phart010

It is pretty obvious that stealing physical property is wrong. Anyone can understand this. But understanding theft of intellectual property takes a little bit of mental gymnastics. Obviously the party paying for the research and development feels the pain directly so they will know something wrong is happening the most. But if you try to explain why theft of tech research is wrong to a people who were predominantly farmers for generations and just began to get into manufacturing, the concept might not click. Asian countries only started to realize the importance of IP protection when they began to develop their own technologies and they wanted to start getting protection for the work they were doing Any screen that has Mario on it that wasn't release by Nintendo's expressed consent is a bootleg in countries where IP theft is defined as illegal activity.

So these international conventions are put together to help the participating countries understand the proposed international standards. The participants sign a treaty which is their commitment uphold the new standard. But the treaty is not legally enforceable. It’s just a show of commitment. To follow through with their commitments the participating countries are supposed make laws within their country that solidify the standards. If they don’t make domestic laws regarding IP theft, then everything is fair game. Also, the Paris Convention wasn’t not a one and done deal. There were a few countries participating in the beginning and over the past 100 or so years more and more countries signed on. To be clear, I don’t approve of IP theft. I’m just saying that some places are probably still in a period of adjustment to new laws if it’s a new thing for them. And we should also recognize that it’s technically not illegal everywhere

I saw the list. soooooo…..

In the world we live in today, what we think of as “international IP law” has become very normalized. However, this is a fairly recent thing. Back in the NES/Famicom days it was very spotty.

Hmmm can someone please explain what a Nintendo country is?

Welcome

I can speak for my own personal experience in the early 2000s. Back then, there were two major shopping malls in the Philippines. One was called SM, and the other was called Robinson’s. These malls were very large and would be considered the most high end shopping experience you could have in the country. In Robinsons malls they had a department store called Robinsons, very similar to Sears. Robinsons department store would be filled with uniformed employees that were doing all kinds of things from mopping floors to assisting you with any shopping needs. In the video game section of Robinson‘s department store you would find it fully stocked with “bootleg” Gameboy Advance games. I’m not sure what the legal stance on these were in the Philippines back then, but if you would not consider that as retail, then you could not call anything in the Philippines retail.

I mostly agree with you @Glovesexcept I would add that morals are subjective. Maybe IP theft is morally wrong over here. Maybe the concept of IP theft does not even exist somewhere else. After all, it is an imaginary concept

Here's some food for thought: Let's go back to the fundamentals of legality.. laws are created as a standard by which some things are allowed and some things are not allowed. There are consequences/punishments for doing whats not allowed. The whole idea being that some smart people in charge of running society decide that some things are harmful for society as a whole, whereas other things are harmless. But here's the thing.. "Harm" is a subjective thing. This is proven because every government in the world regards different things as harmful (and thus illegal) for society. For example, in Singapore, you will be executed for recreational use of marijuana. But in Amsterdam, smoke all day, everything is groovy. Likewise in Western countries, it is not ok to use other's "intellectual property" without their permission. But in some places, the concept of "intellectual property" does not exist, therefore IP cannot be stolen. The use of the term "bootleg" implies that the product was illegal to make and sell. This was not the case for many of the things that are being called bootlegs. They were openly sold in large public department stores with no reproach whatsoever. For us as Westerners to suggest that these products sold in other lands outside of our national borders were ethically wrong or illegal only matters as much as a Singaporean persons opinion about recreational use of marijuana here in the US. It doesn't matter. And to suggest that harm was done to companies like Nintendo by the selling pirate software is wrong. If anything this was only helpful to Nintendo. Here is why: the income demographic of societies that are filled with "bootleg" games is such that people cannot afford the prices that Nintendo would demand for their product. Therefore Nintendo simply decides not to participate in distributing within that country. If Nintendo isn’t selling in that country, then they are not losing any sales when people "bootleg" games there. So no harm done. If anything, not bootlegging is harmful to the society because it deprives the people living there from the ability to experience the games. A similar situation I like to look at is that of Microsoft in China. There's a case study where Microsoft was considering whether to build in a new level of anti-piracy into the Windows operating system which would essentially shut down like 90% of the Windows pc's in China. They ultimately decided not to do this even though easily could have.. Why?? As a rapidly developing country, Microsoft realized that even though people could not afford to buy Windows today, they eventually would be a middle class society with respectable incomes. If they were to crack down on unauthorized use of Windows, then Chinese people would just switch to Linux which is free to use. They did not want China to grow into a non-Windows society when they ultimately became middle class, therefore they just looked the other way with all of the piracy.

Probably better for the environment

I heard those squat toilets are actually better for your health in the long term

Just because something is technically correct doesn’t mean it is practical. Everyone knows what they mean when they say licensed (with like 2 game exceptions that are the subject of debate).

I was just talking about on NES. I can’t speak for Famicom because I have no clue how they did things in Japan

@Code MonkeyCan we download your app on iPhone?

Licensed means Nintendo gave the publisher permission to release the game on the NES. Nintendo designed the NES to be a closed market and the only way to get into the market would be to be granted a license by Nintendo on a per title basis. @Dr. Morbis made a valid point that Nintendo doesn’t need to give itself permission. A more correct term (that nobody will use) would be the “Nintendo Seal of Quality” set Edit: which by the way, NWC doesn’t have a seal of quality

Thank you for the correction. I may have not been technically correct but at least you get the general idea I was trying to convey. @darkchylde28I’ve given up on the Gameboy discussion.. we are going in circles and I don’t understand the “distinctions” that are being made.

@fcgamer hey man did I really say that or did you paraphrase what I said

Copyright law is actually like the Wild West. There is no such thing as international copyright law. Each country has its own copyright laws. Whether one country also honors the copyrights established in another country depends on weather the two countries have agreed to copyright treaties. So… I believe the dude that invented Tetris was Russian. He would definitely be recognized as the intellectual owner of Tetris in Russia (for whatever that’s worth ). Whether or not the US recognized him as the owner of Tetris or not depends on whether he filed for copyright in the US or if the US honored his copyright from Russia. Even assuming that his copyright extended into the US, allowing him to license it to Nintendo, that doesnt necessarily mean he was recognized as the owner or that his agreements with Nintendo apply in all of Southeast Asia at that time. So someone else could have potentially legitimately made Tetris in some other country at that time. Im sure today we have tons of treaties with other countries, but we’re talking about the late 80’s when Southeast Asia was an underdeveloped region.

I don’t think I understand what you are differing with me on. I agree that Stadium Events is a different game because it’s a different game. The programming was changed to make it WCTM. Games that changed publishers for reprints are not different games. The programming of the game remained the same from one publisher to the next. It sounds like we are saying the same thing

You’re talking about Stadium Events right? If so, the fact that they recoded Stadium Events to change the in-game title screen is what makes it a “different game.” The idea that it is now published by Nintendo instead of Bandai doesn’t have any bearing on the matter. Even today there are tons of games that are published by more than one publisher. Limited Run Games is a great example. Limited Run offers to publish a physical release of a game since the developers can’t afford to publish on their own. Since LRG promises to only do a single run, if the game sells well, then another publisher approaches the developers to get permission to do additional runs.

When I say the game code is not changed, I mean the game program. Not the product code xxx-xxx-USA. The product codes were all revised to add the 1 suffix. But the actual Game programming didn’t change. I have not looked deeply into this, maybe someone could actually compare the assembly code..If it did change, the first they would have done would’ve been to change the publishers name on the title screen. This did not happen so I think it’s safe to assume that no other things were changed.

If you do a repro label you might as well make sure that the label is a different design than the original games label. This way nobody gets confused. There’s lot of good looking repro labels with alternative artwork

This games a lot of fun!

Gameboy has a bunch of examples. Adventure Island and Felix the cat were both Hudsonsoft games. They were reprinted by Electrobrain. All they did was replace the Hudson logo with Electrobrain logo on the printed materials… the game code was not changed. Also Bubble Bobble On Gameboy. The Taito logo was replaced with the Natsume logo on printed materials only. Game code did not change. Same with the Gameboy Final Fantasy Adventure games.