Full Screen Mario Takedown Notice

http://www.fullscreenmario.com/index.html

by TheAuditor • 13 years ago

57 94 13 years ago

fullscreenmario.com

hnrandom• 13 years ago

This took longer than I expected.

rybosome• 13 years ago

Agreed. This is the only part of the situation that has been surprising to me.

K2h• 13 years ago

looks like the repo is still up https://github.com/DiogenesTheCynic/FullScreenMario

mattezell• 13 years ago

Thanks for the link. Cloning appears to currently not be a problem.. Of course, for true fans just wanting a copy, hosting the cloned repo as a static site in Apache or IIS is super easy and a fully playable setup can be accomplished in just a few minutes...

sillysaurus27• 13 years ago

Is there an easy way to rehost Github repos outside of Github?

pbhjpbhj4• 13 years ago

Does github get a pass based on safe harbour laws?

Do those laws apply even now when github are going to be on very thin ice arguing they had no knowledge of the infringement or their hosting of copyright infringing content - seems like they'd be an easy target for a contributory infringement suite?

A cynic might imagine that they're waiting for the usage statistics to go up so as to inflate the claim.

paulhodge• 13 years ago

Github.com is protected by the DMCA. If they get a takedown notice then they have to comply, until then they aren't liable. One of the whole points of the DMCA is to prevent hosting companies like Github from being held liable when their users upload infringing content.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Millennium_Copyright_Ac...

krakensden• 13 years ago

Of course they did. Everyone told you they would. Copyright is not just something that a bunch of greybeards imagined and have been lying to young programmers about.

Simple steps to protect yourself:

* Try not to clone commercial products to the pixel

* Pay attention to software licenses. Sometimes they matter

* If prominent news websites accuse you of doing something illegal, consider what they have to say

sillysaurus27• 13 years ago

Some mobile users can't read your pointers because you're using source code formatting instead of italicizing with asterisks, fyi.

m_eiman• 13 years ago

You can drag the "source code" text to scroll it.

danso2• 13 years ago

If the OP thinks he's done the hard work and it's just Nintendo being a lazy ass corporation profiting off of old game brands...why doesn't the OP use the same code, but instead of Mario sprites, hire a freelance designer to make some, and have people play the game with different sprites. After all, if it's only the code that matters, people will flock to "fullscreenantonio.com" to play it, right?

Of course not...part of the appeal of fullscreenmario and any other remake is from the psychological appeal of characters that the big bad corporation spent decades and millions to burnish. It's a cool project but don't play it off as Nintendo being the parasite

pbhjpbhj4• 13 years ago

Not just the sprites but the level designs and general look & feel too.

anonova• 13 years ago

A relevant issue from several weeks ago: https://github.com/Diogenesthecynic/FullScreenMario/issues/3...

kamjam2• 13 years ago

It would be good if Nintendo worked with him/them to release this on their own site. It would be some good publicity for them.

Silhouette6• 13 years ago

Agreed. Nintendo seem to be well within their legal rights, but surely there was a more constructive way to handle this situation than lawyering up first and asking questions never. They could have offered to buy him out and put the game on their own site to bring in traffic, or even just come to some arrangement where his site operated with their blessing in return for promoting newer Nintendo products in a useful way. There was a missed opportunity here.

Frozenlock3• 13 years ago

Oh Nintendo. You used to be so fun and innovative.

But now, it seems you can't make anything newsworthy anymore. (Or when you end up in the news, it's because of some silly takedown like this one.)

sebkomianos8• 13 years ago

C'mon man, if there is one innovative video games company it's Nintendo. At least in that scale.

I agree with @kamjam that it would have been great if Ninty put it on their site but I didn't have the expectation from them to let anyone use their whole game.

sillysaurus27• 13 years ago

What innovative things has Nintendo been doing besides the Wii? Nintendo is the opposite of innovative when compared to Valve.

EDIT: Hmm, I've touched a nerve. Good. When proponents of Nintendo need to resort to "They invented the thumbstick" as an example of their innovation, it becomes obvious that they're not innovating in modern times, else it would be easy to give examples. Nintendo has no recent innovations when compared to other game companies. (The Wii isn't recent, and the WiiU is dead.)

Frozenlock3• 13 years ago

I said fun and innovative.

Believe me, I wanted to love Nintendo after the Gamecube. NES, SNES, N64, Gamecube, GBA, DS... I loved them all. But after that, somewhere along the way, it seems Nintendo lost its unique flavor and started to look like a pale copy of what it once was.

I'm not trying to defend the guy who coded a Mario Bros. clone (in fact, I couldn't care less...). I'm rather pointing out how saddened I am by the fact that the only instances where I hear about Nintendo now are for silly disputes like these.

gdubs• 13 years ago

Nintendo's entire business was built on hyper-strict intellectual property constraints.

dragontamer4• 13 years ago

In particular, Trademark law that allows Nintendo to protect their brand and image.

If you haven't noticed, Nintendo's brands (Mario, Zelda, Pokemon...) are its most powerful asset. People are not allowed to make money off of other people's brands. And that is a good thing.

It goes beyond just "copyright" law, but towards "Trademark" law as well. Protecting your brand image is the absolute cornerstone of relationship building between a company and their customers.

chilldream• 13 years ago

And furthermore they've always been unusually aggressive in protecting what they perceive/claim to be their IP rights. They tried to sue rentals stores and Game Genies out of existence even before the Super Nintendo was a thing.

camus23• 13 years ago

Oh Nintendo. You used to be so fun and innovative.

Nintendo defends its estate all the time. Just because it is targetting a so called "cool developer" doesnt make them "evil" or whaterver.

Trademark/copyright holders have the duty to fight trademark/copyright violations. Being cool or not is not the point.

Want to be cool? Create something new instead of just copying someone else work for a quick buck. Be creative instread of sucking other people's creativity.

Frozenlock3• 13 years ago

Want to be cool? Create something new instead of just copying someone else work for a quick buck. Be creative instread of sucking other people's creativity.

Who wants to be cool here? The guy who replicates a game everyone knows he didn't create, or the lawyers trying to 'defend the company's assets' by making sure a game released in 1985 isn't playable on the Internet?

fit2rule• 13 years ago

Its a real pity, but consider it to your advantage that this occurred, because it means that all your hard work can be pushed further into newer territory. While you would have been limited by how far you can promote a Super Mario clone, now the engine can be re-purposed to something else instead - something creative, perhaps? (It wasn't something I would have considered to be terribly creative, btw: the correct word to use is derivative..)

So, if you take the perspective that Nintendo are doing you a favour by pushing your next phase of development away from derivation and instead into creation, and if you do indeed re-factor the codebase to do something else, then you will have experienced a positive effect from this experience. If all you do is take it down and not think about the next generation of product that you can base on your proven, demonstrated working technology, then I think you will have kind of missed an opportunity. Of course, easier for some random stranger on the internet to say this: but if you roll your own content on top of this layer, then you'll have really made something ..

Kequc3• 13 years ago

So since the source code is written from scratch and the only thing copied were art assets and level design. And since there is a level editor available. They would be able to release it again without prebuilt levels with different art.

It's already not derivative other than cosmetically, I can understand trying to find silver lining but the whole DMCA thing is a ridiculous grey fluster cuck.

pbhjpbhj4• 13 years ago

It's already not derivative other than cosmetically //

Appearance matters, form matters the moreso I'd say.

If the appearance and level structure and such didn't matter there would have been no reason to duplicate them would there?

code_duck• 13 years ago

Nintendo is known to be protective of their largest franchises. If you look at your average ROM site, there are only a few games they try hard to prevent downloads of - Mario, Zelda, Donkey Kong.

How about picking a less well known, but just as entertaining platform game? Many for the Sega Master System are either abandonware or close enough.

yeukhon2• 13 years ago

But you can make this an extension and people can just play off their browser. They can't go after everyone downloading the source code and they are not in a position to stop people from playing off their browser.

pbhjpbhj4• 13 years ago

They can't go after everyone downloading the source code //

They could. But it's highly unlikely and probably in some jurisdictions they would fail.

yeukhon2• 13 years ago

I don't think it is the source code that the jurisdiction has problem with; I think it is the fact that he is offering a hosted service to play this in an emulation/js implementation. In my narrow opinion, anyone could share the source code that they wrote and playing off our own browser does not violating copyright and is entirely altruistic.

deckar01• 13 years ago

The internet archive still has it.

deweerdt• 13 years ago

https://web.archive.org/web/20131019203859/http://www.fullsc...

IvanK_net2• 13 years ago

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?

Peaker4• 13 years ago

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.

Silhouette6• 13 years ago

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.

etler• 13 years ago

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.

tedunangst• 13 years ago

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

cLeEOGPw2• 13 years ago

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.

Silhouette6• 13 years ago

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.

blastoff• 13 years ago

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?

sebkomianos8• 13 years ago

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

Silhouette6• 13 years ago

Can those of you who just want to advocate or share techniques for knowingly breaking the law please do it somewhere else?

HN is one of the better forums on-line, and it would be a shame if it started getting associated with illegal activities, however much you personally might feel that law is wrong.

TheAuditor• 13 years ago

If they wanted to Nintento could have actually made use of the programmer to create a new empire in HTML gaming in partnership. But they choose to go for the same old 'its my stuff'.

rgj• 13 years ago

It _is_ their stuff.

basicallydan• 13 years ago

Full Screen Mario was enjoyed by nearly 2.7 million unique visitors during almost a month of popularity, across 6 continents and dozens of languages. I’m glad so many people got to enjoy the game, and look forward to working on new and exciting (and legal) projects.

Handled like a pro. Josh, I admire your dignity.

wrongc0ntinent• 13 years ago

Yes. Don't know how much he ever got in donations, but at least it was a good showcase for him.

danso2• 13 years ago

I'm going to go out on a limb here: nearly everyone on HN respects and admires Bill Watterson, the creator of "Calvin and Hobbes." And yet Watterson has been quite protective of his cartoon creations, basically not allowing anyone to re-use them to make merchandise or new content, even though Watterson would become filthy rich off of it, and the world would likely be a better place with more Hobbes window-suction dolls than Garfields.

But isn't it Watterson's right to do this? He's an artist, and he wisely saw that the crass commercialization of his beloved creations would, in the long run, reduce their nostalgic value. Hell, maybe he isn't even thinking in that way. In any case, I think it's possible that C&H holds such a special place in our consciousness because of Watterson's reluctance to license his characters, and good for him.

Now imagine a situation in which a hard-working t-shirt maker puts the images of C&H on shirts -- shirts for which he risks a tremendous amount of capital to produce -- and makes a boatload of money selling $8 t-shirts? Is Watterson harmed financially? For some people, the answer is "No", because Watterson was not making money off of C&H t-shirts in the first place. And copying static images certainly doesn't remove them from Watterson's possession.

Yet I would argue again that Watterson's artistic intent has been damaged...and that even though he hasn't been physically robbed, a well-intentioned t-shirt maker has watered down the value of Watterson's creation.

Is this not the same situation as the OP here? Is it different because Nintendo is a big corporation that should be doing better things with its time? Perhaps...size does matter. But the principle is arguably the same, and for anyone to say that Nintendo is going overboard and doesn't need to protect its intellectual property, that requires making a huge assumption about Nintendo's strategy on how it wishes Mario Bros. to be experienced, same as it's a huge assumption to say that Bill Watterson doesn't know what he's doing when he refuses to license the use of C&H.

More context. This is Watterson's opinion on turning C&H into a film:

http://www.salon.com/2013/10/17/calvin_and_hobbes_creator_bi...

Watterson also confirmed that an animated “Calvin and Hobbes” movie won’t happen: > The visual sophistication of Pixar blows me away, but I have zero interest in animating Calvin and Hobbes. If you’ve ever compared a film to a novel it’s based on, you know the novel gets bludgeoned. It’s inevitable, because different media have different strengths and needs, and when you make a movie, the movie’s needs get served. As a comic strip, Calvin and Hobbes works exactly the way I intended it to. There’s no upside for me in adapting it.

Watterson is incredibly protective of his own creation, so far as to not even give Pixar -- legendary artists in their own right -- a chance to entertain millions of people with the goodness of C&H. Yet I don't think that makes him a copyright-villain.

chinpokomon2• 13 years ago

Sure he is -- not in a legal sense, but certainly in a cultural sense.

To pick another comic from the era, the Far Side doesn't have a central character or set of characters like Calvin & Hobbes. There may be a recurring cast of similar bovine, but they aren't characters in the same way Calvin and Hobbes are. Is C&H more worthy of copyright protection? Copying any one comic would be violation of copyright, but if I make another comic with talking cows, no one will say that I sole from the Far Side... well they may say it, but it would be hard to prove.

Once published, these original works become part of our culture. If someone draws a young boy with a stuffed tiger and makes no claim that the characters are to depict Calvin and Hobbes, how can someone claim that they are protected from copyright anymore so than taking cows?

If I have the choice of buying a t-shirt that Bill Watterson illustrated, or some knock-off imitation that claims to be illustrated by Bill Watterson, Bill should be able to sue to protect his name. But if the illustration makes no claim to have been authored by Bill Watterson, why shouldn't this be allowed? Side by side on a clothing rack, I'd buy the official C&H design over an imitation, provided that the official design was the funnier shirt. If the "imitation" design is funnier, then do we as a culture not benefit from what would today be categorized as copyright infringement?

With Full Screen Mario, no claim is made that this is created by Nintendo. If you recolored the art, so that Mario had purple overalls and a yellow shirt, is that sufficiently different? At what point has something been altered enough so that the derivative work isn't a "copy?" Can Nintendo lay claim to the color palette chosen?

The reality is that the line drawn between what is the original and what is copyright infringement is indefinable. More to the point, it is a legal question answered by a court, and therefore an objective decision. Characters are just as much a part of the culture as are the style and format. It just so happens that our current laws favor the protection of characters. If your character is overwhelmingly recognizable in "derivative" works, copyright holders can claim infringement, even when copying wasn't a part of the creative process. Even if the "derivative" work is substantially different in terms of how the asset is used.

As a culture, we really need to reflect upon why we have copyright protection in the first place. I'm convinced that it is causing more harm than good. Copyright is meant to expire so that the culture can build upon concepts and ideas that are still relatable to the culture in which the original was established. 25 years is more than ample time for the original copyright owner to have benefited from an idea. There is no harm to our culture if those ideas are allowed to flourish under the stewardship of others. With the accelerated pace or society evolves today, 25 years is downright ancient.

Full Screen Mario is obviously intended to look and feel like the original game Nintendo published 30 years ago, but so much has changed since then. If Nintendo created Super Mario Brothers today, and they were just getting into the gaming industry, I don't think they would have even built the game using web technologies... they probably would have created a game that runs on cellphones and tablets and they would have called the game Angry Birds.

Rovio understands current copyright law as much as anyone, which is why their games have recognizable characters. Sling shots can be replaced with catapults and birds could be replaced with squirrels, and no one would mistake that game for Angry Birds, even with similar game play mechanics. If you were to put a red bird with a yellow beak in a racing game, I would be terribly surprised if the creators of the driving game weren't sued. Has our culture been harmed in either instance? Has Rovio been damaged in one instance more than the other? Does our culture benefit from any of this copyright debate?

Full Screen Mario Takedown Notice

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