It’s a drum I’ve been beating for some time now: the only reason cord-cutting hasn’t led the traditional cable television market into full capitulation has been television rights for live sports broadcasts. While major sports leagues and college conferences have certainly been trending into the streaming market like the rest of traditional television, it’s typically been with baby steps. And, frankly, the fractured nature of the streaming market, with all kinds of niche streaming services jumping into the game, hasn’t helped push this faster either.

So, where is the market at for these broadcast rights for major sports? We’re about to find out, as the NBA is entering a period in which it can broadly negotiate these rights with whomever it desires.

On Monday at 11:59 p.m. ET, the exclusive financial negotiation window between the NBA, ESPN and TNT Sports will officially close, allowing league commissioner Adam Silver and his top lieutenants to talk specific contract details with other potential partners, which, besides Amazon and NBC, could include Google/YouTube, Netflix and Apple.

There will be at least three separate packages, which is the NBA’s preference, but the idea of four has not been ruled out, those briefed on the discussions said.

It will be the distribution of those deals that will be most interesting here. Keep in mind that, like the NFL, the teams themselves in the NBA often have their own local rights deals that will carry the majority of NBA games, but the national games are always a spotlight, particularly when it comes to the playoffs. So, of the three or four major deals that get signed for nationally televised games, will the emphasis be placed on the streaming market or traditional cable television.

It’s likely to be a combination of both. NBC, in particular, will be of interest, given that it can pair its traditional broadcast channel with its Peacock streaming services. Disney is in a similar place, being able to offer up ABC, ESPN and its streaming services, or Disney Plus. But that doesn’t mean that pure streaming services are out of the running.

The notion that a pure streamer, like Amazon, could have significant games, including conference finals and perhaps even the NBA Finals at some point over the life of a long-term deal is a possibility, according to executives briefed on the NBA’s discussions.

The NBA will broach the idea of partnering with ESPN, Amazon, Apple, Google/YouTube TV — maybe more than one of them — to potentially offer local games direct to consumers.

What’s important here is that the NBA smartly gave itself the full range of options on its licensing menu. In the last round of rights deals, the league organized it such that all of these rights agreements co-terminate after the ’25 season.

Meaning that whatever arrangement the league comes up with, it’s going to be a fascinating view into how a major professional sports league thinks about the streaming and cable television markets.

For several years now, we’ve had a running series of posts discussing how, when it comes to digital goods, you often don’t own what you’ve bought. This ugliness shows up with all kinds of content, including purchased movies, books, and shows on digital platforms. But it has reared its head acutely as of late in the video game industry. The way this goes is that a publisher releases a game in whole, people buy it, and at some later date the publisher decides to shut down backend servers that render the game partially or totally unplayable for those that bought it. This has the effect of deleting pieces of culture, a real problem for those interested in the preservation of this artform, and a real problem for the entire bargain that is copyright, where all that culture is eventually supposed to end up in the public domain.

But all of that is just on the topic of not owning what you’ve bought. With more games allowing for creative expression within them, spearheaded in part by titles like LittleBigPlanet, it’s also the case that you don’t own what you’ve created. Well, with the full shutdown of the LittleBigPlanet servers, all of the user-created content in the game is being whisked away along with the ability to purchase the game itself.

Sony has indefinitely decommissioned the PlayStation 4 servers for puzzle platformer LittleBigPlanet 3, the company announced in an update to one of its support pages. The permanent shutdown comes just months after the servers were temporarily taken offline due to ongoing issues. Fans now fear potentially hundreds of thousands of player creations not saved locally will be lost for good.

“Due to ongoing technical issues which resulted in the LittleBigPlanet 3 servers for PlayStation 4 being taken offline temporarily in January 2024, the decision has been made to keep the servers offline indefinitely,” Sony wrote in the update, first spotted by Delisted Games. “All online services including access to other players’ creations for LittleBigPlanet 3 are no longer available.”

Again, to be clear, the game will still work offline. And if users who created content saved that content locally, they’ll still have it. But many, many gamers saved their creations in the online game servers and used that online component to share what they created with other players. Sony spit out social media content to let the public know the servers were simply never coming back online. Absent from that communication was any plan, method, or capability for those who bought, played, and created content for the game to access any of that content. It’s just, poof, gone.

“Nearly 16 years worth of user generated content, millions of levels, some with millions of plays and hearts,” wrote one long-time player, Weeni-Tortellini, on Reddit in January. “Absolutely iconic levels locked away forever with no way to experience them again. To me, the servers shutting down is a hefty chunk bitten out of LittleBigPlanet’s history. I personally have many levels I made as a kid. Digital relics of what made me as creative as i am today, and The only access to these levels i have is thru the servers. I would be devastated if I could never experience them again.”

Then devastated ye shall be, it seems. I get that technical difficulties can arise. But come on, now. No backups? No way to restore the servers temporarily? Or would there be too much time, energy, and effort required precluding Sony from wanting to do that? We don’t know, because the company hasn’t said. Instead, all this content goes away by fiat, the customers who forked over money and put time into creating within the game be damned.

If companies like Sony are going to be so pernicious with their own centralized servers in this manner, the least they could do would be to instead move to some decentralized and/or user-driven hosting solution. You know, so that a decade’s worth of culture doesn’t simply go away on the whim of one company.

The capricious nature of Nintendo’s IP enforcement practices are, if you’re a regular reader here, quite legendary. In this case, however, it seems like Nintendo’s reputation is what played a part in some copyright fuckery, rather than the company engaging in said fuckery itself.

If you’re not familiar with Garry’s Mod, then you obviously weren’t much of a gamer in the mid-2000s. Built off of Valve’s Source engine, the “game” is essentially a sandbox game with all of the physics of the engine, but in an open “world” in which players can more or less do whatever they want. It also allows for all kinds of user-created mods and content to be added. And, because Nintendo was and remains quite popular with a sizable segment of the gaming population, some of that user generated content created over the past roughly two decades included content and characters from Nintendo games.

The past tense in that sentence being important here, given that it was only recently that Kotaku reported that Nintendo demanded and got all of that content yanked down from the game entirely.

In an update to Garry’s Mod’s Steam page, the developers stated, “Some of you may have noticed that certain Nintendo related workshop items have recently been taken down. This is not a mistake, the takedowns came from Nintendo.”

The update continues, “Honestly, this is fair enough. This is Nintendo’s content and what they allow and don’t allow is up to them. They don’t want you playing with that stuff in Garry’s Mod – that’s their decision, we have to respect that and take down as much as we can.”

So why would Nintendo do this now, after years and years of the content in question existing? It obviously cannot be that Nintendo is suffering some form of irreparable harm due to its own fans having fun creating Nintendo-y things within Garry’s Mod. Were that the case, surely all that harm would have come to Nintendo’s attention somewhere over the course of the last eighteen-plus years. But for all that time, Nintendo was silent.

And, it appears, Nintendo has remained silent. Truth be told, there existed a version of this post taking Nintendo to task for being a bunch of nonsensical copyright assbags. That post has since been rewritten into this one, however, after we noticed some interesting contributions from our awesome community on our Techdirt Insider Discord channel.

Brewster T. Koopa was one of the modders who had content removed from Garry’s Mod. They were adamant from the jump that it was unlikely Nintendo was actually behind the takedowns, based mostly on the above timeline. Then came the answer, with a screenshot from another person explaining just what happened.

We’ve seen this sort of thing before. And, frankly, the story here is the same as it was in that previous case with Bungie. The reason these bad actors are able to pull this sort of crap is due to two things. First, and least important, is Nintendo and Bungie’s reputations for being absolutely draconian when it comes to copyright enforcement. That’s something fairly close to victim blaming in this instance, to be sure, but it’s hard to imagine someone being able to pull this off with a CD Projekt Red or a company with a reputation for being more lenient on copyright matters.

But the real culprit here is Valve’s DMCA review process. If some folks on the internet can figure out in fairly short order that these takedowns are coming from an email address and domain that are not actually owned by or associated with Nintendo, then someone on Valve’s end could have figured this out as well. Instead, the content just came down. And if we’re going to have a DMCA process that looks anything remotely like it does today, that’s a pretty damned big problem. Collateral damage when it comes to matters of speech are simply not acceptable.

So, Valve needs to do better. And, sure, it would be nice if Nintendo turned over a new leaf and was better on copyright matters generally, but the company in this case was also something of a victim here.

There seems to be something rather specific when it comes to the current Italian government when it comes to strong-arming commerce over a protective stance on Italian cultural touchstones. This has traditionally expressed itself mostly in the food and drinks categories of commerce. Wines are particularly of note here, with several recent examples of Italy and companies within it taking a very draconian view of what trademark laws allow it to do. But so too has the government been very protective when it comes to other products, such as cheeses and the like.

But I’ll admit that I wasn’t expecting the Italian government to start a fight with a car manufacturer branding one of its cars “Milano” simply because the cars aren’t made in Milan.

Stellantis-owned Alfa Romeo, a brand steeped in Italian automotive history, unveiled on Wednesday its new Milano small SUV, named after the iconic northern Italian city of Milan, where Alfa Romeo was founded in 1910. The car is being built at the Tychy plant in Poland, and is the first Alfa Romeo model entirely produced outside Italy.

“A car called Milano cannot be produced in Poland. This is forbidden by Italian law,” Adolfo Urso said in Turin, referring to 2003 legislation that targets “Italian sounding” products that falsely claim to be Italian. “This law stipulates that you cannot give indications that mislead consumers. So a car called Milano must be produced in Italy. Otherwise, it gives a misleading indication which is not allowed under Italian law,” Urso said.

Let’s be very clear about what is going on here, because it has nothing to do with the public being misled. The Italian government and Alfa Romeo have been in an ongoing and fairly public battle about job creation within the country and over where the company is making its cars. In other words, it is plainly obvious that the government is trying to deploy this angle of the brand name violating Italian law purely as a pain-tactic as part of of that battle.

Because the fact is that the law being referenced here is all about public confusion, as any good trademark law should be. And nobody is going to convince me that simply by having a name that is an homage to the carmaker’s Italian heritage is somehow the same as positioning that the cars are made in Italy.

The law mentioned by Urso says it is illegal to present a foreign-made product as coming from Italy. Typically, it has been invoked against food products, for example U.S.-made “parmesan” cheese resembling Italy’s “parmigiano”.

To be clear, there haven’t been any other accusations I can find that the company is “presenting” the car as being made in Italy beyond the brand name. And for any sane trademark law and/or ruling, that simply isn’t enough to constitute trademark infringement.

But Italy is going through it’s own nationalistic push. In situations like this, the equitable enforcement of reasonable laws often times goes out the window.

While it doesn’t happen nearly as often as I’d like, it is quite satisfying when a trademark bully is forced to walk back their bullying ways as a result of a public backlash. If you don’t do a lot of your own cooking, particularly cooking Asian foods, you may not be familiar with chili crisp. Somewhat similar to garlic chili paste, chili crisp is a crunchier version of the condiment made with dried and fried chilis and garlic. Oh, and it’s absolutely awesome and goes on a ton of things. It regularly makes its way onto my eggs for breakfast, for instance.

It’s also been around for a long, long time and goes by a variety of name variations. One of those is “chili crunch”, or “chile crunch”. Now, a company called Chile Colonial, LLC had a trademark for “chile crunch” registered with the USPTO somehow. I would argue that the term is both descriptive in nature and also in such widespread common use so as to be invalid as a trademark to begin with, but the USPTO did what it does far too often and granted it anyway. Then famed chef David Chang’s company, Momofuku, acquired the trademark from the company as part of a lawsuit settlement in 2023 and then applied for a mark on the variant “chili crunch.”

And then the threat letters from Momofuku started going out to small makers of the condiment using those terms, almost all of which were headed up by Asian-Americans.

Michelle Tew, founder of the Malaysian food brand Homiah, based in New York City, is one of the letter recipients. It states that Momofuku is the “ … owner of all trademark rights … ” for “chile crunch” and “chili crunch” (two different spellings) and that her product, Homiah Sambal Chili Crunch, is a trademark infringement.

Tew said her chili crunch is based on her Malaysian family’s recipe, where she grew up. Momofuku is concerned that consumers might confuse a jar of Homiah Sambal Chili Crunch, which has a colorful floral motif paper label, with a jar of Momofuku Chili Crunch, which is minimalist with a hand-drawn font and no paper label. Homiah has 90 days to cease the use of the “chili crunch trademark”.

As word spread of Momofuku’s cease-and-desist letters among food entrepreneurs making the chili condiment, reactions ranged from fear and annoyance, to disappointment and astonishment at the gall.

Then other small shops began chiming in about their own threat letters they’d received, almost universally expressing disappointment that a member of the Asian-American community was attempting to lock up this specific cultural term for its own and threaten others over it. The whole thing got a ton of press coverage, and the public and community in general all seemed to be aligned against Chang and Momofuku. Press coverage featured trademark experts that properly labeled this whole thing as a classic example of trademark bullying.

“The phrase that I would use to refer to Momofuku in this case, is a trademark bully,” says Stephen Coates, the lawyer representing Homiah. “This is a clear case of them picking on small businesses with a letter campaign hoping they’ll cave because of the financial pressure.” If small businesses capitulate and omit “chili crunch” from their labels, Momofuku’s product will appear more distinct as it applies for the registered “chili crunch” trademark.

Well, it took a couple of weeks, but it appears all of that public backlash convinced Chang to stand down and apologize for this whole fiasco. His apology, for what it’s worth, is a fairly good one.

“First and foremost, I want to apologize to everyone in the AAPI community who’s been hurt or feels like I’ve marginalized them or put a ceiling on them by our actions,” began Chang. 

He continued: “I spent the greater part of my adult life trying to bring light to Asian food, Asian American food, Asian identity, what it means to be Asian American. I understand why people are upset and I’m truly sorry.”

But the most important thing Chang stated was a promise to simply not enforce the trademark moving forward. And if he follows through on that, there is simply no reason to have the trademark at all. Non-enforcement would lead to it becoming generic. Given that it’s already descriptive and I don’t believe for a second it would survive any actual trademark infringement trial, this whole thing renders the trademark useless.

So maybe the real apology would be Chang invalidating and giving up his own trademark.

Well, that was fast. It was just earlier this month that we talked about some interesting new rules Apple instituted for its App Store when it comes specifically to emulation apps. While emulators in and of themselves are not in anyway illicit, Apple did its best to keep them off its platform, and off iPhones generally. It did so under the public theory that apps that allow in-app callouts to outside software that is not within the app itself represented a security risk. ROMs to run on these emulators was the example that precluded emulator apps from appearing in the store. The reality is that Apple has a history of both valuing strict control over what goes on its devices combined with the never ending hatred console-makers have for emulators generally.

So it was with all of that historical context that I viewed the rule changes Apple announced in early April pessimistically. A lot of the commentary surrounding what Apple would actually allow centered on it being primarily console manufacturers or game publishers themselves releasing their own emulators for purchase. Well, it turns out that pessimism was somewhat misguided, as the App Store just saw its first approved third-party emulator released.

Apple’s decision earlier this month to open the iOS App Store to generic retro game emulators is already bearing fruit. Delta launched Wednesday as one of the first officially approved iOS apps to emulate Nintendo consoles from the NES through the N64 and the Game Boy through the Nintendo DS (though unofficial options have snuck through in the past).

All that history means Delta is far from a slapdash app quickly thrown together to take advantage of Apple’s new openness to emulation. The app is obviously built with iOS in mind and already integrates some useful features designed for the mobile ecosystem. While there are some updates we’d like to see in the future, this represents a good starting point for where Apple-approved game emulation can go on iOS.

Now, the rest of the Ars Technica post delves mostly into a review of the app itself, what it does well, and what it fails at. And that’s all fine, but the point here is that emulation outside of the strict control of Apple and/or console-makers appears to be officially back in the App Store. I can already hear the gnashing of teeth from the folks at Nintendo over all of this, and I certainly don’t expect that we won’t hear from the company in some disapproving form on this and other emulators that might appear, but they really don’t have much of a leg to stand on.

As we’ve mentioned in the past, emulators are not, by themselves, infringing on copyright typically. They don’t typically ship with BIOS files to make the emulator do its thing. Nor do they ship with ROMs that might be infringing. Instead, it’s a tool with plenty of legitimate uses. Homebrew games for old consoles are out there. Games where the companies that made and published them no longer exist, in some cases with rights never having been bought or transferred to another entity exist. Ripped ROMs from owned games by individuals exist.

So the emulator embargo is gone. Somehow, I don’t believe that companies like Nintendo are going to see their livelihoods ruined as a result.

We’ve had plenty of posts discussing all manner of behavior from the Los Angeles Police Dept. and/or the LAPD union here at Techdirt. As you might imagine if you’re a regular reader here, the majority of those posts haven’t exactly involved fawning praise for these supposed crimefighters. In fact, if you went on a reading blitz of those posts, you might even come away thinking, “You know what? Fuck the LAPD!”

Well, if you wanted to display your sentiments while you went about your day, you might go over to the Cola Corporation’s website to buy one particular shirt it had on offer there before they completely sold out.

Now, it’s not uncommon for misguided entities to issue intellectual property threat letters over t-shirts and apparel, even when it is of the sort that is obviously fair use. Given that, you might have thought it would be the Los Angeles Lakers that sent a nastygram to Cola Corp. After all, the logo in question is clearly a parody of the LA Lakers logo.

Nope!

It was the Los Angeles Police Foundation via its IMG representatives. The LAPF is something of a shadow financier of the LAPD for equipment, including all manner of tech and gear. We have no idea how an entertainment agency like IMG got in bed with these assbags, but it was IMG sending the threat letter you can see below, chock full of all kinds of claims to rights that the LAPF absolutely does not and could not have.

If you can’t see that, it’s a letter sent by Andrew Schmidt, who represents himself as the Senior Counsel to IMG Worldwide, saying:

RE: Request to Remove Infringing Material From www.thecolacorporation.com
Dear Sir/Madam:

I am writing on behalf of IMG Worldwide, LLC (“IMG”), IMG is the authorized representative of Los Angeles Police Foundation CLAPF) LAPF is one of two exclusive holders of intellectual property rights pertaining to trademarks, copyrights and other licensed indicia for (a) the Los Angeles Police Department Badge; (b) the Los Angeles Police Department Uniform; (c) the LAPD motto “To Protect and Serve”; and (d) the word “LAPD” as an acronym/abbreviation for the Los Angeles Police Department (collectively, the “LAPD IP”). Through extensive advertising, promotion and the substantial sale of a full range of licensed products embodying and pertaining to the LAPD IP, the LAPD IP has become famous throughout the world; and as such, carries immeasurable value to LAPF.

We are writing to you regarding an unauthorized use of the LAPD IP on products being sold on your website, www.thecolacorporation.com (the “Infringing Product”). The website URL and description for the Infringing Product is as follows:
https://www.thecolacorporation.com/products fack-the- lupd pos-1&sid=435934961&&variant=48461787234611 FUCK THE LAPD
For the avoidance of doubt, the aforementioned Infringing Product and the image associated therewith are in no way authorized or approved by LAPF or any of its duly authorized representatives.

This letter hereby serves as a statement that:

1. The aforementioned Infringing Product and the image associated therewith violate LAPF’s rights in the LAPD IP
2. These exclusive rights in and to the LAPD IP are being violated by the sale of the Infringing Product on your website at the URL mentioned above;
3. [Contact info omitted]
4. On information and belief, the use of the LAPD IP on the Infringing Products is not authorized by LAPF, LAPF’s authorized agents or representatives or the law.
5. Under penalty of perjury, I hereby state that the above information is accurate and I am duly authorized to act on on behalf of the rights holder of the intellectual. property at issue I hereby request that you remove or disable access the above-mentioned materials and their corresponding URL’s as they appear on your services in as expedient a manner as possible.
   

So, where to begin? For starters, note how the letter breezily asserts copyright, trademark, and “other licensed indicia” without ever going into detail as to what it thinks it actually holds the rights to? That’s an “indicia” of a legal threat that is bloviating, with nothing to back it up. If you know what rights you have, you clearly state them. This letter does not.

If it’s a copyright play that the LAPF is trying to make, it’s going to go absolutely nowhere. The use is made for the purposes of parody and political commentary. It’s clearly fair use, and there are plenty of precedents to back that up. Second, what exactly is the copyright claim here? It’s not the logo. Again, if anything, that would be the Lakers’ claim to make. The only thing possibly related to the LAPD would be those letters: LAPD. And, no, the LAPD does not get to copyright the letters LAPD.

If it’s a trademark play instead, well, that might actually work even less for the LAPF, for any number of reasons. Again, this is parody and political commentary: both First Amendment rights that trump trademarks. More importantly, in trademark you have the question of the likelihood of confusion. We’re fairly sure the LAPF doesn’t want to make the case that the public would be confused into thinking that the Los Angeles Police Foundation was an organization that is putting out a “Fuck the LAPD” t-shirt. Finally, for there to be a trademark, there has to be a use in commerce. Is the LAPF selling “Fuck the LAPD” t-shirts? Doubtful.

But that’s all sort of besides the point, because the LAPF doesn’t have the rights IMG asserted in its letter. Again, the only possible claim that the LAPF can make here is that it has ownership to the letters LAPD. And it does not. Beyond the fact that it had no “creative” input into LAPD, the LAPD is a city’s law enforcement agency and you cannot copyright or trademark such a thing. And, as we’ve discussed multiple times in the past, government agencies don’t get to claim IP on their agency names. The only restrictions they can present are on deceptive uses of logos/seals/etc.

But that is clearly not the case here. And we already have some examples from a decade ago of government agencies demanding the removal of parody logos and… it not ending very well for the government. 

So, what is actually happening here is that the LAPF/LAPD (via IMG) is pretending it has the right to screw with private citizens in ways it absolutely does not, and is using those false rights to harass those private persons with threatening behavior to intimidate them into doing what the LAPF wants. Which, if I’m being totally honest here, is certainly on brand as roughly the most police-y thing it could do in response to a simple t-shirt that is no longer even for sale.

Now, you might imagine that the Cola Corporation’s own legal team would reply to the silly threat letter outlining all of the above, crafting a careful and articulate narrative responding to all the points raised by the LAPF, and ensuring that their full legal skills were on display.

Instead, the company brought on former Techdirt podcast guest, lawyer Mike Dunford, who crafted something that is ultimately even better.

If you can’t read that, you’re not missing much. It says:

Andrew,

Lol, no.

Sincerely,
Mike Dunford

Perfect. No notes. May it go down in history alongside Arkell v. Pressdam, or the infamous Cleveland Browns response to a fan complaining about paper airplanes, as the perfect way to respond to absolutely ridiculous legal threat letters.

For what it’s worth, Dunford’s boss, Akiva Cohen, noted that this letter was “a fun one to edit.” We can only imagine.

This was a fun one to edit

[image or embed]

— AkivaMCohen (@akivamcohen.bsky.social) Apr 18, 2024 at 2:47 PM

We’ve had several posts on the video game sensation that is Palworld in the past. Given that the game has been described by others as “Pokémon, but with guns”, we kicked things off both wondering if Nintendo was going to try to take some kind of misguided legal action on the game, while also pointing out that the game is an excellent case study in copyright’s idea/expression dichotomy. After all, the game does not do any direct copying of any Pokémon IP, but does draw obvious inspiration from some of the base ideas behind that IP. In fact, highlighting the dichotomy further was a mod that injected actual Pokémon IP into Palworld, which Nintendo then managed to get taken down.

One of the things writers of this sort of content like me tend to fret about, however, is how often rank hypocrisy suddenly shows up among subjects such as the creators behind Palworld. It’s not uncommon to see a content creator attempt to go after folks doing to them exactly what the creator did in drawing inspiration from others. If you were worried the people behind Palworld would fall into this category, however, it appears very much that you were worried for nothing.

With the success of the game, it was only a matter of time before someone, or many someones, tried to cash in on its success by making similar games, or “clones.” PocketPair CEO Takuro Mizobe noticed this was happening with Palworld and reacted thusly.

“Tencent is already making a Palworld clone game!” PocketPair CEO Takuro Mizobe recently tweeted,” according to a translation by Automaton. He seemed happy about it. “These are incredible times,” he wrote. Some initially interpreted Mizobe as being critical of these moves. An IGN story described him as accusing other companies of ripping off Palworld, a framing the CEO rejected.

“To ‘accuse’ someone of something, means to say they are doing something wrong,” Mizobe wrote in a follow-up tweet responding to the IGN story. “I don’t think what Tencent is doing is wrong. I’m proud that other companies want to make games like Palworld. The industry historically innovates when we borrow ideas from games we love. I’m surprised that many high-quality mobile games are already in development.”

No going legal. No threats. Not even a hint of a complaint. Instead, Mizobe acknowledged what we all already know to be true: video games, like other forms of culture, are and have always been built on what came before it. If the success of Palworld spawns similar games after the fact, that’s not only not a problem, it’s a good thing for gaming culture. Hell, Mizobe even went so far as to praise some of these games’ quality.

Imagine Nintendo doing anything like this. You simply can’t. In fact, when Palworld was released, Nintendo made some vague comments about looking into the game to see if it wanted to pursue any legal action. You know, the exact opposite of the route Mizobe took.

Who knows if these new Palworld clones that Tencent and others are apparently developing will ever see the light of day. We won’t know if they’re actually rip-offs until they’re out, but Mizobe doesn’t seem to mind either way.

And why should he? I imagine he’s far too busy counting all the money his company is making by focusing on making a successful game rather than wringing his hands over some clones that may or may not ever gain any traction.

We’ve written about Bell Canada plenty over the years and not typically for good reasons. This is a company that wanted to ban VPNs to combat people getting around geo-blocked content, has a habit of acting petulant when it comes to regulators, and has engaged in other consumer-unfriendly practices. So, not the best reputation when it comes to treating its own customers, and the larger public, particularly well. You can think of them as something like a Canadian version of Comcast in the States.

As you might expect from a company that likes to wield a heavy hand, Bell Canada has been removing the ability for subscribers to use 3rd party DVRs in their homes, pushing people instead to use its cloud-based PVR platform to record content instead. Customers that signed up for that did so under an advertisement of a 1 year retention policy on recorded content.

Until today, that is, when Bell Canada announced and will begin enforcing a 60 day retention instead. Suprise!

On May 1, Fibe TV will automatically delete recordings stored on its Cloud PVR (personal video recorder) offering once the recordings hit 61 days of age, as confirmed by Canadian online newspaper Daily Hive. Currently, customers maintain access to recordings stored via Cloud PVR for 365 days.

Fibe TV apparently started alerting customers of the upcoming change this month.

A Bell Canada spokesperson, Jacqueline Michelis, minimized the idea of disruption to customers, telling Daily Hive: “The viewing of nearly all recordings takes place within 60 days, so there is minimal impact to customers.” Michelis didn’t provide more details on how Bell Canada arrived at this conclusion.

That last bit isn’t surprising considering just how many people are jumping into Bell support forums to express just how pissed off they are about this. And the flippant comments from the spokesperson don’t even bother to address the fact that Bell customers were told there would be one retention policy only to find out that it got 5/6th shorter now that they’ve signed up. There’s a term for that and it’s called a bait and switch.

And it doesn’t seem like Bell can even get implementing this right. While Bell has also made comments about this being a way to free up storage space, that certainly isn’t the case on the actual end user side.

Customers have turned to Bell Canada’s online support forum to share their discontent with the changes, with some saying that they don’t align with the services they expected to receive when signing up for Fibe TV. Thankfully, Bell Canada won’t be able to delete recordings stored on DVR hardware inside customers’ homes.

Other complaints are coming from users whose recordings are being deleted even when they haven’t come close to maxing out their cloud storage or if their recordings aren’t available on demand.

A user going by camisotro on Bell Canada’s online support forum called the announcement “absolutely ridiculous” and condemned what they perceived to be years of telecoms pushing back against users’ ability to record content.

To be clear, the cloud PVR costs money. $10/month, to be exact. And again, that subscription was sold with customers understanding that content would have a 1 year retention. How in the world this would not result in some kind of class action lawsuit on behalf of consumers is entirely beyond me.

Bell Canada competitors are already out with public comments committing to their own 1 year retention on cloud-based content recordings. I would imagine those competitors will have some new customers in very short order.

Here we go again. There seems to be a thing happening among a select few big name video game publishers that have decided for some reason that they want to go to war with their own modding communities. The reasons for doing so vary, but they all amount to wanting to strictly control the experience gamers have with their products. Which is absolutely silly. Mods only exist because people want them. And they want them because they enhance the gaming experience they have with these games, thereby making them more attractive for purchase and continued play.

But when you’ve declared a war like this, it gets real easy for it to turn into a total war type scenario, where no method of attack is left unused. So it seems is the case with Bandai Namco, which for some reason decided to issue a trademark threat to modding site Tekkenmods.com.

Programmer and TekkenMods.com administrator Dennis Stanistan revealed the site recently received an infringement notice from Bandai Namco. The email from Bandai Namco states that the website uses trademarked visuals and logos without prior approval. “By doing so,” it accuses, “you intentionally seek to attract Internet users to your website. This unauthorized use of Bandai/Namco’s intellectual property falsely suggests Bandai/Namco’s sponsorship or enforcement of your website.”

It’s a ridiculous claim to make for several reasons. At the very highest level, PC gamers are not going to somehow think that a third-party mod site has some affiliation with Bandai Namco just because its name, game name, or logos appear on it. If the company was going to make changes to its game, it would simply do so in an update to the game. The whole point of mod sites like this are to do things the game developers didn’t do with their games.

And while the site did remove the logos and material as demanded by Bandai Namco, Stanistan was also very clear that he didn’t believe any of this amounted to trademark infringement, in particular as the site goes out of its way to state it is not affiliated with the company.

As TekkenMods in its official response, the mod’s creator deleted it from the website. However, Stanistan denies doing anything illegal, writing, “Acknowledgement of your complaint is not an admission of any wrongdoing.”

The site administrator also pointed out that the page clearly states it is not affiliated with Bandai Namco. This, Stanistan explains, was specifically done to avoid confusion about whether TekkenMods carries any official endorsement. “Furthermore,” he writes, “the alleged ‘infringing’ elements are used in the context of fan-based content creation which aims to celebrate and promote the Tekken franchise rather than infringe upon or compete with it.”

For the love of all that is holy, I do not understand why it is so hard for some game publishers to grasp this concept. Mods are not a threat to their games. They are a free source of labor for making the games more attractive for purchase, for replayability, and for extending the longevity of the game. It’s all a boon, with little if any downside that I can find.

But for some, the war continues. I sometimes wonder if these companies even understand why they are fighting this war.