The Spam Thread!

[huckleberrypie]

And is that Bada or Firefox OS on the phone?

Yeah, both Nintendo and Disney are notoriously litigious, for all the right and wrong reasons. Nintendo's legal vendetta is however justified in some cases like with NTDEC brazenly using the "Nintendo" trademark without permission, and when some porn studio decided to make a lewd Super Mario film.

Word has it that Nintendo, perhaps through either an intermediary or a shell company, bought the rights to the Super Hornio Bros. films so they could sue anyone who still sells it. The Big N knew they had no firm ground to stand on in court as the parodies, lewd and offensive as they are, are protected speech (though I'm not sure as to how pornographers would be afforded full protection given the already morally-grey nature of their work, not unless they do something stupid to let's say minors), so they decided to begrudgingly acquire the films in a quasi-legal move against third-party distribution.

A similar extralegal tactic was employed by Sony on Connectix who did a PS1 emulator for the Mac (ironically, Steve Jobs presented it at one of his keynotes, and yet Apple isn't too keen about people emulating their hardware despite previous legal precedents); Sony lost the case but since they have more money than sense they decided to just straight-up acquire the emulator and throw it out of the window. Which is funny as the PS1 Classic is nothing more than a MediaTek-powered single-board computer with commercial games on it, running off an unofficial emulator no different from the ones Sony tried to suppress back in the day.

As far as Hasbro is concerned, at least they were fine about MLP fan works as long as "there's a line to be drawn"; they did object to a fighting game citing "copyright infringement", though it seems that has more to do with what they perceive as a violent depiction of MLP:FIM. The game was retooled as it wasn't worth the court battle, with Lauren Faust herself stepping in to help out with the artwork.