Nintendo Community Tournament Guidelines: Difference between revisions

Moon Channel, a lawyer-run YouTube channel, released a video<ref>{{cite web|url=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Exm8xCSQ9AY|title=A Lawyer Analyzes Nintendo’s Tournament Guidelines|author=VG Law Review|publisher=YouTube|date=October 27, 2023}}</ref> giving some legal analysis regarding the guidelines. Moon Channel speculates that rather than necessarily "cracking down" on events, the guidelines are more of an olive branch adopting to how U.S. copyright laws largely extend worldwide through trade agreements, resulting in legal grey areas and thus less certainty and more regulation by the company. To illustrate this point, Moon Channel cites Nintendo's hands-off approach with its fanbase in Japan. With Nintendo's uniformity in guidelines, Moon Channel posits that this was less of a crackdown à la fan games, but more of an IP protection measure. Moon Channel goes on to mention that while third-party controllers are listed as banned in the guidelines, this is actually a commonality in guidelines for most other game companies, and in Nintendo's own End User License Agreements, and is enforced as a general policy to protect their intellectual property rights. Furthermore, Moon Channel argues that these guidelines are for community tournaments rather than supermajor events, as stated in the guideline's introduction, and that by following these rules, it could aid in reconciliation between Nintendo and the ''Smash'' community at large. Thus, Moon Channel infers that they could result in a more stable community, criticizing big content creators for wanting to run unlicensed tournaments in protest, noting that while the full license agreement has not been published, said licenses being provided are discretionary.