NINTENDO SHUTS DOWN RPG MAKER'S POKEMON FAN GAME ECOSYSTEM!

1) They want to maintain control over their franchise/brand/whatever's image, and fanwork runs the risk of altering that image. This could be anything from "the fanwork is pornography, and our image is family-friendly" to "the work is shitty and our image is quality."

I don't consider the former legitimate except in the most stupidly literal cases. Like if it is ACTUALLY pornography, fine. That's legit. But if it's "the fanwork has swearing", "the fanwork has violence", or "the fanwork has dirty jokes", fuck you Nintendo, not everyone's top priority is to wring out every last dollar they can with an E For Everyone rating. Respect that shit.

The latter is undeniably legitimate but extremely subjective. I would say that in the cases where the fanwork is so bad that it's practically not subjective it's legitimate, but honestly those fanworks are unlikely to get on most people's radar in the first place.

a case of ripping the graphics and then using them in a fanwork are clear violations of the law

Yeah, probably, but my ethical alignment isn't Lawful, it's that other one, the one that's the opposite of that.

author=GRS
IANAL but I'm pretty sure you can't lose a copyright due to lack of enforcement. What y'all are thinking of are trademarks which can be rescinded by lack of defense. However the damages of breaking copyright can be affected by lack of defense, but it's usually judges sniffing out bad faith cases from what I've heard.

You know what I've always wondered? As of the 1993 SNES Shadowrun game, they specifically had The Matrix TM listed among their registered trademarks, along with Shadowrun. When the super-high-profile movie called The Matrix came out six years later, why didn't they go after that shit?

Not only that, matrix is a common word on which a trademark can't be legally upheld.

Laughable indeed! Some people said it should not be a crime to copy paste other people's work just because they dislike a company or its policies. Hypocrites! If you were in front of a ripoff game that highly resembled yours, you would go hunting waiting for those guys to get scared enough to stop plagiarizing your own work ever. Saying it's not the same because it belongs to a large company or corporation would end up making you lose your own right to claim anything as your very own belongings. Why don't we invite bad looking guys lurking around at night to rob our homes? We have no right to tell the police our stolen PS4 or XBox One or our slim cellphones are still ours.

As a sidenote I should say I do hate companies like Nintendo for making RPG's ridiculously lame as a melted ice cube in hell.

author=kyonides
Saying it's not the same because it belongs to a large company or corporation would end up making you lose your own right to claim anything as your very own belongings. Why don't we invite bad looking guys lurking around at night to rob our homes?

Yes this a good counter argument to the idea that copyright laws only benefit companies.

author=kyonides
Hypocrites!If you were in front of a ripoff game that highly resembled yours, you would go hunting waiting for those guys to get scared enough to stop plagiarizing your own work ever.

I literally owned a company whose games were being actively pirated (illegally hosted for download) and specifically chose to do nothing about it solely because of my refusal to be a hypocritical asshole (I have pirated FAR too many things in my day to go after someone for pirating my things). The most successful company in my sector of that industry in the last ten years got that way by releasing their game, into which they had sunk many thousands of dollars, in entirety, FOR FREE and letting people buy it if they felt like it afterwards. This business model catapulted them from obscurity to the top of the industry.

This blanket accusation of hypocrisy ticked me off, so I could say something very nasty here, but instead I'll just post a relevant Rick and Morty meme:


(I know it's not the exact same thing as if someone were to claim my work as their own but I think it's similar enough to make my point.)

And yeah, just a PSA: plagiarism is when you steal someone else's work and say it's yours. I.e. just stealing Rudra sprites is not plagiarism; if you were to say "look at these sprites I made" while doing the same thing, that's plagiarism. Stealing someone else's work and putting it in a thing you make is not plagiarism unless you are specifically claiming authorship of the stolen components, resources, rips, whatever. However you (meaning whoever is reading this) feel about the use of rips is fine, but it is not plagiarism in and of itself, that is not what the word plagiarism means.