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Abusing copyright strings to trick SW into thinking it's running competitor's PC

(devblogs.microsoft.com)
69 points mastazi | 2 comments | 26 Jun 25 00:18 UTC | HN request time: 0.001s | source
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ndriscoll ◴[29 Jun 25 12:12 UTC] No.44412471[source]▶
Along similar lines, the Sega Genesis required games to trigger a routine in the console to show "Produced by or under license from Sega Enterprises LTD." at bootup time, attempting to use trademark law to force game publishers to pay for a license from Sega to build games for the console. The court ruled that copying the code to trigger the message was not copyright infringement and the message itself was not trademark infringement because Sega's own design forced those things to make the hardware work.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sega_v._Accolade

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somat ◴[29 Jun 25 14:57 UTC] No.44413668[source]▶
See also: the game boy nintendo logo check.

https://knight.sc/reverse%20engineering/2018/11/19/game-boy-...

"The idea was that if you were an unlicensed Nintendo developer and you produced an unlicensed game you would have to reproduce Nintendos logo which is a registered trademark. This would in turn allow Nintendo to manually enforce anti-piracy measures through litigation."

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1. josephcsible ◴[29 Jun 25 15:13 UTC] No.44413772[source]▶
Why didn't that kind of abuse result in Nintendo's trademark being voided by the functionality doctrine like it did for GP's example?
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2. somat ◴[29 Jun 25 16:10 UTC] No.44414183[source]▶
First, I don't think sega's trademark was voided, it is more like "It is not a violation of a companies trademark to use it when they require using it to access the device." That is, the registered trademark still protects everything else it is intended to protect.

Second, that was the US ruling, I have no idea of how the rest of the world, specifically japan, views using a trademark like this. I do know japan is weirdly(at least to US sensibility) strict about copyright and trademark law.

So it was an attempt by Nintendo(and Sega) to have a legal crowbar to use to control third party use of their system. In the US it was ruled that this would not work for Sega. So Nintendo probably never used it for that purpose (in the US)