Nintendo shuts down decade old fan game creation tool Pokemon Essentials

Pok__mon_Essentials_screenshot.png

If Pokemon Uranium was anything to go by, Nintendo hasn't had the best past in regards to fan games using its intellectual properties. In a jarring but not so surprising turn, the company has sent a takedown notice to a Pokemon fan game maker tool, Pokemon Essentials. This tool, an add-on script to RPG Maker, originally released in 2007, was particularly popular in the community of fan game creators, as it allowed users to easily create area maps thanks to its included graphical assets, which offered tilesets, music, sprites, and more. These very same included assets are reportedly why Nintendo issued the notice, as it has copyrighted graphical assets within the program. Nintendo went so far as to also delete Pokemon Essential's wiki, taking out the largest repository of guides and information on how to use the program. Maruno, the developer of Essentials was given a DMCA notice, issued from Nintendo's legal team, to which he obeyed, and took down all things regarding the tool. Essentials is no longer allowed to be distributed on many sites, though many know the dark recesses of the internet to be an immortal repository, especially when it comes to such cases like these.

:arrow: Source: Pokecommunity
 

FAST6191

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Alright, in all honesty I'm fed up to the brink of Nintendo's bullshit. There's a difference between protecting your own IP like other companies do and abusing DMCA so much that you go against fanmade tech demos, small or unknown projects, 10 year old fangame kits and hackroms falling into fair use. Fuck 'em.
You reckon this, and all the other stuff they have done, would fall under fair use? I don't see how it would be.

Mind the "and". Considering that usually hackroms are distributed in patches containing only no copyrighted material except maybe a few mentions of Pokémon names and characters then yes, that would fall into fair use.

Also, I've noticed that you tend to defend Nintendo a lot in this thread. Did you know that as a preventive measure Nintendo requires a console to read an usually encrypted version of their logo from a cartidge for it to boot on their consoles? That would be considered borderline illegal in a few different countries because of trademark and digital rights laws (and yes, they're the only ones that use such a dickhead "legal protection" as other companies use provably more effective cryptographic stuff) yet a few unlicensed companies such as Datel managed to bypass it by including it into their product without permission and sell their stuff, and even go beyond that with the ARDSi when they included the entire ROM header of several whitelisted DS games to bypass the DSi's cart blacklist.

Considering that fair use doesn't really apply with trademarks and stuff, ask yourself: why does Nintendo threat to take legal action with individuals and non profit small teams with way better intentions while they do nothing with Datel and similiar companies? Because they know Datel could afford a serious legal team and fight back in court while your random fangame creator wouldn't. Long story short, Nintendo is nothing short of a giant corporate bully.

Think about this the next time you try to defend them ;)

EDIT: Oh and before anyone asks, Datel is not your random flashcart manufacturer. Their headquarters are in the UK. Again, if they aren't based in China, I wonder why they didn't try to take them down yet... ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

The only hacks I have seen them go after were things like the pokemon one which had a full site and everything else, and if you read the legal notice for it then they focused primarily on that whole side of things. That is also a different discussion to the subject of this thread. Best not to muddy the waters.

The logo and datel stuff is tricky. On the other hand you have Sega vs Accolade (relevant part here was is your "security" key is your trademarked logo then it does not count as trademark infringement), on the other I don't know where the DMCA falls on this as far as protections. In any case such a thing gets hard to prove damages for -- it is not like you can pop in your AR and play the game it pretends to be. The subject of this thread reuses their assets by the sounds of things which again is a different matter.
 
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Nintendo is going hard this year
Yeah, they're finally doing a "fan service"! :P

hqdefault.jpg


--------------------- MERGED ---------------------------

This is really not about piracy or legal stuff. its about people having fun and learning to program in their private time, not even wanting to make money of off it. Many young and older people that have passion for pokemons, can learn to code, create with these tools, and get into that world. I dont get with what head is nintendo thinking and i dobt care taht "they have every right", this is not about that (for them it is)...

--------------------- MERGED ---------------------------

Good. A little slow for Nintendo though.. Square Enix hit people for using copyrighted assets in the past, yet noone talks about cause it's magically bad cause it's Nintendo? Gotta love outrage culture.
I dont see this as good for their immage among gamers, and shifting weight to square enix doesnt make this a good move from nintendo.
 

RattletraPM

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You reckon this, and all the other stuff they have done, would fall under fair use? I don't see how it would be.
Everything? No. But in many cases, yes - starting from the Nintendo Creators Program on YouTube and going all the way to No Mario's Sky.

The only hacks I have seen them go after were things like the pokemon one which had a full site and everything else, and if you read the legal notice for it then they focused primarily on that whole side of things. That is also a different discussion to the subject of this thread. Best not to muddy the waters.
Maybe they did it because having a site boasts your popularity and so they've attracted Nintendo's attention, but it might also be because that's the only legal hook they might've had in some situations. Unless they've sometimes edited the tilesets to include the Pokémon logo somewhere else than where it was in the original ROM, not even that's included in a patch, while it's very likely that it's shown in its entirety on a fan website (of course sometimes other copyrighted characters and stuff appear too). That's a very similiar caveat to what they've used to try and take Freeshop down a while ago afterall (which in itself didn't contain any copyrighted code, but let's be honest, they had all the right to block it being a piracy tool and all).

The logo and datel stuff is tricky. On the other hand you have Sega vs Accolade (relevant part here was is your "security" key is your trademarked logo then it does not count as trademark infringement), on the other I don't know where the DMCA falls on this as far as protections. In any case such a thing gets hard to prove damages for -- it is not like you can pop in your AR and play the game it pretends to be. The subject of this thread reuses their assets by the sounds of things which again is a different matter.
As far as damages go, there's a very real economic damage here. It might not have to do with modding or assets but Datel is indeed making Nintendo lose money by eluding their developer licensing program which is arguably one of its biggest sources of income after console & game sales and investors. About the ROM header, fair use determines a percentage of a work that you can copy without legal repercussions (usually 10%-15% or a smaller part of something) - after that, it's copyright infringment. If we consider a ROM a "Numerical data set" (as it cannot be a movie, text, musical piece or illustration) in the US you'd have to copy 10% or 2,500 "fields" (whichever is less) to fall into fair use and if we consider "fields" as bytes in the ARDSi's case, the header they've taken from Game & Watch Collection is way bigger than 2500 bytes. And that's not even taking into account possible legal repercussions from copying the license ID and logo!

So, yeah. I didn't do the math for Pokémon Essentials' case and truth be told, it might exceed fair use by a far larger margin. But at the same time, if they really are the good guys like some people are showing them to be, wouldn't they go after Datel too which is a far bigger threat to them?
 
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Ive been so busy lately and come back to check on temp and find this. Rip Pokemon Essentials. I had to find it and study it for personal reasons. lol I guess if you know where to look you will be happy to see it. I wont say much more than that.
 

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While I find many other issues with the pokemon hack in question that legal hook is big and solid. Don't see that one as tenuous or reaching. The hack aspect of it is almost incidental in the case in question, I might agree that legally speaking it was reaching to try to take out the ROM hack itself with it but such is the nature of an opening salvo (if you want validation of your bully line then I guess that will have to be it). If they had released it boringly like every other pokemon ROM hack then I might have more to say.

Freeshop wise. Hacking and piracy tools have a weird history here, I don't know what I would be able to look at though I am not entirely sure what I would look at for "substantial non infringing uses" which seems to be the main choice phrase in such discussions.

"Datel is indeed making Nintendo lose money by eluding their developer licensing program"
Irrelevant. Many cases have said if you can get it in there by your own means then carry on (again sega vs accolade). There has to be another aggravating factor (see Atari Games Corp. v. Nintendo of America Inc. -- Atari had obtained the SDK and reverse engineered that to bypass protections) before things get to be smacked down on that front.
Now whether you would want to release a product knowing it could be blocked by a simple update is a different matter, and I don't see Datel as having any recourse in that instance, but as far as the law goes then I am going with the above.

I do not see percentage being relevant here, nor have I seen a hard guideline as to what counts beyond those music sampling cases which also do not appear relevant to this discussion. If you can't play the ROM and the work derives no creative, artistic or technical* merit from it (fields in which I would expect percentages to play a role) and instead it functions solely as a security key then no harm done beyond whatever the DMCA might want to barge in on. If it was 100% of the game (or functional equivalent thereof, or substantial equivalent thereof) and by some quirk it could end up being played then I could see a legal headache a la the hot coffee thing, this does not appear to be that though.

*for the sake of clarity I see a game has a really nice background scrolling routine . Disassemble, copy, paste...
 

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Good. A little slow for Nintendo though.. Square Enix hit people for using copyrighted assets in the past, yet noone talks about cause it's magically bad cause it's Nintendo? Gotta love outrage culture.

Actually Square did get feedback about that and a lot of people were upset when they threatened the CHRONO Trigger fan make project into the ground. That's just been a while but in that Fandom it still gets talked about a lot.

Funny you mention Square though as most of the positive feedback they've gotten recently is from Nintendo fans for Octopath Traveler as overall they have a pretty bad reputation. Definitely worse than Nintendo for now and for more, like their half ass pc ports.

Gotta love deflection though.
 

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While I find many other issues with the pokemon hack in question that legal hook is big and solid. Don't see that one as tenuous or reaching. The hack aspect of it is almost incidental in the case in question, I might agree that legally speaking it was reaching to try to take out the ROM hack itself with it but such is the nature of an opening salvo (if you want validation of your bully line then I guess that will have to be it). If they had released it boringly like every other pokemon ROM hack then I might have more to say.

Freeshop wise. Hacking and piracy tools have a weird history here, I don't know what I would be able to look at though I am not entirely sure what I would look at for "substantial non infringing uses" which seems to be the main choice phrase in such discussions.

"Datel is indeed making Nintendo lose money by eluding their developer licensing program"
Irrelevant. Many cases have said if you can get it in there by your own means then carry on (again sega vs accolade). There has to be another aggravating factor (see Atari Games Corp. v. Nintendo of America Inc. -- Atari had obtained the SDK and reverse engineered that to bypass protections) before things get to be smacked down on that front.
Now whether you would want to release a product knowing it could be blocked by a simple update is a different matter, and I don't see Datel as having any recourse in that instance, but as far as the law goes then I am going with the above.

I do not see percentage being relevant here, nor have I seen a hard guideline as to what counts beyond those music sampling cases which also do not appear relevant to this discussion. If you can't play the ROM and the work derives no creative, artistic or technical* merit from it (fields in which I would expect percentages to play a role) and instead it functions solely as a security key then no harm done beyond whatever the DMCA might want to barge in on. If it was 100% of the game (or functional equivalent thereof, or substantial equivalent thereof) and by some quirk it could end up being played then I could see a legal headache a la the hot coffee thing, this does not appear to be that though.

*for the sake of clarity I see a game has a really nice background scrolling routine . Disassemble, copy, paste...
I get what you're saying about the websites, in fact when it comes to websites alone, what Nintendo's doing would be somewhat understandable. Still, if infringing assets on the website such as logos and the like, they could've asked the team to take down just those: the DMCA doesn't force somebody to take down an entire website, server or project just because a few copyrighted assets are involved. Think about the many videos on YouTube, unless the whole purpose of the video was to illegally upload music then only the audio would me muted. Yet, many a times Nintendo asked "violators" to not only to disable server access entirely but also to take down any and all projects even remotely linked to it, meaning that the end goal was indeed to take down the hacks. Remember: if they only wanted to take down or even change the website and "push the hack back underground", the DMCA would allow them to do so, whilst keeping to protect their IPs and all. It's not a far fetched idea as some would think.

About the "get in there by your own means part" I legitimately didn't know that so I stand corrected. One might say that in Nintendo's specific case the logo found in the ROM header is usually an image and copying a trademarked logo is a trademark violation as clear as day, but hey. For the sake of this argument I'm going to assume it's going to be treated as a pure, numerical security key and not continue this argument, otherwise we'd go down a huge legal clusterfuck of stuff which probably no one has a clear answer to. I'm all for fair and pacific discussion (unless I get called names like I have not too long ago by that other guy) but I hope you understand my point here! :P

For fair use, well, it varies from country to country so it's hard to say. Where I live, for example, we do have some regulations for specific stuff. For example, not directly related to digital stuff but it's one of the better examples, you're allowed to copy 15% of a book max. legally as you don't resell the copy in question. In the USA, these look like the regulations for all mediums (these rules seem to be cited by other sources aswell). I cited the other mediumbs because, simply put, a ROM header cannot be considered anything in the list but a big array of numbers, thus falling into the "numerical data set" category. It could be relevant because again, while it could've been considered derivative or transformational work, if it does not fall into fair use then it can be considered a copyright violation, no matter if the game is playable or not. Afterall, if that wasn't the case then I could upload per se non-functional bits of data from games and be done with it - like for example the emulator part of a 3DS VC title and leaving the ROM behind (without the banner and other stuff so it wouldn't even be bootable on a real console) - but instead that's not legal!
 

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They could have, however some might see it as a tacit endorsement of a hack and they can't be seen to be doing that really.

The trademarked logo thing was also part of the sega vs accolade stuff (I even mentioned that one in the reply prior to that).

Numerical data sets is more along the lines of a database, results of an experiment... something which might have taken skill, time, effort, money... to put together. Database rights are an interesting one as these things go actually and technically you don't have many rights. Classic example being you have a list of every house in a town and sell that info to local businesses for their marketing, while I might not be able to copy your book word for word I can drive around the town, note every address and sell my own copy of what is identical data quite happily. However if someone steals yours then you can get them for that, typically you would do this by including 123 fake street in there and my lazy copying self would not think to take it out*. Anyway back on topic the emulator example would not work -- plaintext emulator code that can run is still code someone made in what is presumably function form but for the document (if I alter the auto open document in something have I made a new program?).

*it can also leak to amusing cases like that of Agloe. Short version of that is fictitious town added by a map maker to catch copycats, someone eventually came alone and stuck some houses there, wondered if the place had a name and wouldn't you know.. https://www.amusingplanet.com/2017/03/agloe-fake-town-that-became-real_19.html

On the flip side a few years back various keys for HDDVD leaked. While their distribution was brought into question it was fairly firmly established they were not a copyrightable work in and of themselves. This would be where I look for that.
 

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They could have, however some might see it as a tacit endorsement of a hack and they can't be seen to be doing that really.

The trademarked logo thing was also part of the sega vs accolade stuff (I even mentioned that one in the reply prior to that).

Numerical data sets is more along the lines of a database, results of an experiment... something which might have taken skill, time, effort, money... to put together. Database rights are an interesting one as these things go actually and technically you don't have many rights. Classic example being you have a list of every house in a town and sell that info to local businesses for their marketing, while I might not be able to copy your book word for word I can drive around the town, note every address and sell my own copy of what is identical data quite happily. However if someone steals yours then you can get them for that, typically you would do this by including 123 fake street in there and my lazy copying self would not think to take it out*. Anyway back on topic the emulator example would not work -- plaintext emulator code that can run is still code someone made in what is presumably function form but for the document (if I alter the auto open document in something have I made a new program?).

*it can also leak to amusing cases like that of Agloe. Short version of that is fictitious town added by a map maker to catch copycats, someone eventually came alone and stuck some houses there, wondered if the place had a name and wouldn't you know.. https://www.amusingplanet.com/2017/03/agloe-fake-town-that-became-real_19.html

On the flip side a few years back various keys for HDDVD leaked. While their distribution was brought into question it was fairly firmly established they were not a copyrightable work in and of themselves. This would be where I look for that.
Eh, about the hack then there's still the argument that Sega allows them pretty much all the time. It's not really that they can't be seen doing that, it's more like they're stubborn as hell when it comes to emulators and romhacks.

Still, for the tradermark, I admit I haven't read that much about the Sega vs Accolade case (yet, looks interesting) but from the glimpse I've seen it looks like it's a bit different than what Nintendo's doing (I read it was mostly about the TMSS screen and the absence of a logo). But still, point taken.

And finally, about numerical data set, I get it: I knew about the fake addresses in maps and fake words in dictionaries, but I didn't know stuff such as maps would fall into that category (I blame language barriers... :P). I wouldn't really know where games would legally fall then, maybe each part of the game has to be considered differently? I made it clear for the emulator example to not include the banner so it wouldn't be functional on the target system and at the same time you wouldn't be able to extract a working ROM for use on other systems (either of the VC emulator itself or of the emulated title). That way you're left with, well, just the "skeleton" the code. It could work if you add these missing parts but you'd have to fetch them somewhere else in order for it to be working.
 

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Sega has something of an agreement in place that would mitigate some of the trademark genericide woes but allow hacks to come into the light. As far as I am aware Nintendo has none and is under no obligation to have one, and in this case have chosen to do business this way.

Computer games are multi medium works and thus both able to use and prone to the quirks of each of those. Different mediums have different things associated with them -- we just discussed the map and database thing. Or if you prefer there is a reason film makers still have to pay for music even if their film is mostly a visual affair, 10 times longer than the song (possibly 100 times the length of the clip they want to play). Computer code is a fun one as there are limited ways to reasonably do tasks so if something happens to be the same as someone else then looks like you have two good coders, if it can be demonstrated to be copied though (tricky but popular ones are matching bugs, matching quirks that would not normally be done, matching function names...) then problems arise.

A raw emulator is a raw emulator. Banner matters little here. ROM matters little other than maybe some kind of double the fun if you inject something else copyrighted into it. Not working as is would not be a defence if it is trivial to make something work again (adding a banner would be, adding a ROM typically is as well). Practically speaking it is not a whole lot different to inverting a file (every 0 is a 1, every 1 is a 0) and calling it a new file. Back to the matter at hand you could probably make an example of where something walks the line (the thing with the game ending up playable by some quirk being a potential one from where I sat) but that one was not one that I could go with.

To that end when Datel copied a chunk of game I presume they only took as much as was necessary (possibly a debatable amount), and derived nothing from the chunk beyond getting the system to launch their own code. There was no intention or serious incompetence that caused people to be potentially able to derive some enjoyment from whatever code they copied, nobody then saying haha I shall buy an AR instead of this game as I can still enjoy all the meat of the game, and thus it was functionally just a version of the logo issue that Sega vs Accolade had handled however many years before. The DMCA might still try to say something.
 
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Sega has something of an agreement in place that would mitigate some of the trademark genericide woes but allow hacks to come into the light. As far as I am aware Nintendo has none and is under no obligation to have one, and in this case have chosen to do business this way.

Computer games are multi medium works and thus both able to use and prone to the quirks of each of those. Different mediums have different things associated with them -- we just discussed the map and database thing. Or if you prefer there is a reason film makers still have to pay for music even if their film is mostly a visual affair, 10 times longer than the song (possibly 100 times the length of the clip they want to play). Computer code is a fun one as there are limited ways to reasonably do tasks so if something happens to be the same as someone else then looks like you have two good coders, if it can be demonstrated to be copied though (tricky but popular ones are matching bugs, matching quirks that would not normally be done, matching function names...) then problems arise.

A raw emulator is a raw emulator. Banner matters little here. ROM matters little other than maybe some kind of double the fun if you inject something else copyrighted into it. Not working as is would not be a defence if it is trivial to make something work again (adding a banner would be, adding a ROM typically is as well). Practically speaking it is not a whole lot different to inverting a file (every 0 is a 1, every 1 is a 0) and calling it a new file. Back to the matter at hand you could probably make an example of where something walks the line (the thing with the game ending up playable by some quirk being a potential one from where I sat) but that one was not one that I could go with.

To that end when Datel copied a chunk of game I presume they only took as much as was necessary (possibly a debatable amount), and derived nothing from the chunk beyond getting the system to launch their own code. There was no intention or serious incompetence that caused people to be potentially able to derive some enjoyment from whatever code they copied, nobody then saying haha I shall buy an AR instead of this game as I can still enjoy all the meat of the game, and thus it was functionally just a version of the logo issue that Sega vs Accolade had handled however many years before. The DMCA might still try to say something.
Alrighty, understood. This last post was very informative (and yeah, I admit I've misunderstood what you were saying about the emulator).
About Datel, well, this old post from the HackMii blog also made me realize that Datel copied a lot more than I originally realized. And I really mean A LOT. The original ROM contains around 1.30 MB of code (I'm not taking into account free space left in the ROM) and if a NDS header is only around 1024 bytes big (max.), well, Datel has copied a grand total 912 Kb. That's around 70% of the entire game's data!

So, yeah. Maybe they won't complain about it in court because you can't boot that game and all but if they actually decide to prosecute one day, DMCA might have a field day with that one!
 
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Now they showed to those naughty modders!
Now there will be nooo other sources to download this mod from!
Nintendo is so smart!!

Am i right or am i right?!

This isn't a mod. It's a tool to create RPG Maker games that contains dozens of sprites and assets ripped for the DS (and maybe GBA) series of games. Mods, or "ROM hacks" don't tend to be taken down as long as they're distributed (NOT BY SALE) as patches and aren't redistributing copyrighted data.
 

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