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Comment by IvanK_net | Hacker News Reader

So if I understand, they had a huge website traffic and made lots of money (donations) thanks to stealing the product (Mario character) from another company (Nintendo), who invested lots of money and hard work into it, and they are still complaining about it?

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They made a derivative work that added value to many people. And the law said that derivative works are generally banned, and society should be deprived of them. So their hard work to make Mario work for many people in the browser should be thrown away.

The word "theft" is unproductive, because as this case shows, it might be more descriptive to claim that copyright is theft, as society was deprived of value for no good reason at all. Nintendo won't make more and better games because this website does not exist. People won't enjoy a single nice thing. Copyright stole this value from everyone.

You make a fair argument for changing copyright law to better reflect today's reality without undermining the motivation for having the law in the first place.

I don't think someone has much right to complain if they blatantly violate the law as it stands today and then get minimally called on it, though.

So he's going to change the law to make copyright terms reasonable? No. He should persist in civil disobedience (and of course be prepared to take the consequences).

And face a $150,000 claim for statutory damages for the wilful infringement?

It's easy for a general to consider the optimal strategy for storming a fortified position. He's not going to be the cannon fodder who gets sent in first with little chance of survival.

Hell, its not just Copyright law. Trademark law says that you're not allowed to use another company's Brand.

Without proper Trademark law, it is impossible to build up a "trustful" relationship between a company and its customers. You are NOT allowed to copy another person's brand that they have spent many years and much money developing. Its just not fair.

> Without proper Trademark law, it is impossible to build up a "trustful" relationship between a company and its customers.

I disagree. This can still be achieved with the right (non legal) infrastructure to protect your brand i.e. an official Twitter account or domain name that can be used to identify the "legitimate" products from a company. It would be a much better tradeoff to the current cannibalistic nature of our current trademark laws that cripple the development of truly wonderful games like Pokemon Generations [1] while they milk the brand to death by regurgitating the same game with new Pokemon year after year.

[1] http://www.indiedb.com/games/pokemon-generations/news/change...

http://www.bitlaw.com/internet/domain.html

Trademark law protects you from domain camping and false identities.

Isn't Trademark a form of domain camping, too?

Domain Camping is when you look at another person's brand and say "I like their brand, lemme pretend to be them". For example, "camping" the site "microSSoft.com" would be domain camping.

Trademark law requires you to provably build a brand from the ground up. Hire your own artists, hire your own creativity. Are you honestly telling me that you are so uncreative that you can't create your own brand? Don't recreate "Mario", create your own damn characters!

And that is how the world gets better: when you reward creativity. It is virtually impossible to recreate a character, a brand, or anything and actually violate trademark law if you actually built a brand from scratch.

Nintendo still sells the original mario bros. game through multiple avenues. This site existing absolutely takes away from Nintendo's profits off the game in a real sense.

I disagree, Nintendo has never distributed a PC- or browser-based version of this game. Also, it's debatable whether or not profiting from a thirty-year-old game is adding social value. Nintendo seems to fashion themselves after Disney, in the sense that they place extreme value for themselves on copyright protectionism.

> it's debatable whether or not profiting from a thirty-year-old game is adding social value

the law says it is not,case closed.

The law is not the end-all-be-all for moral debate, and he raises a reasonable point.

They haven't but they might license someone else to do it.

Creating derivative works is the most productive avenue for creativity. By requiring a license for it, it is virtually banned. Society loses out on a huge body of derivative works.

Note, virtually all works are derivative works, except that now, we're only allowed to derive from stuff created at an arbitrary point when copyrights became perpetual.

If this mario game was allowed to benefit the many users it did -- would Nintendo lose their incentive to create new games? Would it make Mario not profitable to develop retroactively?

I think the answer to these questions is clear. As is the fact that society is deprived of a huge amount of value here.

Even if that were true -- does it mean that Nintendo will avoid creating the next game because of less profits?

I think the answer is obviously not. Therefore, depriving society of this value in order to incentivize Nintendo with higher profits is a bad deal.

Would the value of this work be seriously reduced by renaming it to Full Screen Giuseppe?

You said it right. Why didn't they start the project FullScreenGiuseppe.com and start their business with a new original trademark? Why did they have to steal?

I certainly agree that Nintendo have not done anything similar to this. But what if Nintendo would make a browser-based Mario game with the same functionality? Would it be fair that they , the original authors, would have to compete with him?

In these situations in general it is best to think about extremes in both ends. At one extreme there is round corners on the phone - requires no effort at all to "research". Not allowing to duplicate such work is absurd to anyone who has common sense. On the other end - drug formulas. Requires many scientists' hours, expensive equipment and years of testing to come to market, but can be very easily taken apart and duplicated once it is done. It is clear that it would be unfair if he who researched this formula needs to compete with all the copycats who may only be investing in drug reverse-engineering and mass production. It's really hard to draw the line imo, more so to make a law that could not be abused somehow.

About pharma patents, I think many have been misled, as this explanation from the Pirate Party seems very credible:

http://christianengstrom.wordpress.com/2011/03/09/an-alterna...

It really seems so. Wish my country had a party like that.

If the copyright holders aren't also claiming everything made from donations off the back of this, he actually got off lightly here. If Nintendo had wanted to make an example of him, it would probably have been a very short court hearing. Leaving the donations button on the site at this stage seems like poking the sleeping dragon with a stick.

I suppose that according to current copyright legislation they did "steal" the Mario character.

Maybe the point is that the copyright laws are wrong.

If the website is correct, and Mario debuted in 1983, it means he has been a character for 30 years now. Mario (the character/the game) is part of our collective culture.

If anything, the website was an expression of that.

I don't think anyone is arguing that Nintendo doesn't have the legal right to shut down the website. The question is should they have that right?

facebook is part of our collective culture too, does Zuckerberg share profits?

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