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Nintendo Issues Copyright Strikes Against Super Mario 64 Online Fangame
Conventional wisdom used to be that Nintendo would allow most fangames to live as long as the creator wasn't charging money for them, but conventional wisdom sometimes changes. When we reported on Super Mario 64 Online last week, no one really imagined how fast Nintendo would move to take it down.
As Kotaku reports, the creator of the 24-player online Super Mario 64 sandbox, Kaze Emanuar, has been on the wrong end of Nintendo's copyright strikes since releasing his rom for free. Nintendo has taken down the video for a copyright claim on the music, variations of the footage with no music for apparent copyright claims on the music, and targeted Emanuar's patreon.
This follows in a long string of events wherein Nintendo has gotten aggressive about fangames using their intellectual property, such as Pokemon Uranium, Another Metroid 2 Remake (AM2R), and 562 other fangames in a wave of DMCA strikes over a short period of time. This contrasts with Nintendo's previous image of a seemingly live-and-let-live attitude where fangames that weren't profiting from the IP were left alone, at least litigiously. Nintendo of America president Reggie Fils-Aime, in an interview with Waypoint, made the designation of paid versus free the deciding factor in taking down fangames, though he used the argument to erroneously state AM2R was a commercial product.
The existence of Patreon obviously muddies the waters on whether a project is for profit or not, but fangames with Patreons are not the only ones being taken down.
As for Super Mario 64 online, Emanuar believes Nintendo is getting combative due to the impending release of Super Mario Odyssey, and says he hopes to resume project development and releases after Odyssey is out.
[Source: Kotaku]
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