Topic: Nintendo was behind the DMCA trolling for pokemon artists all along.

Posted under Art Talk

Last year many artists were hit with what were assumed to be troll/fake DMCA notices on twitter, patreon and other websites and were urged to dispute them as such. Well, at least one of those counter-notices has been responded to and posted: from Nintendo's lawyers, the same ones they send after fan games/mods like Pixelmon.

https://twitter.com/MkLXIV/status/1235765408214417409?s=19

The targets seem *mostly* limited to people making money off it- patreon, redbubble, teepublic, and private websites- but twitter posts which of course receive no revenue or compensation have also been targeted.

Nintendo is just Japanese EA/Activision, but run by competent people and still capable of making good games

is this news?
this has been their MO for years, I feel like this would be pretty obviously real, judging by what happened to all of the not for profit fan games that have been getting slammed for the past dozen or so years, also stuff like what happened to the StarFox the Animated Series' and the SMBZ remake's crowdfunding campaigns. Ninty doesn't like when people either make money using their IPs or make games that might interfere with their releases.
I mean, in most cases they totally have the right, 99% of this stuff isn't fair use. Whether or not you agree that they should be doing on either a moral or business standpoint it is a totally different question.

I continue to be entirely unsurprised that corporate rightsholders might object to widespread commercial production of unlicenced artwork.

but twitter posts which of course receive no revenue or compensation have also been targeted.

How many of these posts are related to commission or Patreon work?
But really, even if there's zero monetary gain from the artwork itself, I'm pretty sure they can tell you to stop using their properties anyway, at least unless it's transformative enough to grab a Fair Use defence. (I'm gonna go out on a limb and guess a courtroom isn't going to decide that "Pokemon, but it's porn though" is sufficiently transformative.)

Publishing unlicenced works of large corporate properties has never been safe, everyone's just been relying on the corporations being too lazy to do anything about it.

At this point it's not surprising. Nintendo of Japan doesn't do this, so it's probably the special snowflakes in the Treehouse or whatever seeing shit and getting upset.

nuji said:
At this point it's not surprising. Nintendo of Japan doesn't do this, so it's probably the special snowflakes in the Treehouse or whatever seeing shit and getting upset.

Nintendo of Japan absolutely does do this. They do it even *more* than NoA does and NoA was probably instructed to do so.

Also any time you use "special snowflake" unironically, people will take you less seriously.

nuji said:
At this point it's not surprising. Nintendo of Japan doesn't do this, so it's probably the special snowflakes in the Treehouse or whatever seeing shit and getting upset.

People still use "snowflake" unironically these days?

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