Nintendo DMCAing emulators in bid to remain relevant to anyone older than 10

[Leynos]

what happens when the "author" was a company that does not exist anymore, nor anyone has ever bought any rights to own the companies assets?(majority of games are in this state, Nintendo never owned them)

The rights to just about all these games are bought up by another entity. Quintet may not exist but their games are owned by Enix. G-Mode bought up the IP's from Data East. THQ's properties were bought by a few buyers but mainly Nordic games. Atari does not exist anymore but Atari Holdings owns the rights of the game. Typically copyright in the US lasts 75 years.

[gamevet]

1) Hiers get them.
2) Everything gets sold on bankruptcy, period (if it doesn't then it stays around waiting until somebody does it)

And if nobody ever claims copyright on something, it's an orphaned work, which means nobody can do anything with it until somebody can figure out who actually owned it. Which is essentially never. (this is why libraries are desperate to make exceptions for orphaned works)

Also we're in an era where game rereleases are becoming the norm, so the idea of abandonware is 100% bullshit now (especially with Nintendo games since Nintendo remains around and sometimes brings up games that are pretty obscure - X would have gone practically forgotten if they hadn't referenced it in Brawl).

That’s not what happened with King Kong.

[MrMatthews]

They also fought in courts for years to continue cheating the company that made Donkey Kong, until they ran out of legal avenues.

Hmm... what?

[Sik]

That’s not what happened with King Kong.

Wasn't the whole deal with King Kong that it was public domain when the whole thing happened? (heck, that Universal fucked up themselves because they had argued that King Kong was public domain first) Also note that King Kong was made in an era where copyright terms were much shorter and had to be explicitly registered and if you wanted an extension you had to renew it. Games don't fall under this (especially not GBA games), they're much newer.

And let's be blunt: I imagine that there's at least one ROM in the list that wasn't abandoned so even the abandonware excuse doesn't apply.

[Black_Tiger]

Hmm... what?

http://www.nintendolife.com/news/201...ed_donkey_kong

This part of the story will perhaps be familiar to Nintendo fans. Radar Scope was a success in Japan and, seeking to break into the North American market, Nintendo Of America president Minoru Arakawa placed an order for units in the US. By the time the units reached American shores interest had waned and Nintendo was left with a large amount of unsold inventory. Arakawa asked Nintendo president Hiroshi Yamauchi – his father-in-law – to provide him with a replacement game which could be quickly installed inside the unsold Radar Scope cabinets, thus solving the issue. The man chosen to design this game – which was seen as the last throw of the dice by many within Nintendo, it has been reported – was none other than Shigeru Miyamoto, a young and relatively inexperienced staffer at the time.

It's here that the commonly-reported history fails to mention the fact that Nintendo enlisted Ikegami's aid to develop Miyamoto's idea, which of course become Donkey Kong. As the original developer of Radar Scope, Ikegami had the technology required to write the new game for the target hardware, and duly supplied all of the code, working to Miyamoto's game design specifications. It is believed that it took four programmers and two 'pattern ROM' creators (credited as*Komonora, Iinuma Minoru, Nishida Mitsuhiro, Murata Yasuhiro, Shigeru Kudo and Kenzo Sekiguchi respectively) around three months to create the game, based on Miyamoto's design. Ikegami's designers traditionally left a small calling card in each game they worked on; if you inspect the tile-sets for SEGA's*Congo Bongo*and*Zaxxon*(two other famous arcade titles the company appears to have developed) – as well as Donkey Kong – then it's possible to spot the Ikegami logo.*

Also found buried in the code for Donkey Kong is the following message:

CONGRATULATION !IF YOU ANALYSE DIFFICULT THIS PROGRAM,WE WOULD TEACH YOU.*****TEL.TOKYO-JAPAN 044(244)2151 EXTENTION 304 SYSTEM DESIGN IKEGAMI CO. LIM.

According to the GDRI, between 8,000 and 20,000 printed circuit boards were made by Ikegami and sold to Nintendo, but it is believed that Nintendo copied an additional 80,000 boards*without*permission. No formal contract appears to have existed between the two companies for this job, so Ikegami retained the source code for Donkey Kong – it was never handed over to Nintendo.

Donkey Kong was a massive commercial success and effectively changed the fortunes of Nintendo forever; it was the firm's first genuine video game smash hit and became a global phenomenon comparable to*Space Invaders*and*Pac-Man. A sequel was inevitable, but Nintendo didn't have the source code for the first game to base it on. In order to begin work on what would become 1982's*Donkey Kong Junior, Nintendo employed subcontractor Iwasaki Giken to reverse-engineer the original version. If the Ikegami narrative is to be believed, this gives Donkey Kong Junior the distinction of being Nintendo's first 'in-house' video game, designed and developed entirely by the company itself without any outside assistance.

Donkey Kong Junior was apparently created in-house at Nintendo by reverse-engineering the original game's code, which Ikegami held

Ikegami was less than impressed with what it viewed as blatant copyright infringement; it felt that it owned the original Donkey Kong code which had been disassembled to form the foundation of Donkey Kong Junior. It sued Nintendo in 1983 to the tune of ¥580,000,000 (around $91,935,800). It wouldn't be until the turn of the next decade that this issue would be resolved; in 1990 a trial took place in Japan which determined that Ikegami was correct – Nintendo did not own the original code for Donkey Kong – a ruling which may well have had something to do with the fact that the two companies settled out of court in the same year for an undisclosed sum

[gamevet]

Wasn't the whole deal with King Kong that it was public domain when the whole thing happened? (heck, that Universal fucked up themselves because they had argued that King Kong was public domain first) Also note that King Kong was made in an era where copyright terms were much shorter and had to be explicitly registered and if you wanted an extension you had to renew it. Games don't fall under this (especially not GBA games), they're much newer.

And let's be blunt: I imagine that there's at least one ROM in the list that wasn't abandoned so even the abandonware excuse doesn't apply.

I’d imagine that there are some bible games and old arcade games that nobody protected.

King Kong is a little more complicated. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/King_Kong

[Leynos]

Actually, the Bible games are still owned. I saw them on a local Retro game group on facebook. Wisdom Tree is still around...somehow and I think they released some of them on Steam.

I find the OP funny and quite childish with the topic title.

[Yharnamresident]

Nintendo is the only one uptight about ROM sharing. They gotta relax, these old games have already made 99.99% of the profit they'll ever make.

Or I suppose they wanna sell you a Mario World ROM for the 16th time.

[Gryson]

Yeah, imagine if they tried to sell a "classic" console with those old ROMs on it! Nobody'd buy it.

[Leynos]

Think of those movies on blu ray from the 80s. Should just let us download them for free. No one is going to buy them anymore. /s

[Yharnamresident]

Yeah, imagine if they tried to sell a "classic" console with those old ROMs on it! Nobody'd buy it.

But people purchase those for the hardware/novelty and not the ROMs. And those things are nothing more than artificial scarcity marketing gimmicks. I'm glad I stepped aside from all that.

[miru]

But what about the games they never bother bringing back? Anyways, this is dragging in the bones of the horse that bolted out the door back into the dilapidated stable years after the fact.

[Yharnamresident]

But what aviushe the games they never bother bringing back? Anyways, this is dragging in the bones of the horse that bolted out the door back into the dilapidated stable years after e fact.

I tried hard to understand what you meant by that, but impossibru.

[StuOhQ]

I support Nintendo's rights to protect their IP. In Japan, they have to defend/pursue damages for their IP or risk losing rights to the properties.

That said, this title is kind of missing the fact that Nintendo is outselling Sony 2.5 to 1 in Japan, is currently enjoying revived success in Europe, and running neck and neck in NDP for North America with the Switch. Selling 20 million pieces of hardware in 1.5 years is hardly irrelevant.

[waterclaws6]

Nintendo Asks GitHub to Shut Down Game Boy Emulator
Article Archive on Archive.fo

So never mind that the overwhelming majority of emulators are fully legal, and it's not like there are legitimate, free, homebrew games of professional quality out there or anything. Well, just because the horse has bolted doesn't mean that you can't retroactively shut the door. It's not as if we live in a linear time universe.

Seems like you didn't read the article you link at all or you are very special engine