But it was determined there were not enough visual similarities nor any code plagiarizing to actually qualify the game as copyright infringement. But the mechanics of game-play don’t actually have anything copyright-able to them, a perfect example of this is the 1981 case of Atari VS Amusement World over their game Meteor, which was even by the courts admission an Asteroids “clone”.

It’s also important to understand that even prior to that a creator of a work had exclusive rights to it for about 50 years, essentially long enough to maintain control of it for their own lifetime, before it would hit public domain.įan work is not remotely protected by any copyright law and never has been, not when using the actual branding and content of the IP in question.

That’s been one of the biggest strangleholds on the creative industry. The biggest thing would have been Disney lobbying to extend the expiration of copyrights in order to keep Mickey Mouse from entering the public domain after Walt Disney’s death. The other big thing of note is Nintendo is about to have their new console out, and since first party IP is really all they have to their name right now they’re probably performing a brand cleansing to (hopefully) focus attention on their upcoming Copyright hasn’t really changed too much in this case from it’s earliest days to be honest. It’s likely that many of these developers were accepting it as well, which would mean they’re not exactly innocent. It’s also worth noting that Game Jolt offers up to (I think) 30% (number may be off) of AD revenue on a game to the developer should they choose to have it. So Game Jolt was earning a, potentially decent profit, not intentionally off of Nintendo IP but since the revenue is enable site-wide it definitely was a factor. The web site at generates revenue from advertising banners displayed on the site and advertisements played while users wait for the games to load. These web pages display images of Nintendo’s video game characters in connection with unauthorized online games that copy the characters, music, and other features of Nintendo’s video games. One of the important things to note however from the DMCA itself is why they went after Game Jolt so directly, I mean sure Nintendo have always been tight on their IP, but this was a large scale take-down.

Dmca nintendo 500 games