from the nintendon’t dept
It was only some weeks back that we were discussing how a group of hobbyists were once again doing the culture preservation work that content creators should be doing in the form of a scan of every single Nintendo Power magazine and uploading it to the Internet Archive. At the time, you could go to the link for the project and view every magazine’s contents in its full antiquated glory. I finished that post off with the following line after ruminating that the view on this by Nintendo should be that this is pure preservation and not some kind of threat to its current business operations:
Hopefully Nintendo can manage to see that as well. Somehow, though, I suspect the lawyers already have pen to paper.
But, as I’m fond of saying, Nintendo is going to Nintendo. If you go to the site for the project now, you’ll see that the content has been replaced with a notice indicating that the content has been taken down. Annoyingly, the text displayed now doesn’t detail out why it’s been taken down, but rather indicates a bunch of possible reasons: TOS violations, a decision by the uploader, etc. Because of that, I can’t say for sure that Nintendo’s lawyers got involved to get this content taken down, but it’s a pretty safe bet. Why?
Well, because the company has done this exact thing before. At that link, you can read a Wired post on how Nintendo took down 140 issues worth of scans, also from the Internet Archive, back in 2016.
The 140+ issues of classic gaming magazine Nintendo Power that were uploaded to the Internet Archive are once again the preserve of physical collectors and forgotten boxes stashed in attics. Nintendo, the original publisher of the title, has had the digital collection pulled.
While no formal announcement has been given on the takedown, Nintendo of America told Polygon that it must “protect our own characters, trademarks and other content” and “the unapproved use of Nintendo’s intellectual property can weaken our ability to protect and preserve it, or to possibly use it for new projects.”
What’s clear here is that either Nintendo requested the content be taken down directly or either the Internet Archive or the uploader did so purely out of fear of Nintendo’s lawyers. Either way, as I’m often wont to do, I am happy to blame Nintendo for this.
And you really do have to keep it in your head that there both is no threat to Nintendo for not figuring out a way to allow this to exist, nor is Nintendo doing anything itself to achieve the same preservation efforts that the upload achieved. It’s not like there’s an official Nintendo site out there where all of this culture is being preserved. If there were, the IA.org scans wouldn’t need to exist.
It’s a net loss for culture, all because Nintendo just can’t stop being Nintendo.
Filed Under: archives, copyright, nintendo power, terms of service, trademark
Companies: nintendo