I bet a lot of little things like that would’ve been changed. Which reminds me, EarthBound has its share of yo-yos too. This seems ridiculous to us, but the legal folks obviously did their homework, because in Canada a company owns a trademark for that term. The legal team didn’t allow it to get released until every instance of “Yo-Yo” was changed (it got changed to “Star”, incidentally). I don’t play many Virtual Console games, but one easy example I do know about is StarTropics. If the legal team feels uneasy with anything – even the tiniest thing – then they won’t give their approval. The point is to stay out of court altogther. This is an important point that I think many people don’t understand. Having this team of legal people is cheaper than putting up with every lawsuit that every crazy money-hungry company hits them with. It doesn’t matter if they could clearly successfully win lawsuits brought against them they’d still lose money in the process. The point is: they’re trying to avoid lawsuits in the first place. Then these things are fixed if necessary. To avoid crap lawsuits, Nintendo has a team of legal people who have to go through everything Nintendo plans to release and look for anything that can cause potential lawsuits. Of course, if you lose, you’ll lose a lot more, but just having to go to court will cost a whole lot of money. Whether you win or lose a case in court, you’re going to pay a LOT of money defending yourself. – but there was an internal mistake (sound familiar? ? ) and the lawsuit-happy company decided not to sue after all
Nintendo loses controller-related lawsuit.
I don’t follow game news very often, but I do recall these recent examples. Being a big, profitable company helps this, especially in our lawsuit-happy society. You can read the original post about no EarthBound on Virtual Console here.įirst, it’s important to understand that Nintendo is bombarded with lawsuits all the time. Get yourself a sandwich or something first ? I made that post last week as a kind of neat trivia thing, that’s all.
That, or they don’t understand the full story, so I’m going to try to clarify some things as best as I can here.Ī lot of people are seeing this page that compares a few EarthBound songs to real-life stuff, but that page wasn’t meant to show off legal issues or anything. February 17th, 2009 | Audio Stuff, EarthBound, Rumors, Uncommon KnowledgeĪ lot of people seem to be confused about the recent no EarthBound on Virtual Console thing.