. NES, SNES, N64, Gamecube, GBA, DS... I loved them all. But after that, somewhere along the way, it seems Nintendo lost its unique flavor and started to look like a pale copy of what it once was.
I'm not trying to defend the guy who coded a Mario Bros. clone (in fact, I couldn't care less...). I'm rather pointing out how saddened I am by the fact that the only instances where I hear about Nintendo now are for silly disputes like these.
If you haven't noticed, Nintendo's brands (Mario, Zelda, Pokemon...) are its most powerful asset. People are not allowed to make money off of other people's brands. And that is a good thing.
It goes beyond just "copyright" law, but towards "Trademark" law as well. Protecting your brand image is the absolute cornerstone of relationship building between a company and their customers.
Nintendo defends its estate all the time. Just because it is targetting a so called "cool developer" doesnt make them "evil" or whaterver.
Trademark/copyright holders have the duty to fight trademark/copyright violations. Being cool or not is not the point.
Want to be cool? Create something new instead of just copying someone else work for a quick buck. Be creative instread of sucking other people's creativity.
Who wants to be cool here? The guy who replicates a game everyone knows he didn't create, or the lawyers trying to 'defend the company's assets' by making sure a game released in 1985 isn't playable on the Internet?
the guy who says something is open when it is not and rips off copyrighted assets.
hmm? openmario...yeah right.
> a game released in 1985
yeah like it changes anything.