Joe vs the Nintendo

It seems weird to say, but we're still adjusting to the existence of the World Wide Web. Some of you where born to a world where connecting with everyone else via the internet is normal, but many, many more weren't, including the one who writes this piece. Even those working on the technology business just don't understand fully what is happening.

There's Let's Plays. You watch someone ELSE play a videogame. You know how I used to call that before the Internet? "Is it my turn yet?" However, I'm not surprised it's become somewhat popular and lucrative.

To make this a bit more grand than it probably is, you're not just playing a videogame with no interactivity, or watching cousin Joel hog all the  Super Mario World to himself, but rather  opening up a window to another person's mind, at the cost of nothing but  a bit of time.

Nintendo, and other companies with similar minds, don't think that's something you should be able to do, without paying them.  In concordance with Youtube, and under the ever widening umbrella of our copyright, Nintendo totally expects those who monetize videos of themselves playing Nintendo games to cut them a bit of the share, or kiss those videos goodbye.

A Let's Play is not a "Performance" or a "Reproduction". It's a documentation of an event. Nintendo should not be the ones  earning money from that. That's fair use!

Other companies, such as Capcom , have taken a different approach: taking down negative  discussions of their videogames by flagging videos for copyright. Youtube has a pretty strict "Better safe than sorry" policy regarding copyright, and that makes it an ordeal to finally prove that, yes, their video is a Fair Use video.

And people get angry with Youtube's way of handling copyright, which includes automatic scanning of videos for copyrighted content. But can you blame them? They're the world's most used video hosting site. According to current law, if they where to be sued for enabling the distribution of copyrighted content, they'd be facing  a loss of thousands of dollars FOR EACH COUNT, without mention of the court costs.  Now multiply that by all the videos being put on Youtube that contain copyrighted content NOT made by the poster, and you can see how it could bring the whole thing down. They MAY or may not want to side with the Angry Joes of the world, but they certainly can't afford it.

The law was not made for this. The law was not made thinking that one day a recording of yourself playing a videogame might be something  people would be able to monetize.  That I understand. What I don't understand is how companies who live and breath digital technology fail to embrace this new  cultural dynamics as a feature, and not as a bug.  Will "cutting a check to Nintendo" catch on? Time will tell.