Nintendo Does Another DMCA Blitz On YouTube Video Game Music Not Available Elsewhere
from the nintendon't dept
Earlier this year, we discussed Nintendo — dubbed by me as “the Disney of video gaming” — having gone on a DMCA blitz on YouTube videos that are essentially just new and classic video game music. This has been something Nintendo has ramped up over the years, taking down 100 videos in 2019, more than that in 2020, and then over 1,300 in 2022. That last one mostly targeted a single YouTube account, that of GilvaSunner, who later shut down his account due to all this nonsense.
What’s important to keep in mind with all of this is that, other than basically some music from some Pokemon games, Nintendo does not make this music available elsewhere for streaming. In other words, the public wants a product of Nintendo that it doesn’t directly sell or make available, but Nintendo refuses to also let the internet fill this need free of charge. The music videos don’t compete with Nintendo, in other words, but the company refuses to allow the public to consume them.
And this is still going on. The company recently got over 500 of these music-only videos removed from YouTube, largely all uploaded by one user again, DeoxysPrime. DeoxysPrime, given the pressure from the DMCA takedowns, is simply going to remove all Nintendo music from his/her channel.
The reaction to all of this from fans of Nintendo’s games and their music has been fairly uniform: confusion mixed with irritation. And the reason for that is very clear. Nintendo is removing access to this beloved music without bothering to offer its own method for listening to it.
“It really makes me wonder why Nintendo still hasn’t created their own VEVO channel or addEd OSTs to music streaming services. Even Disney has the decency to do both,” said one fan on the Restera forum.
“Why don’t they let people pay to listen to this stuff, everybody wins,” said another.
Perhaps Nintendo has plans to offer some way to stream music from its games that hasn’t been made public yet. But this DMCA blitz on game music, as noted earlier, has been going on for several years now.
So as it stands now, this all looks like Nintendo pissing on the legs of its fans without any good reason.
Filed Under: copyright, dmca, music, takedowns
Companies: nintendo
Comments on “Nintendo Does Another DMCA Blitz On YouTube Video Game Music Not Available Elsewhere”
“So as it stands now, this all looks like Nintendo pissing on the legs of its fans without any good reason.”
And the fans keep asking why its raining.
Stockholm Syndrome
They’ve been scum since at least the 80’s. I’ve been calling them Scumtendo or Nintenscum (or choose your own) for quite a while now.
Unfortunately, “consumers” are too infected with a certain Swedish disease to tell corporations where they can go.
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“I’ve been calling them Scumtendo or Nintenscum (or choose your own) for quite a while now.”
why do people think this is funny or clever to do?
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Because they know that a pun can be clever, but they don’t understand what makes a pun clever. In high school a juvenile attempt at word play got a laugh, and now they think any attempt at word-play is gold.
That admittedly checks out with a dude who was a Middle School bully in the 80s making fun of the nerds with their Nintendo’s. Not sure what Nintendo did in the process of saving the North American video game market that got in this guys bonnet, but he likely forgets that for Nintendo’s various bad behavior, most of it wasn’t well known until the social media age. They instead had a reputation built off quality experiences. Prior to recent handhelds, Nintendium was a term for a reason. They burned that rep now. But Nintendo maintained a good rep as the place to go for fun even as competition rose, discounting the idea that Nintendo locked us in a room until we didn’t know any better.
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The censorship became very well known in the ’90s, perhaps most famously with Mortal Kombat (while Sega owners got a respectable port, the version for Nintendo had blood re-colored green, severed heads removed, etc.).
Nobody was paying much attention to copyright in those days, because things like books, movies, and console games (except PSX games) couldn’t be easily copied anyway—it was mostly an industrial regulation. The music recording industry had been whining about home taping, but everyone knew they couldn’t do a damn thing about it.
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It is neither funny nor clever. Calling a spade a spade is all it is. Honesty. Something in very rare supply.
These bastards are monopolistic, anti-consumer scumbags. Therefore I call them by their real names.
Laizorb has Kirby 64 music. Those will be gone soon.
The laws in Japan on music rights are very strict, there was never a version of guitar hero for Japan released because Japanese music rights are very expensive,and hard to negotiate, Nintendo prefers to control its ip, even if there’s no legal way to listen to this music
Copyright owners have some priviledges that other people on the planet do not have. They can for example decide to discontinue some product line or a product when the money equation does not cover the costs of producing the material. Once the product disappears from the market, it is illegal for 3rd parties to fill the market with illegal copies of the same material, even though customers would loudly request access to the product. The only possible avenue to meet the customer demands is via creating competing product. But the development work must already began like 3 years before the original company stopped providing the material to reach the market in time. This is awesome way for established companies to move their customers from old product to newer slightly improved products, since the competitiors cannot meet demands from those customers unless they saw the company dropping ball on old product beforehand.
Mickey mouse is not available for purchase any longer, since the disney headquarters saw beforehand that their 70 years after death of the author copyright ownership is being expired, and the company will need to move all their customers to newer products which have significantly longer copyright lease. But pirates or the “community” is not allowed to take mickey mouse animations and meet the demand for animations with mickey mouse material, instead they need to create competing products.
This is what meshpage is doing now. We saw beforehand that disney need to stop creating mickey mouse animations and move their customers to new products. This causes distruptions in the market where mickey mouse demand skyrockets, but supply side is not able to meet the demand. But we in our magical foresight, spend previous 10 years to build alternative for children’s mickey mouse animations, and now when disney stopped licensing the animations to the customers, meshpage is ready to offer the replacement.
We know this magical market where our product is selling like hotcakes is not going to last too long time. The mickey mouse copyright term is expiring soon and once that happens, we need to compete against the original mickey mouse animations all again. But if we work hard, we can beat the expectations and provide better animations for customers, and then we can beat the people who rely on expired copyright term.
This is basically how the market works. When pirates resupply the market with pirated copies of the old products, they kill the market for newer products like meshpage. This is why copyright is important and pirates should die horrible death.
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What person on the planet does not own a copyright?
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Copyright maximalists would claim this post should be considered sufficiently creative to have a copyright attached.
They are wrong.
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Anyone in a country out of a very short list of about 16 nations.
How is it you want this to work?
If i own the copyright on some music and don’t make it available then other people can share it and that’s OK if there’s public demand?
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If you don’t make it available, you don’t make money on it. That shouldn’t be difficult to understand.