Nintendo continues crusade against ROM sites

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Erockbrox
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Re: Nintendo continues crusade against ROM sites

Post by Erockbrox »

I found a cool article here about the subject of old ROMS.

https://kotaku.com/in-defense-of-roms-a ... 1828340811

The best quote from the article I'll post here.
Nintendo maintains a hardline stance against unauthorized emulation, yet Nintendo’s official re-releases of classic games use emulator tech that builds on the work of the hobbyists that came before
Oziphantom
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Re: Nintendo continues crusade against ROM sites

Post by Oziphantom »

tepples wrote:Ultimately the question is this: If the owner of copyright in a given work is no longer exploiting it commercially, how does continuing to enforce exclusive rights in that work "promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts", as the U.S. Constitution puts it?
Well instead of buying Castlevania 3 which has not evolved at all in the last 20 years, you go and buy one of the 5 clones released a week on Steam, that have more modern updates, and support new people making games. Allowing for more variety and keeping the economy going while supporting new Art. And maybe if they couldn't have all downloaded Castlevania 3 for free they would actually do something new and interesting.... ;)
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Re: Nintendo continues crusade against ROM sites

Post by Oziphantom »

tokumaru wrote:I was always told by people who visited France that French people showed a certain resistance against English, and weren't very friendly when tourists spoke that language.
not quite its actually
I was always told by people who visited France that French people showed a certain resistance against the English, and weren't very friendly when tourists spoke that language.
English people walk into a French restaurant or shop, No Speak English... I walk in 5mins later and says "G'day", happily to serve me in English.

The French do have a stronger resistance to English, French is the newest language, however it misses a lot of modern words. Le Jogging for example. So every couple of years they have a minor panic attack about the amount of English words in their language. We heckle them with "We have some great English words you will love, Hotel, Hospital, Pot Purri, Postal.. I dunno I think they just have a certain je ne sais quoi!" ;)

While Germany only had one massive heart attack a few years ago about English.
93143
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Re: Nintendo continues crusade against ROM sites

Post by 93143 »

Reminds me of a story I once heard from a Canadian visitor to Paris, who (being fluent in French) asked a local where he could find "le stationnement". The response was "Le stationnement...? Ah, le parking!"
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Sumez
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Re: Nintendo continues crusade against ROM sites

Post by Sumez »

tokumaru wrote:I was always told by people who visited France that French people showed a certain resistance against English, and weren't very friendly when tourists spoke that language.
It's funny, because I remember this cliché from when I was a kid, especially when we visited Paris.

Visiting Paris again a few years ago, my experience was the exact opposite. Most people spoke English, and everyone was extremely welcoming towards tourists even though we didn't speak a word of French. Really nice people everywhere.

My experience in Germany is very different, and I've very often visited Germany. Most people there are super friendly, but very few speak English at all.
Here's a really strange thing that has happened to me in Germany on multiple occasions - Someone random will start speaking to me in German, yapping away. I will tell him politely that I'm sorry I don't speak German. Instead of politely withdrawing, the person will just immediately ignore me completely, like I don't exist, even if he continues to sit next to me.
It really depends on where you are though, and eastern Germany are clearly the worst.


Anyway, back to the topic at hand...
Erockbrox wrote:I found a cool article here about the subject of old ROMS.

https://kotaku.com/in-defense-of-roms-a ... 1828340811

The best quote from the article I'll post here.
Nintendo maintains a hardline stance against unauthorized emulation, yet Nintendo’s official re-releases of classic games use emulator tech that builds on the work of the hobbyists that came before
See, this is exactly why people really need to learn how to draw a line between preservation and software piracy.
Sites like EmuParadise, Loverom, etc. have nothing to do with preservation, and people who make emulators aren't doing it just so you can play video games for free.
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koitsu
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Re: Nintendo continues crusade against ROM sites

Post by koitsu »

And here we have "phase 2": https://games.slashdot.org/story/18/08/ ... -fan-games

The key part of this description: "Pokemon Essentials offers all the graphics, music, maps, and tilesets a fan game maker needs to craft their own Poke-adventure." In other words: Nintendo's assets (art, music, etc.). This isn't just about ROMs, it's about intellectual property, which as the above DMCA indicates, includes exactly what I said earlier.

I hope this adds further justification to my stance that pulling down the Super Mario Bros-oriented PPU GIF was the right choice. I don't like it any more than the rest of you, but playing it safe is the better choice right now. The risk is that the entire site could be shut down, and/or WhoaMan (and possibly the company he works for (last I remember it was hosted there? Unsure)) taken to court.

As for NSFs and screenshots of dev docs... *cough* nothing to see here! *cough*. These would be only Nintendo-created or Nintendo-owned assets (ex. musics, images/art, documents, etc.). The less stuff there is, the less likely the site becomes a focal target. It would be prudent to start digging through forum attachments and cleaning those out. There's no easy way for a forum admin (Tepples) to do this, so the best I can do is to go through my own posts and remove potentially problematic attachments. I'm going to start doing that (for my own posts) regardless of what people's opinions are on this matter.

Welcome to the United States! If this is your first time witnessing the nebulous and widespread effect of the horror that is the DMCA, well then, have some of these complimentary peanuts.
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DRW
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Re: Nintendo continues crusade against ROM sites

Post by DRW »

koitsu wrote:The key part of this description: "Pokemon Essentials offers all the graphics, music, maps, and tilesets a fan game maker needs to craft their own Poke-adventure." In other words: Nintendo's assets (art, music, etc.). This isn't just about ROMs, it's about intellectual property, which as the above DMCA indicates, includes exactly what I said earlier.
It doesn't include what you said at all, unless you look at this devoid of all context and intention.

The current issue is still about games.

Yes, it's not ROMs, but it's about creating "Pokémon" fan games, like in:
"Nintendo is a game developer and it owns the "Pokémon" brand, hence, they will not tolerate non-Nintendo games that use the "Pokémon" brand."

So, no need to get all paranoid about screenshots in a wiki or images in forum attachments.

When they start to threaten Spriter's Resource or NESGuide, then we can talk.
But in the moment, this is in no way different from their stance against ROMs and ROM hacks.
My game "City Trouble":
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rainwarrior
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Re: Nintendo continues crusade against ROM sites

Post by rainwarrior »

That just looks like a routine DMCA? Certainly not "phase 2" of some overarching plan to conquer their IP forever. The way they sued LoveRoms was an exceptional thing. This is not, this is just the daily grind, and once again a no-brainer infringement case.
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Re: Nintendo continues crusade against ROM sites

Post by tepples »

It does, however, provide a counterpoint to the occasionally encountered use of CHR ROM ripped from Super Mario Bros. or Metroid or whatever as a placeholder. (See Alp's post for example.) If some of those tiles leak into someone's final product, that could spell trouble. It's why I have long pushed for placeholder graphics under a free license.
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koitsu
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Re: Nintendo continues crusade against ROM sites

Post by koitsu »

It appears to be about 3 things:

1. The assets (graphics, music, etc.), as they were all taken from commercial Pokemon games -- and it appears to be VERY extensive (across several platforms/releases, all the way back to original GameBoy from the look of it),
2. A modification to RPGMaker (commercial PC game making software), which includes scripts/all the necessary bits to make your own Pokemon-like game via RPGMaker. In other words: the community likely did all of this work, and the end result was similar to the existing commercial Pokemon games,
3. Probably as a "convenient addendum", use of the word Pokemon (with accented e) which IIRC is trademarked or copyright, i.e. branding violation.

* Here's a tutorial video demonstrating its use and some of the assets.
* Here's a video demonstrating what stock results could look like.

Youtube is filled with videos of people showing how to make your own "whatever" using Pokemon Essentials, though the goal is to make something that's Pokemon-like.

To clarify on #2 above: it does not appear to be a romhacking-esque tool that let you tweak the entire engine/assets/etc. in an existing Nintendo game (think ROM) and rebuild a working binary for an existing system (present-day or classic). There are tools like that already for actual Nintendo games though (Zelda, Metroid, and Super Mario World come to mind). The ones for SMW are extensive, and I imagine it's just a matter of time before Nintendo does something about that.

Take a look at an archived copy of their Wiki -- it's all about how to make whatever type of Pokemon-esque game you want, down to what all of the individual .txt files and .pbs files are for and their syntax/usage.

The actual .zip file of the assets and RPGMaker mod wasn't on the Wiki -- it was actually on some file hosting service which now returns basically no-such-file. The last version released appears to be from October 2017, so almost a year ago.

Key point: there are tons of games out there that are Pokemon-like in style... just that none of them are using ripped assets from actual Nintendo Pokemon games. That is the major difference.

Are people here unaware of what happened to Rachel Simone Weil (who does NES homebrew of sorts -- I assume everyone knows her by this point) and her "Pokemon 7" homebrew? Nintendo issued her a DMCA takedown back in late 2016. It wasn't a Pokemon game for the NES, it was a completely unrelated thing that contained Nintendo-owned assets. Look at the tweet. Hell, I even mentioned this before on this forum!

Respectfully: people arguing against my points here need to step back and think about what this site is for: it's for general knowledge, homebrew, and gamedev. If Nintendo is willing to issue DMCA takedown for a Wiki -- and that is what they did, read the news articles, it's not just about the .zip file -- that contained "howtos" on how to use said .zip file contents in RPGMaker + make your own Pokemon-like game -- and also for homebrewers who used Nintendo's own assets... yeah, think about it. The only difference between "us" and "them" (the Pokemon Essentials site) is that there's little-to-no Nintendo-copyrighted assets on the Wiki. Screenshots are "fair use", I can't argue against that, but when you put those types of things up on a site dedicated to development, the situation becomes a bit different.

So I'm back to stating my point: we need to be careful about attachments/etc. going forward, and I strongly argue for review of ones that are already here. I've been saying this stuff for years (actually *decades*, from my own personal experience with Nintendo back in the 90s with my SNES docs), but people seem to think I'm being overly paranoid or that I should wear a tin-foil hat or something.

I'm not saying "THEY'RE COMING FOR US!". I'm saying "let's not give them a reason to come". There's more than enough evidence that yes, they obviously do care about even the smallest things.
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DRW
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Re: Nintendo continues crusade against ROM sites

Post by DRW »

koitsu wrote:Are people here unaware of what happened to Rachel Simone Weil (who does NES homebrew of sorts -- I assume everyone knows her by this point) and her "Pokemon 7" homebrew? Nintendo issued her a DMCA takedown back in late 2016. It wasn't a Pokemon game for the NES, it was a completely unrelated thing that contained Nintendo-owned assets. Look at the tweet. Hell, I even mentioned this before on this forum!
It was still a game.
As I said in my last post: Create a videogame (NES ROM, ROM hack, PC game) that uses Nintendo material, Nintendo might step in. This is nothing new. Nintendo is known to do this since the 80s when they sued the creators of "The Great Giana Sisters".

Still, this is something completely different from the whole talk about screenshots in the wiki or the future situation of BootGod.
Because as of now, Nintendo didn't try to make Dorkly remove their "Super Mario" comics, nor did they demand that the AVGN removes his videos.

That Pokémon Essentials site was clearly targeted by Nintendo because their main theme was about creating "Pokémon" fan games. Not because they simply happened to host "Pokémon" graphics, otherwise Spriter's Resource would be the number 1 target.

And regarding the NESDev forum:
There's a difference between a website that's:
"General programming, and here we show you a certain scrolling technique with the help of a "Super Mario Bros." GIF file"
and
"Hey, with our tools you can do your own "Pokémon" games."
koitsu wrote:There's more than enough evidence that yes, they obviously do care about even the smallest things.
They don't care about "the smallest things". They care whenever you do a videogame with Nintendo-related stuff in it. That's the same in the past and in the present.
And just like in the past, they still don't give a shit about websites using their box art or their sprite sheets in a context where no new games or game copies are in place.
My game "City Trouble":
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Download (ROM, manual, artworks): http://www.denny-r-walter.de/city.html
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rainwarrior
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Re: Nintendo continues crusade against ROM sites

Post by rainwarrior »

Here's the actual takedown notice for Pokemon 7, if anyone's interested:
https://itch.io/takedowns/37268

Pokemon 7 was never claiming fair use, and unless there's something unsaid here I don't think the consequences really go significantly beyond being forced to take down that file.You can see that this takedown hit about 100 itch.io games at once. It was a very run of the mill DMCA.
koitsu wrote:Respectfully: people arguing against my points here need to step back...
The only practical argument I've made here against you is that it wasn't necessary to change a good diagram to a less good diagram in response to lawsuits that aren't at all equivalent cases. ...but I'm not going to fight for putting that particular one back. I do however want to voice my opposition to applying this unilaterally to stuff that's being used as valid fair use examples here.

The NSFs on the other hand I think are a clear copyright liability, and a violation of the forum's rules, but in a selfish sense I'm content watching someone else roll the dice on that one. However, I wouldn't bat an eye if WhoaMan or whomever is actually on the hook here decided they needed to go.
DRW wrote:Nintendo didn't try to make Dorkly remove their "Super Mario" comics, nor did they demand that the AVGN removes his videos.
I wouldn't make any assumptions about what private agreements AVGN or Dorkly might have with Nintendo.
DRW wrote:They don't care about "the smallest things". They care whenever you do a videogame with Nintendo-related stuff in it.
It's not just games. They monitor and pursue a lot of different violations of their IP. I've definitely seen takedowns for music and art, for example. A lot does slide, but a lot doesn't, and I'd guess that you personally hear a lot more about the games cases.
DRW wrote:There's a difference between (NESDev) and (Pokemon Essentials)
Absolutely agree on this though.
Last edited by rainwarrior on Wed Aug 29, 2018 10:57 pm, edited 1 time in total.
8bitMicroGuy
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Re: Nintendo continues crusade against ROM sites

Post by 8bitMicroGuy »

Urgh... Like, from the disgustingness of Nintendo being so sopastic, I sometimes have such a revulsion towards anything that's from Nintendo. Like, ANYTHING! Even the NES console. Now, I'm not saying I don't like making stuff for NES. I love this whole adventure about learning about how our good old NES works. But somehow, I think that Nintendo will soon take down all the NES let's plays, all the retro stuff, and after that, they'll just start targetting us for using the word "NES". I know, it's a slippery slope, but you know what happens when you give a man a little finger; he takes your whole hand! So that's basically what Nintendo is doing. I'm kinda thinking about what if we could modify the NES to the point of eliminating everything that has "Nintendo" text in it or anything remotely. Like, making an FPGA modification, an emulator modification, etc., and stopping using *.NES file extension and instead using something else. Like, seriously! I'm so ready to boycot everything from Nintendo! I'm sick and tired of all of these SOPA, PIPA, ACTA, CISPA, PRISM, TPP, GDPR, Article 13, DMCA, RIAA, etc. fan-phobic assoholism!

Now, maybe all of this is just a pointless rant or my subconscious soapboxing. Sorry about that. But really! I just want to wipe away all the risk of us getting destroyed! Considering that most of our adventures are based on something. Like, soccer players don't violate copyright by playing soccer with a soccerball they buy and with the T-shirts they wear when they record themselves playing. So why should we digital people have to suffer from copyright? If in the times of Rennaisance and Baroque there was no copyright protection, why should there be any over here? Or why doesn't someone just create a copyleft open-source EULA that's going to enforce fandom rights and which will indemnify all fan-workers and punish all of those who dare to sue them? Now I'm starting to understand why Linux people are so zealously toxic.
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Sumez
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Re: Nintendo continues crusade against ROM sites

Post by Sumez »

koitsu wrote:There's no easy way for a forum admin (Tepples) to do this, so the best I can do is to go through my own posts and remove potentially problematic attachments. I'm going to start doing that (for my own posts) regardless of what people's opinions are on this matter.
It was never uploaded to this forum, but nevertheless, my Donkey Kong port is now gone from the internet as far as where I'm in control.
I hope those who have it will cherish it. :)
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DRW
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Re: Nintendo continues crusade against ROM sites

Post by DRW »

rainwarrior wrote:It's not just games. They monitor and pursue a lot of different violations of their IP. I've definitely seen takedowns for music and art, for example.
Yeah, if somebody has the guts to create a commercial NES book that consists of nothing but screenshots, and then even puts a counterfeit Seal of Quality on it, they step in as well.
But did they really take down harmless, free (non-gamehosting) websites that have this material like sprite sheets, box arts or music rips for pure informational purposes?
8bitMicroGuy wrote:Urgh... Like, from the disgustingness of Nintendo being so sopastic, I sometimes have such a revulsion towards anything that's from Nintendo. Like, ANYTHING! Even the NES console. Now, I'm not saying I don't like making stuff for NES. I love this whole adventure about learning about how our good old NES works. But somehow, I think that Nintendo will soon take down all the NES let's plays, all the retro stuff, and after that, they'll just start targetting us for using the word "NES".
Seriously, have so many people here gone absolutely crazy?

First of all, Nintendo has always been dickish towards this stuff. It started right in the 80s when they put strict license deals to publishers and tried to sue companies who recreated the lockout chip, as well as companies who created a C64 clone of "Super Mario Bros."

You're acting like this is some totally new behavior and that they will now aggressivey remove any reference to any of their IPs, even though they're merely doing exactly the same stuff that they always did.

Just because they're now doing a bit more of the same stuff, it's still merely more of the same stuff. As of now, there's absolutely no hint that they will start doing dick moves regarding other stuff, like attacking general programming forums or wiping free to access NES-related informational data or even suing DeviantArt or something like that.

Targeting us for using the word "NES". :roll: Are you people slowly becoming totally nuts?

(And that's the last thing I will say about this.)
My game "City Trouble":
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Download (ROM, manual, artworks): http://www.denny-r-walter.de/city.html
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