Companies that do not defend their rights to their IPs risk losing them to the commons. So if they do care about their IPs they pretty much have to.
First of all, I want to say I'm not singling out your post or trying to start a debate with you specifically- I'm just using your post as a starting point.
People always say this as if we should be on corporations' side and
want them to protect their IP. But for fans and artists amongst the common people, outside of Nintendo, a series like Pokemon becoming public domain would be a
good thing. Imagine the variety of Pokemon games we could get from both major publishers and indie devs if Nintendo no longer held a monopoly over the concept. We could finally get that Pokemon MMO everybody wants, an animation studio could develop an anime series with a truly fresh take on the Pokemon word, we'd get a variety of original Pokemon projects in new genres with new tones and new interpretations of the Pokemon universe.
Basically, imagine if all the variety we see in Pokemon fan art wasn't
just limited to these "fair use" scenarios. It would be a renaissance for us.
The same applies to others series.
It seems that in the gaming community we become so attached to corporations rather than the works they sell, to the point we look at everything from the perspective of what's good for their profits. We justify things not on the basis of what benefits us as fans and artists but on what protects corporate profit. Sure, Nintendo is acting in their own interests and legal rights by shutting down these projects- but why should we care about
their interests and
their rights? We're not Nintendo. We're game players and artists, and it's in our interests to be able to create and share art freely.
What you might call "theft" is the way culture organically grows and evolves, and it's the way it has done so for thousands of years. Intellectual property is a recent invention that artificially restricts the free movement of culture. It doesn't exist to promote originality or help artists survive. IP law exists for the sake of
capitalists and their profits by creating monopoliea over ideas. Why should we cheer this on?
Look at all these wonderful projects that have been worked on over the years. Project M, AM2R, Pokemon Uranium and Prism. Look at all the wonderful variety of fan art and fan works that surround the likes of Mario, Zelda, Pokemon, Metroid, and every ofher beloved idea in gaming. This is organic artistic expression. This is our
culture. The amount of people on Earth who personally hold sentiment for these ideas far outweigh the number of people at Nintendo who profit from those ideas. We as a culture should stop being so afraid to embrace the idea that our culture should belong to
us. You might say that Mario for example "belongs" to Nintendo, and legally he does. But the idea of Mario exists in the minds of millions of people, and for a great deal of those people he is an idea that means something to them. Let's forgo legal constructs for just a moment and define ownership by what it truly, psychologically is; what we knew it to be long before we codified it in law: as usage, need, possesion and sentiment (e.g I own my bed because I'm the one who uses it, I need it, i have it and I like it). This is what you might think of as moral ownership- if it were codified in law that my bed no longer belonged to me and the state came to take it away, that wouldn't be right, would it?
My point here is that ideas are first of all immaterial and cannot be possessed or stolen as objects can, but more importantly is the fact that by existing as a source of happiness and artistic inspiration for millions of people, ideas like Mario and Pokemon are in fact
used by a great deal many more people than those who profit from those ideas. They hold sentiment for for more people. And while they are not needed by any of those people in a strictly utilitarian sense, they aren't needed by anybody at Nintendo in that sense either, unless you consider their legal monopoly over their ideas to be a need or an inherent right.
What I'm saying here is that Pokemon and all other beloved gaming series- Mario, Zelda, everything- rightfully belong to the the people because they are a part of
our culture. These ideas may have originated in the brains of people working at Nintendo, but now they're in our brains too and the human brain's creative impulses and instincts don't care about copyright. Humans are creative beings and it's in our nature to create things based on the ideas floating around in our heads. It's also in our deepest instincts to freely share those things because we are social beings. The amount of fan art and fan media surrounding Pokemon that's spread all over the Internet is a testament to this.
"Stealing" and "copying" ideas to remix them with your own take is how art and culture is naturally shared among humans. Intellectual property law deprives us of this collective right. Now we have all these ideas floating around in our heads that we
can't share to the fullest extent possible and that's a very recent situation for humanity. The idea that an idea can be "owned" and that it should only ever be used by the person who introduced it isn't something inherent to human conceptions of morality. It's something that has been recently introduced into our culture and become part of our cultural programming- because it benefits capitalists.
I'm disgusted that Nintendo is shutting down fan projects and trying to stop their distribution. This is literally the suppression of culture, and yes- it's totally within their legal rights to do this, they're acting logically within their own self-interests- but that makes me even more disgusted by fhe situation, not less. It speaks to the fact that our legal system is designed for the interests of profit and not for what benefits common people and our culture.
I feel that video games are a form of art and we should be celebrating them as art, but instead we celebrate games as brands and we cheer on corporations. We have actual artists creating art and when Nintendo uses the law to shut it down, instead of mourning the loss of art we celebrate the protection of a brand. I know a lot of people in this thread are upset about this C&D and agree with fhe point of those last few sentences, but my impression is even those who are saddened by Nintendo's actions are probably thinking "well, it's within their legal rights, that's just how it is, and we do need IP law after all..." And it seems like this discussion is always framed in terms of "Fair use is okay, but once your creation infringes on the profits of a capitalist
it's gone too far." So I just want to introduce this idea into these discussions because I never see it. That it doesn't have to be this way and we should question the legal structures that allow this to happen in the first place.
