Nintendo has never had much patience for copyright infringement. Whether it’s a YouTube video or a fan game paying homage to one of the company’s classic franchises, sooner or later, there’s going to be a takedown notice involved.
These have become increasingly common in recent years, but Nintendo made a huge splash this week when it reportedly flagged 562 games from indie game site Game Jolt for removal under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA).
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As Kotaku notes, someone from Game Jolt appears to have published the entirety of the takedown notice on GitHub. The notice claims that company wants Game Jolt to disable public access to pages featuring copyrighted works from Nintendo’s franchises, including Super Mario, The Legend of Zelda and Pokemon.
The notice then links to over 500 web pages containing games with “infringing material,” all of which are now hidden from public view.
Nintendo is well within its rights attempting to preserve its copyrights, but the repeated legal assaults on fans of the company and its properties has resulted in a mixed reaction from the gaming community. Some have no sympathy for the individuals who are uploading infringing material on to the internet, while others have a difficult time reconciling Nintendo’s happy-go-lucky image with its hardline approach to anything that might somehow threaten its trademarks.
Regardless, the games are now gone and Nintendo has protected its properties. Now if only Nintendo would make use of these characters as often as fans do, those fans might not be so tempted to use the characters themselves.
