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Re: ROM hacks now in Nintendo's crosshairs

Posted: Mon Jan 02, 2017 11:23 pm
by Sverker
8bitMicroGuy wrote: Bottom line, have as much fun as possible, but avoid impurity, blasphemy and immorality like a plague and you'll be okay.
That's the thing though, a ROM hack that contains explicit imagery is just as illegal as one that translates a game from Japanese to English. One could even argue that the latter is even more damaging to the copyright holder because it could be sold in piracy and mistaken by less discerning individuals as legitimate.

Re: ROM hacks now in Nintendo's crosshairs

Posted: Wed Jan 04, 2017 10:42 pm
by Erockbrox
If Nintendo ever e-mails anyone about their fan project this is what they should say:

Nintendo: Dear Game Dev, we see that you are making a fan game with our intellectual property. Sorry, but we will have to give you a C&D.
Game Dev: Before we go any further, do you mind talking for a while?
Nintendo: Sure what's up?
Game Dev: Did you own a monopoly with the NES in the 80's by forcing all 3rd party devs to only make games for your console?
Nintendo: Yesh
Game Dev: Did you license and sell Shaq-Fu and Superman 64 knowing that they were terrible games yet did it anyway just to make money off innocent gamers?
Nintendo: Yesh
Game Dev: Did you censor the blood in Mortal Kombat 1 for the SNES fully knowing that it should most definitely have blood in it?
Nintendo: Yesh
Game Dev: Did you illegally break a contract with Sony regarding the Super Nintendo Playstation CD add on?
Nintendo: Yesh
Game Dev: Are you out of touch with the current video game market to the point where you are taking down and monetizing youtube videos when no other company is doing this?
Nintendo: Yesh
Game Dev: Do you really think that a bunch of basketball players will play basketball and then after the game is over that they will then sit down and continue to play basketball via the Nintendo Switch with those tiny two inch long mini controllers all while still being at the basketball court when you fully know that the battery won't even last long enough for a full length basketball game?
Nintendo: Well... not really.
Game Dev: So what do you have to say about yourself after reviewing your history?
Nintendo: :(
Game Dev: That's what I thought.

Re: ROM hacks now in Nintendo's crosshairs

Posted: Wed Jan 04, 2017 11:47 pm
by Revenant
Of course, that entire exchange relies on the assumption that anyone at Nintendo's legal department is capable of feeling shame, so try it at your own risk.

Re: ROM hacks now in Nintendo's crosshairs

Posted: Wed Jan 04, 2017 11:51 pm
by Sverker
Erockbrox wrote:If Nintendo ever e-mails anyone about their fan project this is what they should say:

Nintendo: Dear Game Dev, we see that you are making a fan game with our intellectual property. Sorry, but we will have to give you a C&D.
Game Dev: Before we go any further, do you mind talking for a while?
Nintendo: Sure what's up?
Game Dev: Did you own a monopoly with the NES in the 80's by forcing all 3rd party devs to only make games for your console?
Nintendo: Yesh
Game Dev: Did you license and sell Shaq-Fu and Superman 64 knowing that they were terrible games yet did it anyway just to make money off innocent gamers?
Nintendo: Yesh
Game Dev: Did you censor the blood in Mortal Kombat 1 for the SNES fully knowing that it should most definitely have blood in it?
Nintendo: Yesh
Game Dev: Did you illegally break a contract with Sony regarding the Super Nintendo Playstation CD add on?
Nintendo: Yesh
Game Dev: Are you out of touch with the current video game market to the point where you are taking down and monetizing youtube videos when no other company is doing this?
Nintendo: Yesh
Game Dev: Do you really think that a bunch of basketball players will play basketball and then after the game is over that they will then sit down and continue to play basketball via the Nintendo Switch with those tiny two inch long mini controllers all while still being at the basketball court when you fully know that the battery won't even last long enough for a full length basketball game?
Nintendo: Well... not really.
Game Dev: So what do you have to say about yourself after reviewing your history?
Nintendo: :(
Game Dev: That's what I thought.
They would be so moved by this impassioned plea that they would release all of their properties to the public domain in repentance.

Re: ROM hacks now in Nintendo's crosshairs

Posted: Thu Jan 05, 2017 9:12 pm
by Drag
mario.png
OH NO! CALL THE AUTHORITIES! SOMEONE DREW FANART!

Nah, this is my own unique expression of Mario, and since I drew it myself, I own the copyright to it, even though Mario's not my character. If I use this picture to promote my own platformer game, then Nintendo can force me to stop using this picture to promote it, but they cannot stop me from making my platformer (even if my platformer ends up still using a similar character). If I'm just showing this picture off by itself, then Nintendo can't do much about it since I made this and it's distinct from their artwork of Mario, and pictures by themselves don't compete with video games.

The part I'm not keen on, however, is if I used this picture to sell my own merchandise, like if I mass-produced this as a bumper sticker, or put this on t-shirts, or on backpacks or whatever. I believe Nintendo would be able to stop me from doing so, on the grounds that I'm using the recognition power of their trademark to promote my own goods, but this is a question better answered by an actual lawyer. It seems like there's a way around it though, given what you see whenever you walk into Hot Topic...

Re: ROM hacks now in Nintendo's crosshairs

Posted: Tue Jan 10, 2017 2:50 pm
by 8bitMicroGuy
I just have that fear that no matter what kind of theorizing we do, we will never be completely in the legal zone. But speaking of emulators and homebrew games, I believe that copyright doesn't protect game consoles or the hardware combination. Patents do that. And those patents have expired. This is for NES, SNES and GB, I think. This is not a legal advice, but what I'd love to see is a real lawyer going around ROM developer sites and giving free legal advice to everyone and defending all those who are sued by Nintendo and making Nintendo lose on so many fronts. I'd sooo want to hear from the Supreme Court that these ROM stuff are legal. What I'd love to hear is that it is not only legal in America, but also in Europe.

But regardless, sometimes I'm thinking about just moving to a completely different platform like PICO-8 the fantasy console which doesn't have DRM or any Nintendo-ish SOPAsticness. But enough of dreaming. What is SEGA's opinion on homebrew ROMs?

Re: ROM hacks now in Nintendo's crosshairs

Posted: Tue Jan 10, 2017 3:06 pm
by tokumaru
8bitMicroGuy wrote:What is SEGA's opinion on homebrew ROMs?
Seeing as they're even sanctioning hacks these days, I don't think they're bothered by homebrew at all.

Re: ROM hacks now in Nintendo's crosshairs

Posted: Tue Jan 10, 2017 7:38 pm
by Drew Sebastino
A proper Super Monkey Ball 3 needs to happen! :wink: :lol:

Re: ROM hacks now in Nintendo's crosshairs

Posted: Tue Jan 10, 2017 7:48 pm
by Myask
The original point of copyright law is to reward content creators and promote creativity.
8bitMicroGuy wrote: The big problem is that the Creative Commons license doesn't prevent
CC is designed to prevent people from being able to carve out a segment of possibility and say "None may operate within this space"… so, feature, not bug.
Zepper wrote:
tepples wrote:Perhaps Nintendo wants the public to forget about its old products so that they don't unfairly compete with its new products.
What about the copyright of the games? And the hardware patents? Expired after 20, 30 or 70 years? Or... more?
Lifetime of creator + 70 years in the US, or lesser of (95 years from publication/120 years from creation) It's quite absurd. They keep extending it at (allegedly) Disney's behest.
tokumaru wrote:
psycopathicteen wrote:Nintendo should sue everyone with the name Mario.
As absurd as that may sound, here in Brazil there's a famous singer named "Roberto Carlos", who recently sued another guy named "Roberto Carlos" for naming his company after himself. The singer lost, obviously, but still.
Wikipedia: McDonald's Legal Cases wrote:McDonald's filed a lawsuit against MacDonald's Family Restaurant, located in Grand Cayman. McDonald's lost the case, and in addition, was banned from ever opening a McDonald's location on Grand Cayman. This ruling still stands today.
though, note the other cases where they're basically trying to lay claim to the entire McPrefixed namespace.

Re: ROM hacks now in Nintendo's crosshairs

Posted: Tue Jan 10, 2017 8:52 pm
by tepples
I'll address the alleged Disney issue in a separate topic, as it's quite unrelated to ROM hacks.

Re: ROM hacks now in Nintendo's crosshairs

Posted: Wed Jan 18, 2017 2:47 pm
by 8bitMicroGuy
If I ever get enough patient to continue on my broken NES project, I'll be glad to let people reverse engineer it for fandom purposes as long as they don't make anything immoral with it.

The reason why I can't get patient is that I get so inspired to think about mappers that have a pointer for each CHR tile to any part of ROM or RAM and about mappers that can dynamically render text on surfaces and whatnots... Then I realize that I'm just at the beginning and that I should make my first platformer game. It seems I'm good at theorizing about stuff, but bad at doing those things. If I was a director of a homebrew game development company, I'd be able to prove my theories by having lots of people actually doing them for me instead of me losing my inspiration during the process of carrying it out to a finished product. Has anyone had this problem?

Re: ROM hacks now in Nintendo's crosshairs

Posted: Wed Jan 18, 2017 5:42 pm
by tepples
About your "immorality" constraint: You could release the game's program as free software, but release the art assets under a non-free license that allows non-commercial use so long as the characters' sexuality is neither depicted nor strongly suggested. (Is this what you meant by "immoral"?)

We had a previous topic about intractability of a large-scale game with a tiny team.

Re: ROM hacks now in Nintendo's crosshairs

Posted: Wed Jan 18, 2017 6:11 pm
by 8bitMicroGuy
I don't think that's how it works. I mean, if by free you mean FSF-defined free, then it won't work. GPL covers everything just like a ShareAlike license. I can't have a game's program and its assets separate unless there was some kind of a dynamic loading system. But on the NES, that doesn't exist. I also heard that dynamically linking DLLs makes two programs one which means that dynamically linking two license-incompatible programs is a copyright infringement of both licensed programs. Same could be said for patching IPS patches. Like, imagine that I make a game engine and then provide a hacking tool for everyone to inject their own graphics into the game by using IPS patches. The mixture of a, let's say, ShareAlike'd program and assets that contain immorality restrictions. The license of the assets discriminates against wrongdoing, but by ShareAlike, everyone should use the program and all of its contents. By the ShareAlike license, whoever has the program mixed with the assets can use that license as an excuse to do what they please and bypass my immorality restriction.

My best method would be to hire a lawyer to help me write my own EULA for both software and assets. Until then, I could just say that my work is licensed under a BSD license, or if I use patented stuff such as something that I'm about to patent, Apache 2.0 license with a slight modification about this morality thing.
tepples wrote:but release the art assets under a non-free license that allows non-commercial use so long as the characters' sexuality is neither depicted nor strongly suggested. (Is this what you meant by "immoral"?)
Yes, that's what I mean. I'd also append that I wouldn't like any strong language, obscene blood/gore, blasphemy or Satanic elements. The reason of this discrimination is that I want all Google searches, when a kid fan of my assets searches, show clean family-friendly and Christian-friendly content. I'm sick and tired of the impurity of everything, starting from the anthropomorphic fandom. Kids deserve a clean environment for anthropomorphic self-expression like I did when I was young.

Re: ROM hacks now in Nintendo's crosshairs

Posted: Wed Jan 18, 2017 8:15 pm
by Sverker
8bitMicroGuy wrote:Yes, that's what I mean. I'd also append that I wouldn't like any strong language, obscene blood/gore, blasphemy or Satanic elements. The reason of this discrimination is that I want all Google searches, when a kid fan of my assets searches, show clean family-friendly and Christian-friendly content. I'm sick and tired of the impurity of everything, starting from the anthropomorphic fandom. Kids deserve a clean environment for anthropomorphic self-expression like I did when I was young.
I don't think this is a battle you can win.

Re: ROM hacks now in Nintendo's crosshairs

Posted: Wed Jan 18, 2017 8:37 pm
by tepples
8bitMicroGuy wrote:I don't think that's how it works. I mean, if by free you mean FSF-defined free, then it won't work. GPL covers everything just like a ShareAlike license.
It doesn't cover components of an aggregate. For example, your operating system's application menu and the applications themselves are separate works, as are a program and its installer. That's why Action 53 compilations have a list of which banks belong to which ROM files, with the equivalent to an exec barrier identifiable as such in the menu's source code, so that they can be extracted and reinserted as separate executables in an aggregate.

A computer program and the data it reads are also separate works. This includes a compiler and the source code it compiles, an interpreter and the programs it runs, the Doom engine and its WAD files, or the free part of a WLAN adapter's driver that runs on a PC and the "blob" part that it sends to a separate CPU inside the WLAN adapter to run there, even if shipped on the same zipfile, disc image, or other distribution medium. I see a ROM image as no different from a disc image in this respect, so long as program and data areas are distinguishable in a machine-readable way and data is never executed.

If you are the author of all copylefted components of your engine, and your engine needs to call asset-specific executable code (such as set piece scripts) that you fear others will use for immoral purposes, you can license your engine under a GPL exception allowing linking through a controlled interface, specifying the API that executable assets are allowed to use.
I can't have a game's program and its assets separate unless there was some kind of a dynamic loading system. But on the NES, that doesn't exist.
Tell that to any user of Mario Improvement or Lunar Magic, which inserts modified assets into the asset part of an existing ROM image, leaving the program part largely untouched. If you mark up the link script to designate MEMORY areas as belonging to either "engine" or "assets", then their identity as separate works should become clear. To help enforce this separation at the assembler level, you could use one of the bits of a MEMORY area's bank attribute to denote assets and then make macro wrappers for jsr and jmp instructions that .assert that the target's .bank attribute has the assets bit clear. But I'm not a lawyer; make sure to run this legal theory past yours.
Yes, that's what I mean. I'd also append that I wouldn't like any strong language, obscene blood/gore, blasphemy or Satanic elements.
Each of which you'd need to have your lawyer define in detail.