Olive Garden At It Again Enforcing Its IP Instead Of Letting Anyone Have Some Fun With Joke NFTs

from the wyhyf dept

You all know about Olive Garden. It's the chain of... oh, let's just play along and call them Italian restaurants that have unlimited breadsticks and names of supposedly Italian offerings that appear to have gotten their names by inputting a bunch of Italian food words into a dilapidated AI program that combines them into a series of unholy dish-names. Sure, there's "Shrimp Scampi", but there is also "Five Cheese Ziti Al Forno" and "Lasagna Fritta". I kid of course, but the chain and its parent company, Darden, have also found their way onto Techdirt in the past by being overly aggressive when it comes to trademark enforcement. For instance, Darden attempted to shut down the site allofgarden.com, which was dedicated to tongue in cheek reviews of the chain's dishes. Darden later apologized for that, blaming some kind of legal bot that crawls for potential trademark infringements on the brand.

We'll have to see if something similar happens here, as Darden is now going after a site that jokingly sells NFTs to "own" individual Olive Garden locations and/or simply get NFT tokens for free unlimited breadsticks. The site, nonfungibleolivegardens.com has actually sold out of individual locations, but points to a secondary market. The breadstick tokens are, as are their real life counterparts, free and unlimited. Olive Garden's imagery and name appear all over the site, naturally, and the site's Twitter account confirmed that the site's host, OpenSea, had received a takedown demand (the recipients incorrectly call it a "DMCA" takedown, even though it's about trademarks).

Now, again, Darden IP appears all over those pages. That being said, the site has general language and a specific Q&A on its home page that makes it abundantly clear that it is not affiliated with the real life Olive Garden in any way. This is all one giant joke, in other words, albeit one where some measure of real money is changing hands. It's also built to be a place for Olive Garden enthusiasts to express that enthusiasm. From the homepage:

For too long, ownership of Olive Garden franchises has been dominated by the capricious whims of the fiat system. That’s why we’re enabling anyone to trustlessly mint a nonfungible token representing 1 of 880 real Olive Garden franchises in the United States.

Our goal is to bootstrap a community of Olive Garden enthusiasts, which is why the franchise mint price is tethered to the reasonable cost of a Tour Of Italy entree ($19.99, as of Dec 20, 2021).

And later, in the Q&A:

Is this affiliated with Olive Garden?

No. We are simply a community of Olive Garden fans invested in both trustless future economies and delicious, reasonably-priced Italian fare.

Hell, the entire "business plan roadmap" the site lays out involves plans for celebrity influencers, "Layer 2 on-chain curbside pickup", and the eventual buyout of Olive Garden from Darden. The whole thing is done for funsies. Which means that the Darden folks could figure out a way to get involved with the fun, instead of trying to stamp it out. Whether they will or not remains to be seen.

But NFGO certainly isn't backing down. In addition to the response letter the site sent, which you can see in the embedded/linked tweet above, they've also come out with two new NFT tokens. Those would be for -- you guessed it -- the takedown notice they received and that response letter.

Because when you're here, you're hilarious.

Filed Under: enthusiasm, fans, nfts, olive garden, takedown, trademark
Companies: darden restaurants, olive garden

Parody Post About Sega Suing Its Fans Perfectly Lampoons Nintendo

from the slow-clap dept

We have long chronicled the aggressive IP enforcement tactics and behavior of video game giant Nintendo. There have been so many stories specifically about Nintendo's animosity towards its fans when those fans express their fandom by creating fan-games that any regular reader here will be familiar with at least some of them. While gaming company responses towards fan-games are certainly more of a spectrum than something black and white, Nintendo probably takes the crown for the least permissive gaming company for this sort of thing. So much so, in fact, that we highlighted its former chief rival, Sega, when it took the opposite tact with folks making Sonic the Hedgehog fan-games.

Well, someone out there took the time to create a parody news article about Sega doing a heel-turn on this in a way that seems mostly dedicated to skewering Nintendo for its aggressive, anti-fan behavior. The headline for the comedy post is, appropriately, "Sega Announces They Will Be Using Fan-Game Creators To Develop New Sonic Lawsuit."

Let's dive in.

Sega announced today that, after a down-period of creativity in its staple Sonic franchise, the company will be reaching out to fan game developers to create new and exciting lawsuits.

“For years, people have said that Sega’s Sonic games lack that magic from the original games, while fan games have become impressive standalone titles,” said Sonic team leader Takashi Iizuka. “We worked with fans to make Sonic Mania and then everybody was all like ‘oh I guess the fans are better than Sega at making their own game,’ so now we’re switching up the strategy, because fuck you guys. From now on, we have to go full Nintendo and sue these fuckers for every single penny they’ve got. These people have spent their own time and money creating beautiful, loving tributes to Sonic games, and they thought they could just get away with it. Sonic Team is honored to take these longtime fans, some of them even just kids, and drag them kicking and screaming behind bars where they belong.”

"Go full Nintendo." Sega and Nintendo have taken starkly different paths interacting with their most dedicated fans and this fictional post is essentially poking fun at the latter by satirizing what it would look like if Sega got aggressive. More to the point, it does a useful job of pointing out, given that all of this is not true and done for comedic purposes, that Nintendo could exert less control and allow its fans to express themselves if it wanted to. If Sega can do it, so can Nintendo.

But Nintendo doesn't want to do this. It values strict IP control over everything else, even as many argue doing so is against its own monetary interests.

Go to the link for one fun fictional comment from a Sega fan being put into the back of a squad car, but I couldn't let this post be written without including the final paragraph from the post, because it's just so, so good.

Despite the lawsuit, Sega admitted they were incredibly thankful for the fan designer's unique, exciting ideas for Sonic games that they could completely ignore for the next decade. They then announced their new game Werewolf Sonic 2: Sorry, Fuckers will be arriving in 2023.

While this is all quite funny, it's also frustrating trying to understand why in the world Nintendo is willing to endure being the butt of these particular jokes, not to mention the negative aspects of its reputation, just because it wants to squash its own fanbase. In nearly all cases, the company gains nothing and loses at least some measure of goodwill and respect. Put another way, if you took this parody article and replaced every reference to Sega with Nintendo, it wouldn't be that far off from reality.

Why a beloved gaming company wants that for itself is an open question.

Filed Under: fans, ip, ip enforcement, lawsuits, parody
Companies: nintendo, sega

BookTok Shows How Fans Can Power Sales; Imagine What Could Be Done Without Copyright Anxiety

from the let-your-fans-market-for-you dept

A little while back, the Guardian covered the rising literary power of BookTok – short videos on TikTok devoted to the pleasures and pains of reading. As well as plenty of background information about the BookTok phenomenon, it has the following perceptive comment from Kat McKenna, a marketing and brand consultant specializing in children's and young adult books:

“These ‘snapshot’ visual trailers are making books cinematic in a way that publishers have been trying to do with marketing book trailers for a really long time. But the way TikTok users are creating imagery inspired by what they are reading is so simple, and so clever. It’s that thing of bringing the pages to life, showing what you get from a book beyond words.”

Attracting new – and especially new young – readers is something that publishers have long been striving for. And now, free of charge, BookTok creators are doing this for them, driving huge sales in many cases, as the Guardian explained:

Adam Silvera’s 2017 novel They Both Die at the End is one of the books to have benefited from the BookTok effect. Users recently started filming themselves before and after reading the book, sobbing as they reached the finish line. In March, it shot to the top of the teen fiction charts, selling more than 4,000 copies a week. The book has sold more than 200,000 copies in the UK, with well over half of those coming belatedly in 2021, after thousands of posts about it (#adamsilvera has been viewed 10.8m times).

BookTok is a wonderful demonstration of the power of user-generated content. Because it is made by ordinary people for ordinary people, it speaks directly in a way that no slick marketing campaign can hope to match. But inevitably, hanging over all such exciting experiments with the digital medium there will be “copyright anxiety” – a fear that during your explorations you might cross some invisible line that means you are breaking the law.

Think how many more sales of books, music, art, and films could be driven by new kinds of BookTok, appearing on multiple platforms, if only copyright allowed this kind of material to be used without the risk of legal threats, or of accounts being blocked. Ironically, it turns out that companies demanding stringent enforcement of copyright's unreasonable rules are ultimately harming themselves.

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter, Diaspora, or Mastodon.

Originally posted to the Walled Culture blog.

Filed Under: advertising, booktok, copyright, culture, fans
Companies: tiktok

Huge GTA4 Mod Started In 2014 Shuts Down Due To 'Hostility' From Take-Two Interactive

from the mod-squad dept

For some reason, it seems that there is an industry issue heating up among video game developers and publishers over their modding communities. We've begun to see a flurry of stories on the topic lately and perhaps the most impressive thing about those stories is how wildly binary they are. Nintendo tends to Nintendo, for instance, where control is valued over building a community of fans. Other publishers, like CD Projekt Red and Bethesda go the completely opposite direction and not only embrace the modding communities for their games, but also sometimes simply hire talented modders directly to their payroll.

Take-Two Interactive, the publishers of the Grand Theft Auto franchise and the subject of this post, has a history of bullying ambitious modders into shutting down. The company has recently put this practice into overdrive, going after all kinds of modding teams working on current and past GTA games, with the speculation being that it's all being done because of a forthcoming remaster of some of those older games.

Well, the hostility has gotten bad enough that some fan-run projects are simply shutting down before the legal threats start flying. That appears to be the case with an incredibly ambitious mod for GTA: San Andreas.

As a result of this hostility, GTA Underground lead developer dkluin wrote in a post yesterday on the GTAForums that they and the other modders working on the project were now “officially ceasing the development” of GTA: Underground.

“Due to the increasing hostility towards the modding community and imminent danger to our mental and financial well-being,” explained dkluin, “We sadly announce that we are officially ceasing the development of GTA: Underground and will be shortly taking all official uploads offline.”

The mod had aimed at putting all the historical cities from GTA games on a single map, while also developing new home-grown cities for people to play in. Work on it began in 2014, when dkluin was a teenager. As is so often the case with this sort of thing, this was a labor of love by a modder and a community that clearly love the GTA games. But, with Take-Two again set to release a bunch of GTA remasters sometime in the future, the lawyers have been sic'd on all kinds of mods.

In its fair well video by dkluin, where they announce the end of development and then thank all who contributed to it, the comments were almost universally negative towards Take-Two. Examples include:

• I hate how anti-modding Take2 is towards modding, even for games that are nearly two decades old
• Been watching this since evolve since 2014. Truly tragic, I don’t even see the benefit of shutting these mods down from a business end unless T2 wants to achieve this same goal GTA Underground has but from a profit angle. But they’d never put all the cities from the 3D era in one map/client, so I don’t understand the move. This is like watching part of my teenage years die. I was 17 when I subbed to this channel, I am 25 now.
• One of the best mods we can see out there and this is the result, I hate Take-Two

It goes on from there, with hundreds of comments. Now replicate this anger across all the different mods that were developed or in development for a game that came out nearly 20 years ago. All of that very real anger felt by very real fans of GTA and all directed towards Take-Two is going to have some impact on the public's willingness to keep buying Take-Two games.

Apparently the company is betting that such anger is not enough to outweigh the profits gained by remastering old GTA games and exerting strict control. I have my doubts that this was the best route for Take-Two to go.

Filed Under: fans, grand theft auto, gta4, mods, video games
Companies: take two interactive

Sony Hates You: EarthBound Let's Plays Flagged For Copyright Infringement Due To Soundtrack

from the six-degrees-of-infringement dept

It's no secret that I don't care for the way that Nintendo treats its biggest fans when it comes to allowing them to view and use its IP in order to express their fandom. I have been known, after all, to create entire genres of posts with "Nintendo Hates You" in the title. And, so, when I noticed headlines about how YouTube videos for let's-plays featuring the classic SNES game Earthbound were being demonitized or taken down over copyright claims, I was sure I would be writing yet another of those headlines.

But, nope. Instead, this is a story about how Sony has issued copyright claims, and apparently rebutted counterclaims, against let's-plays for Earthbound not because it published the game, which it very much did not, but because Nintendo licensed the soundtrack for the game to Sony for an album release.

Over the past couple of weeks, reports have come flooding in from YouTube users who say that their EarthBound-based videos are being flagged for copyright by Sony. In some cases, it's reported that Sony has claimed the ad revenue for the video in question; in others, the videos appear to have been removed entirely.

As is often the case with YouTube, the reasoning for this lies with the game's music. While Nintendo still owns the EarthBound/Mother brand in terms of its video games and the franchise as a whole, the game's soundtrack was released as a studio album back in 1989 under Sony's then-named CBS/Sony music label, essentially meaning that any piece of music featured on that record can be claimed by the company.

Okay, if you really needed a more perfect example of how broken copyright laws have become in the modern era, this must certainly be that case. Nintendo releases a game called Earthbound in 1994. Nintendo composers created the music for the game. In 1994, and again in 2004, Sony licenses the music to release a studio album soundtrack. Fast forward nearly twenty years and suddenly people releasing videos of them playing the game that was created by Nintendo nearly thirty years ago are having those videos demonitized or taken down... over the album release. If you can seriously get through that and think that any of this makes sense, you have capacities that I simply do not.

Plenty of YouTube users have taken to social media to express their upset at Sony's decision to remove their content, hoping to find a way to restore their work. The videos will no doubt be getting flagged automatically, what with the soundtrack being part of Sony's catalogue, so unless Sony decides to manually excuse the affected videos going forward, it may be unwise to include music from the game in any future content.

Notably, some of these YouTubers are also indicating that they disputed the notices only to have Sony dig its heels in. If that's the case, this isn't just our stupid automated copyright notice systems creating chaos again.

But here's what this really all boils down to: if even Nintendo is allowing this content to remain up, it should probably stay up. Nintendo has arguably been one of the most aggressive enforcers and protectors of its IP on the planet. Sony is obviously no slouch in that respect, but there is literally nobody watching let's-plays in order to listen to the game soundtrack in the same manner they would an album version of it. In fact, one would think that it might serve as free advertising of Sony's albums, if nothing else.

Filed Under: copyright, earthbound, fans, lets play
Companies: nintendo, sony

Ubisoft Teams Up With Mystery Rights Holder To Remove Fun Fan-Made 'GoldenEye 007' Maps From 'Far Cry'

from the no-fun-for-you dept

We have seen our monumentally absurd permission and copyright culture kill off all sorts of cool fan projects. Perhaps no industry is impacted by this more than the video game space, where you have the combination of rabid fans of particular games and franchises coupled with an above average level of technical skill in exhibiting that fandom. This combination sees an absolute ton of fan-made projects, including ports of games to different hardware, fan-made games, and even the re-creation of old games within new ones. It should be obvious that all of this carries very little monetary risk for the game makers, and, in fact, often times could be a boon, and yet it is all too common for publishers and developers to sic lawyers on their own fans rather than figuring out a way to coexist or benefit from them.

But sometimes this nonsense gets down to an absurdly granular level. Such appears to the be the case with one YouTuber going by Krollywood, who spent hundreds of hours recreating the maps for the classic N64 game GoldenEye 007 in Far Cry 5, only to have those maps removed by Ubisoft in response to a copyright claim.

You could find and play these levels yourself by hopping into Far Cry 5’s arcade mode and punching in Krollywood’s username. As of this writing, you no longer can. Ubisoft removed them all from Far Cry 5, a move that Krollywood described as “really sad,” noting that he probably won’t be able to restore them since he’s “on their radar now.”

“I’m really sad—not because of myself or the work I put in the last three years, [but] because of the players who wanna play it or bought Far Cry just to play my levels,” Krollywood told Kotaku in an email today.

Ubisoft hasn't responded as of this writing as to who made the copyright claim, but it appears the rights are held by MGM, the film studio that put out the movie of the same name. Notably, it's unclear just how valid a copyright claim would even be. Ubisoft owns the code used to make the game and used by fans to make new levels. Krollywood recreated the levels, rather than borrowing any digital assets from the original. Also, the maps were not for sale; they were free to download.

But even if we granted that MGM or someone else could make a valid copyright claim on these maps... why the hell bother to do so? What precisely is the threat being staved off here?

Players just want a taste of nostalgia, and MGM has a track record of shattering the plates before they’re even delivered to the table. (Recall GoldenEye 25, the fan remake of GoldenEye 007 remade entirely in Unreal 4 that was lawyered into oblivion last year.) MGM has further neglected to do anything with the license it’s sitting on—for a game that’s older than the Game Boy Color, by the way. At the end of the day, shooting this latest fan-made project out of the sky comes across as a punitive move, at best.

“In the beginning, I started this project just for me and my best friend, because we loved the original game so much,” Krollywood said. “But there are many GoldenEye fans out there … [The project] found many new fans and I’m so happy about it.”

Sadly, it appears happiness is not on the menu at present, to keep the analogy going. Instead, the only dish served is cold, hard copyright.

Filed Under: fan made maps, fans, far cry 5, goldeneye 007, video games
Companies: ubisoft

Nintendo Hates You And The Company Most Certainly Does Not Want You To Co-Stream 'Nintendo Direct'

from the direct-as-in-direct dept

If you're a fan of gaming giant Nintendo, you really should know by now that Nintendo hates you. More specifically, when Nintendo is presented with a choice to either allow its rabid fans to express their fandom in new and interesting ways or attempt to exert iron-fisted control over every last thing, the company will always, always, always choose control. From taking down fan-games, DMCAing let's plays and much-loved video game music from its properties, or shutting down fan-projects for fiction or movies, the company behaves as though it just can't help itself. To be clear, Nintendo is typically within its rights in taking these actions, but it doesn't have to. This is a choice, not a necessity.

And now, on the cusp of this year's Nintendo Direct, the company's E3 presentation that serves essentially as one giant commercial for what's coming out from Nintendo in the near future, the company has put out a statement in Japan insisting that nobody co-stream the event.

Leading up to the event, the Kyoto-based game company has issued a request on its Japanese Twitter account: Do not co-stream our presentation.

“Please refrain from mirroring Nintendo Direct footage and sound during the Nintendo Direct livestream,” the tweet reads. Nintendo will allow simultaneous viewing (reactions, basically) without mirroring—and thus, without streaming sound or footage.

Nobody seems to be sure if this applies in other countries, such as America, as well. Even if this is limited to just Japan, or perhaps especially if this is limited to just Japan, this makes little sense. The very idea behind big productions like Nintendo Direct is to generate massive amounts of interest in future Nintendo projects. Why in the actual hell would the company not want that production disseminated as far and wide as possible? Why limit the avenues by which people can watch what is essentially a commercialized hype-video for its own products?

This is something akin to when companies have on occasion DMCA'd their own commercials on sites like YouTube, except those are typically done in error. I guess some should take this as a sign that maybe Nintendo doesn't actually want you to watch Nintendo Direct this year.

Filed Under: control, fans, streaming
Companies: nintendo

Nintendo Hates You: Gaming Giant Lobs A DMCA Nuke At Hundreds Of Fan Games

from the nintendon't dept

Nintendo has built quite a reputation for itself as an intellectual property protectionist, going much further than most other game publishers to exert strict control over all of its IP. While this control is deployed in a wide-ranging manner, one of the most visible, common, and consequential avenues for this protectionism comes in the form of Nintendo getting all manner of fan-made creations taken down. These games, almost universally created by huge Nintendo fans as labors of love, are nearly always the subject of DMCA takedowns. Think for just a moment what that means: Nintendo is disallowing, on the regular, the expression of fandom by its own customers.

Every time I have written a post about some individual game being erased in this manner, rather than Nintendo exploring how to officially endorse these fan-made creations so as to protect its IP while still promoting its own fans, it's left me scratching my head. But now that Nintendo has managed to get hundreds of fan-games taken down in one fell swoop, well, it seems the company has decided to take this war on its own fans to another level.

Hundreds of non-commercial Nintendo fangames have been removed from the popular game publishing community Game Jolt after the platform complied with several DMCA takedown requests. Many of the affected games have dedicated fanbases including many die-hard Nintendo fans, some of whom now seem eager to revolt.

A few days ago, Nintendo’s legal department sent DMCA notices to the game publishing community Game Jolt. The site, where hobbyists and indie developers share their creations for free, was notified that hundreds of fangames infringed Nintendo’s trademarks.

Now, GameJolt does advertise on its site, leading Nintendo's DMCA notice to warn that the site was profiting from this infringement. As a result, the site took 379 games down. But it's worth noting both that uploaders appear to have an option to turn off ads on their games' pages and that the developers and fans for these games are absolutely livid about Nintendo's actions. One developer summed it up nicely and then went on to point out why this attempt at enforcement by Nintendo probably won't even work.

“They’ll get no sympathy from me, this isn’t the first time they’ve pulled a stunt like this. They’ve made it clear they hate their fans and repeat it time and time again never learning from it.”

The developer will continue to work on his “Five Nights At Team HQ series” but fears that it will be targeted eventually. That doesn’t stop the developer though, and he encourages others to simply flood the Internet with copies.

“Nintendo if you think taking down everyone’s games will help your image and get people to buy more of your games then you’re sorely mistaken! I’ll keep making and reuploading fan games even if you try to take them down, so DEAL WITH IT! All people who have copies of the fangames that were taken down take them and reupload them all over the internet so they stay up no matter what!”

And that already appears to be happening. Some developers are taking their fan games to other platforms and reuploading them there. Other developers are actually reuploading their games back to GameJolt, but without advertising on them, in the hopes that banner ads were somehow the lynchpin that caused Nintendo to target their particular games.

Nintendo has remained silent on the matter as of the time of this writing, but readers here will know its reputation well enough to know that removing advertisements won't stop the takedowns. Nintendo hates fan-made creations, see, and has taken down plenty of games that were completely devoid of any commercial aspects.

The only thing that will stop the company from treating its biggest fans so poorly, it seems, is if those fans suddenly begin disappearing like the games they created.

Filed Under: dmca, fangames, fans, takedowns
Companies: nintendo