"Please Understand, Nintendo is the Bad Guy"

Mark Hamill

Interesting article on escapistmagazine by Shamus Young:
Please Understand, Nintendo is the Bad Guy

The gist is that Nintendo is cracking down hard on speedrunning and ROM hacking videos (i.e. videos of people playing hacked ROMs) on Youtube, under the notion that they have the exclusive right to perform their games publicly or to make derivative works based on their games.

Why is Nintendo so arse-backwards when it comes to the internet?
How is a speedrun or rom-play hurting their IP?
Have they never heard of fair use?
If they have the exclusive right to make derivative works based on their games, does that mean they are going after FAQ writers and cosplayers next?

iamtony

Don't they allow you to use there stuff on YouTube once you register with them and give them a slice of the money pie?

Mark Hamill

iamtony wrote: »

Don't they allow you to use there stuff on YouTube once you register with them and give them a slice of the money pie?

Sure. But only if you follow Nintendo's rules like:
1) Give them 30% of ad revenue of all your videos on your channel, even those not of Nintendo games (you can register videos one-by-one to avoid this, but then you must give them 40% of ad revenue from those videos and they get their cut first before you see anything)
2) The games being video'd must be on Nintendo's whitelist, which is missing many big Nintendo games (like Super Smash Bros U, Bayonetta and Pokemon). The list is here, only 15 Wii U games and 17 3DS games are allowed.
3) You must follow their Terms of Service and style guides (essentially giving them creative control).

Nollog

You can sign over all ad revenue and play the game(s) on youtube all you want.

If I was the type to youtube, I'd just create a new Nintendo-Only account and use that to do Nintendo content and still get all those 12 year old's ad-view dollars.