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It already was legally distinct since it wasn't made by the company behind pal world.
Go ahead and try to explain it using copyright and trademark laws all you want, but I don't understand how a MOD that isn't backed by a company can be arbitrarily blocked by another company.
Nintendo is cancer whether they make good games or not.
Using someone else's copyrighted assets or a facsimile there of is still a violation of copyright whether it's free or not. It being a mod makes no difference. It being free makes no difference. The only way it could be considered fair use is if it was kept for personal, private use by the creator.
Because the guy had a Patreon charging for the mod. He was profiting from their IP, there are pokemon mods for hundreds of games and hundreds of fan made pokemon games that exist because they don't charge for them.
Nintendo is cancer. Few companies hate their customers as much as Nintendo (Capcom, I'm looking at you). If you want to have a smash brothers tournament, Nintendo will shut you down.
Can we get away with calling it something like a "Touch Fellows Tournament"?
I'm open to better names.
You can’t use Nintendo’s characters. Mods are not exempt just because they’re mods.
Not sure exactly what part of this is so hard to understand.
You’re talking to the generation that puts entire episodes of tv shows on YouTube then writes “no copyright infringement intended”
It already was legally distinct since it wasn’t made by the company behind pal world.
That's not the issue, or what that means here. "Legally distinct" in this context would mean that the product isn't infringing on the IP, copyright, or trademark of a similar product. "Yellow rat" is fine, "Pikachu" is not.
Go ahead and try to explain it using copyright and trademark laws all you want, but I don’t understand how a MOD that isn’t backed by a company can be arbitrarily blocked by another company.
If someone ripped a verse or a chorus from a song, and uploaded it to Spotify, you don't think that Universal could contact Spotify to take it down or block it?
Mods are free and community-driven. This situation is closer to someone using the chorus to a song in their own soundcloud track, which in my opinion should be completely fine
Ignoring that this mod wasn't free, that's absolutely not in the neighborhood of legal.
Nintendo is fully within their legal rights to send a DMCA takedown to every single fan drawing of Pikachu on the planet if they so desire. It belongs to them.
You're also not allowed to use someone else's song to make your own soundcloud track.
I'm not familiar with soundcloud's TOS, which is why I noted that it's my opinion. When did people decide it's alright for multi-billion dollar corporations to dictate what people create for fun?
It has nothing to do with anyone's TOS.
People decided that when they passed copyright laws and signed international treaties about it.
When they're a company that provides something that specific person likes more than their spine, pride, or common sense.
IIRC, the mod wasn't free. They were making money off of it using Patreon.
It's this and the fact that Japan has no Fair Use of Copyright as well
Will...what's the point?
I mean, if it were me I'd isolate the copyrighted assets in a way that makes them really easy to add or remove, remove them from the official distribution, then plop a tarball and an install script of some sort onto all the most common piracy outlets. If people want it, they'll find it and legally I'm not liable because I'm just distributing a mod that has a place where you can put copyrighted assets
Write a script that rips them from a rom in the structure you want.