A daily miasma of frivolity by two wanna-be cultural critics. Or: just, like, some good links, dude.

Tag Archives: copyright infringement

Sep 10 2011
Mark Twain, probably

Newspaper Chain Drops Righthaven — ‘It Was a Dumb Idea’

Newspaper Chain Drops Righthaven — ‘It Was a Dumb Idea’

David Kravets, Wired’s Threat Level blog:

The new chief executive of MediaNews Group, publisher of the Denver Post and 50 other newspapers, said it was “a dumb idea” for the nation’s second-largest newspaper chain to sign up with copyright troll Righthaven.

The Denver-based publisher’s year-long copyright infringement litigation deal with Righthaven is terminating at month’s end, said John Paton, who replaced Dean Singleton to lead the company on Wednesday.

“The issues about copyright are real,” Paton told Wired.com in a telephone interview. “But the idea that you would hire someone on an — essentially — success fee to run around and sue people at will who may or may not have infringed as a way of protecting yourself … does not reflect how news is created and disseminated in the modern world.”

If you’re not familiar with Righthaven, it’s a company that exists solely to license copyrights for news articles and then sue bloggers for posting parts from them, splitting the damages awards with the licensing newspaper. Really a delightful business model.

Kravets also wrote a piece about Righthaven’s legal setbacks in court that explains a bit more about how they were formed and how they work. I hope they go away exceedingly quickly.

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Aug 26 2011
Mark Twain, probably

The Secret History of Donkey Kong

The Secret History of Donkey Kong

Travis Fahs of The Next Level put together a nice piece for Gamasutra on Nintendo’s subcontracting of the development of Donkey Kong to Ikegami Tsushinki and their subsequent copyright infringement battle.

What, you hadn’t heard about any of this before? Don’t blame you, I hadn’t either. This doesn’t appear to have been particularly known at all in countries outside Japan until quite recently. Japanese game writer Masumi Akagi wrote a book in 2005 titled Sore wa “Pong” kara Hajimatta which appears to be the definitive source on this. Fahs put together his piece with research from the book and GDRI.

Ikegami Tsushinki produced the initial shipment of boards, just as they had done for Radar Scope, but Donkey Kong was a huge hit and Nintendo needed more. Demand was so high in America that Arakawa began manufacturing new units in Nintendo of America’s warehouse.

But Nintendo didn’t actually own the manufacturing rights to Donkey Kong. Although their game was still a Nintendo product, and the characters, name, and brand all belonged to it, the development contract gave Ikegami Tsushinki the exclusive rights to manufacture and sell boards to Nintendo for ¥70,000 each. After the initial order of 8,000 units, Nintendo ceased to buy boards from Ikegami. Although the contract was unclear with regard to actual copyright of the program code — still new territory for the law — Ikegami was named as the sole supplier for Donkey Kong boards.

Nintendo didn’t see it that way. Before long, Nintendo had manufactured about 80,000 additional units without Ikegami’s involvement, burning the bridge with the company that had developed its biggest hit, and opening themselves up to a bitter legal battle that would drag on for almost a decade.

Joseph Rard also translated the relevant part of Akagi’s book on his blog.

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