General Category > General Discussion
Kickstarter - Your source for retro games?
Rx_79:
Looks like it got shut down by Nintendo
https://www.kickstarter.com/dmca/nintendo-entertainment-system-famicom-a-visual-compendium-submit
Hoggs17:
I ended up backing the project and then got the notice that it was in jeopardy. I did get an email from the project head saying that he was previously assured that images of nes games was ok (I'm not a lawyer, not sure of the specifics) and that he was in contact with whomever he needed to be, in order to straighten it out. Fingers crossed.
palmer6strings:
Ya I had this backed for quite a long time. It's stunts like this that make me never want to support Nintendo.
It's also instances like this that help this world be shit. The people out there wanting to help make others happy get shot down by the bigger guys.
I and a few other people have experienced situations like this and it's quite exhausting and infuriating. As said, let's keep our gets crossed.
larryinc64:
I guess it was a for-profit book completely filled with reprinted copyrighted materiel (Art, characters, ect) and did not fall into fair use (For review or satire)
I have not looked too much into what it was exactly, but even though I would love a copy, I can't fault Nintendo here. They are reprinting art without properly licensing it, and you can't do that.
I can't just print a book with all the Beatles album covers, or covers to all the Batman comic. Copyright works in a 'use it or loose it' type of way, if Nintendo does not try to protect it's rights they will loose the ability too.
I'm curious if it can count as educational use, I'm not too sure how Fair use would apply to that, and the amount of art used.
EDIT: reading the complaint, yeah, they over use copyrighted art to where it knocked it out of fair use, it needs to be more text based and mostly use art as examples.
--- Quote ---The description of the book states that it is “mainly visual”, and the campaign shows pages of the book which consist simply of large screenshots copied directly from Nintendo’s video games. This campaign also makes use of a mark that is confusingly similar to registered trademarks owned by Nintendo. Specifically, the project’s creator is using a modified version of Nintendo's “Official Nintendo Seal” mark (protected by U.S. Trademark Registration Nos. 3114368 (Class 16), 3117154(Class 28), 3173562(Class 9), and 1570911(Classes 16 and 28)) and Nintendo’s “Original Seal of Quality” mark (protected by EU Trademark Regisration No. 3475977 (Classes 9, 16, 28) to promote this project. This use of Nintendo's intellectual property may confuse Kickstarter backers into thinking this project is sponsored or licensed by Nintendo, when in fact it is not.
--- End quote ---
The also got in trouble for this for being too similar to the Nintendo seal, and might be confused for the official one:
PX0:
There also seem to be quite a few (double) pages with mostly screenshots and only like 5% original content (text).