FirebrandX wrote:Yeah Nintendo's "Iron-Grip" days where they blacklisted retailers. I remember one of their stunts to get back at Tengen was they went over to Russia and greased some commy palms to let them release Tetris, even though Tengen had already cut a deal. When Tengen tried to sue, the Russians, now with pockets stuffed with Nintendo dollars, basically said "snooze you lose".
Actually, the Tetris licensing issue was a mess to start with.
Atari Games(and by extension TEngen got their license from a european guy that got a license from the russians to make PC versions.
Nintendo got a license from the russians to make console versions.
The stuff I've read makes it sound like the european guy was trying to screw everybody, and he never had console(or arcade) rights to start with. Atari Games got burned for assuming the guy was being honest.
They then created Klax, in an attempt to provide themselves with an in-house puzzle game they KNEW they could sell.
Which is actually a pretty neat game, but it lacks the simplicity of Tetris.
WolfWings wrote:Gil_Hamilton wrote:GameBoy I've got no explanation for. It's as trivial to "defeat" as the first-run Genesis.
GameBoy was their moment of legal brilliance, basically. The 'protection' in this case was a copyrighted and trademarked logo in bitmap form, so by having that fixed byte sequence in your ROM, you had to fight uphill against copyright law AND trademark law instead of just them basically going, "We didn't say they could, WAH!" like with the NES lockout chip.
Actually, since it's a mandatory requirement to get a game to run, it's exempted.
Sorta like how putting the ASCII codes for "SEGA" in a Genesis game's header is safe, albeit more extreme.
...
Actually, it's pretty much a direct copy of the Genesis scheme.
See Sega vs Accolade.
http://digital-law-online.info/cases/24PQ2D1561.htm
Sega lost, and the use and display of their trademark was found to be fair use, setting the precedent that would apply to unlicensed Gameboy software if any existed.
" In the case before us, Accolade’s identification of the functional requirements for Genesis compatibility has led to an increase in the number of independently designed video game programs offered for use with the Genesis console. It is precisely this growth in creative expression, based on the dissemination of other creative works and the unprotected ideas contained in those works, that the Copyright Act was intended to promote."
and
"In any event, an attempt to monopolize the market by making it impossible for others to compete runs counter to the statutory purpose of promoting creative expression and cannot constitute a strong equitable basis for resisting the invocation of the fair use doctrine."
The opinion of the court is that copyright law is explicitly NOT intended to allow manufacturers to restrict availability of creative works.
"A product feature thus is functional “if it is essential to the use or purpose of the article or if it affects the cost or quality of the article.” The Lanham Act does not protect essentially functional or utilitarian product features because such protection would constitute a grant of a perpetual monopoly over features that could not be patented. Even when the allegedly functional product feature is a trademark, the trademark owner may not enjoy a monopoly over the functional use of the mark. "
And the Nintendo bitmap is fair game, despite being a trademark, because it is a functional part of Gameboy software. You can't make a Gameboy game without it.