<i>Creating a game like that from scratch is a lot of work, but it would be a lot easier to do if people could start with the Full Screen Mario codebase.</i><p>There's nothing that prevents the creators from making their own thing that people could start from. It doesn't need to be Mario.<p><i>Game designers could also incorporate parts of "Super Mario Brothers" as a "mini game" within modern video games.</i><p>This also seems odd to me.<p>Generally I think I stand for reasonable copyright terms, but on the other side, I never applied those terms to Mario. I can't imagine a character like Mario being used by many companies in many games across many systems where it is not tightly controlled by Nintendo. That is really a dreadful outcome. Nintendo has grown the brand and character over the years and it would be immediately diluted.<p>I could very easily picture a game like GTA starring Mario using a gun to shoot goombas and koopas, while Bowser snorts crack off of Princess Peach. That's not the kind of thing I'd like to see.
How come its legal for musicians to do cover versions and pay a fee to centralized songwriter organizations to do so, yet this doesn't exist in other copyright spheres?<p>OK, having things enter the public domain would be <i>better</i> but if it were possible to pay a certain amount for every X pageviews of a Mario "cover version" and that makes it legit.. that could be pretty interesting and allow for things like this to live on safely via donations or sponsorship.
Many of us love the Super Mario franchise and SMB has made a huge cultural impact, but that does not entitle people to use it as a base for their own work.<p>Take inspiration from Mario and create original games!
Too bad it's open-source.<p><a href="http://files.benbristow.co.uk/archive/FullScreenMario" rel="nofollow">http://files.benbristow.co.uk/archive/FullScreenMario</a>
Reminds me of Square Enix pulling the plug on what was at the time a pretty awesome remix of Chrono Trigger. I really don't understand why any company would choose to piss on the efforts of dedicated fans who only wish to pay tribute to the greatest franchises. It's not like it's diminishing the sales of the game or anything. Quite the contrary, as all the past studies about piracy, fanart and derivatives have clearly shown.
<i>James Grimmelmann, a legal scholar at the University of Maryland, believes Nintendo would have a strong case in court. He says the graphics and music from the game are protected by copyright, and the levels and game mechanics likely are as well.</i><p>To bad they didn't contact anyone familiar with copyright law or look at copyright.gov for a few seconds. Game mechanics have never been eligible for copyright. You can copyright the art and code but not the gameplay.<p><a href="http://www.copyright.gov/fls/fl108.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.copyright.gov/fls/fl108.html</a><p><i>Copyright does not protect the idea for a game, its name or title, or the method or methods for playing it. Nor does copyright protect any idea, system, method, device, or trademark material involved in developing, merchandising, or playing a game. Once a game has been made public, nothing in the copyright law prevents others from developing another game based on similar principles. Copyright protects only the particular manner of an author’s expression in literary, artistic, or musical form.</i>
Obviously it won't help where companies want to retain their copyright longterm but I want to set a better example. I'm thinking of coming up with a license that offers no additional rights for a limited duration and then allows free use to emulate what would happen if copyright durations were more sensible. I don't think it will meet the OSS definition of Open Source although I think it should be possible to make it compatible with liberal licenses by offering mechanisms to exclude code (snippets, files or folders) from the licence. If you wanted you could dual license with a real OSS license.<p>I'll put it on Github do a "Show HN" when I have something worth looking at.<p>Does anyone know of any examples of this being done? Also I've never been able to work out whether code on Github needs to be under a license that allows modification/distribution, it seems like as long as it can be read it can still be copyright protected, does anybody know?
Nintendo built the super mario franchise with the help of society's infrastructure(on top of the gaint's shoulders). For that society gave them 28years of time to monetize. But lobbying changed that equation in favor of corporations and made it 95 years. Nintendo making money or not, it's immoral to say the least for trying to impose copyright on what is supposed to be a public domain work. In the long run, relatively speaking society wouldn't be as big a gaint for future inventors as it was for nintendo.
I wonder where Tuper Tario Tros[1] stands from a copyright standpoint, then. At what point would you say that a game violates copyright? Obviously Super Mario Bros was the inspiration for a whole generation of platformer games that came after it. What would be the minimal set of changes that will allow Full Screen Mario to exist without violating copyright?<p>[1] <a href="http://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/522276" rel="nofollow">http://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/522276</a> (flash required)
Surely this is not causing Nintendo to loose money on SMB sales. I heard they have to pursue copyright violations, otherwise they might risk loosing the copyright (or did that apply only to trademarks?).<p>Anyway, why don't they just give that guy a very limited, non-commercial fan license to make that game? Maybe charge him a cent or so. And have him slap on a big "unofficial" sign. They wouldn't loose much, but it would be a big PR gain.
Lawyer in the article suggests game mechanics are copyrightable, but that is definitely not the case. Game mechanics aren't protected by anything (and shouldn't be). Art and music you can make the case for.