So, Nintendo of America, whose president is Doug Bowser, and who previously sued a Gary Bowser, had gone to court with a José Mario Alfaro González, who owns the supermarket chain Super Mario.
I'm pretty sure, at this point, they're just joshing us all.
Just to add to it all: In Paper Mario: TTYD there’s a segment where Mario infiltrates a professional wrestling promotion, and in the English translation he uses the name “The Great Gonzalez”.
Most likely a reference to the boxer Rodolfo González, who was extremely popular in Japan and is frequently referenced in video games (e.g. Gato in Chrono Trigger is named Gonzalez in the Japanese release).
Interesting, I never knew (or bothered to look into…) the context, but it did seem like a non sequitur given Mario’s vague Italian heritage. That seems likely.
Haha I actually had no idea about all this, given Nintendos proclivity for suing people over seemingly small things, I can imagine the hiring process involved something along the lines of "If you don't join us, we'll sue your family for infringement"
Not familiar with the Costa Rican legal system, but in US law you can lose your trademark if you don't actively protect it from infringement. They are legally obligated to be litigious.
This is often parroted and almost never true. US courts will not kill one of the biggest and most well-recognized companies in the world because of one tiny corner supermarket.
Knowing quite a bit about the world of Costa Rican grocery stores -- many of which started using "Hiper-" (spanish for hyper-) as a prefix in their names a few decades ago, to one-up markets merely named "Super-" [1] -- I'm actually quite suprised they didn't just rename themselves "Hiper Mario" and save the legal fees. But bravo to them for winning against all odds.
We have the same in France. The first big "big surface" stores were named supermarché, then we got hypermarché and the funniest is that now we have superette, a small surface store, branded like the super/hyper but within the city center.
The "ette" French suffix is to reduce the main word.
> A diminutive is a word obtained by modifying a root word to convey a slighter degree of its root meaning, either to convey the smallness of the object or quality named, or to convey a sense of intimacy or endearment, and sometimes to belittle something or someone.
Yeah, it's funny, a word consisting both of an augmentative (the opposite of diminutive) and a diminutive.
Same for me. My brain broke down somewhat, but luckily I am retired. I often ask AI like "What's the word for a smaller variant of something?", super helpful.
Were you thinking of „Verkleinerungsform“? Do people still use those Germanized terms? It feels a little old-fashioned to me, like saying „besitzanzeigendes Fürwort“ instead of Possessivpronomen.
I had the word "Verniedlichung" in mind, of course this is also not the right term, but as I been living outside of France for the past 25 years, switching daily between French, German and English, I am sometimes "stuck" and can't get the right word out. And this in whatever language I am thinking at the moment.
I now accept that I am losing my French while not being really fluent in any other language.
In a way? I always found it more sensible to use German words like "Namenwort" instead of "Nomen" to express German grammar, instead of using latin terms. After all Latin is a language that comes from a completely different language family to start with and is not used at all in Germany except when wanting to pretend you're fancy (law, medicine, grammar).
That's meaningful though, at least in my experiences in France circa twenty years ago, a supermarché would be a supermarket like here in the UK, and a hypermarché would have all kinds of other stuff like clothes, back to school stationery, seasonal gear/toys, etc. - as well as other mini shops around the edge, cutting keys, McDo, etc.
I think supermarché is more a type of shop that offers products that are traditionally from different shop (you've got a bakery, green-grocer, butcher, cheese-monger, electronics, etc... under one shop), while the hypermarché are really defined the "big surface" you mentioned.
So it make sense to have a superette in the corner of the street that offer everyday goods while an hypermarché have clothing, DIY materials, big appliances, etc. on sale..
Sorry I explained myself poorly: I wasn't saying that a superette wasn't a supermarket, I was pointing out that OP curious remark about superette being a "small big shop" wasn't as contradictory as it seems.
Also, while we're digging Wikipedia: the French one points to the national statistic institute that have a definition of an hypermarket as "non specialized store that's over 2 500 m^2 in surface and make more than a third of their revenue from food".
"Hiper" refers to something bigger than "Super", and it's common to respect that convention. Wikipedia defines both [1][2]. From this photo[3] the size of "Super Mario" follows that convention. It is obviously true that there are more options for names but congratulations to "Don Mario".
i think hypermarkets achieve their bigness not by being bigger supermarkets, but by selling everything a supermarket sells, and then also selling everything a department store sells.
Actually, "hiper-something" trend started with Hipermas, created by a bigger local supermarket chain (Corporación Supermercados Unidos, which owned others like: Más x Menos [More for less] and Pali). They were bought by and renamed to Walmart. Sharing the "hiper" prefix I only know HiperDiego, which like a Walmart big.
Here most are "super-" if they are big enough. if they are smaller "mini super-". All the categories before are self service.
If they are really tiny (a window) and not self service then they are called "pulpería".
> a reputation of petty litigation with dubious claims.
True but recently they've turned much worse by launching a major campaign of unprecedented legal attacks across the historical preservation, retro emulation and fan creation communities. While Nintendo has always been protective of its IP rights, it was mostly limited to piracy of current titles and protecting their trademarks from commercial infringement.
The greatly expanded scope of their recent legal campaign now threatens aspects of non-profit historical preservation and adjacent fan activities unrelated to Nintendo's present day commercial interests. This is new, different and dangerous. Previously, Nintendo's lawyers made at least some effort to distinguish between non-profit or fan hobby activities and piracy or commercial trademark protection. Nintendo changing to now aggressively pursue non-profit retro preservation has made me swear off buying anything from them again.
The catch is, game preservation touches Nintendo's present day commercial interests, as they fully expanded their offering to "classic" games. Nintendo Online is already that, but I also wouldn't be surprised if tomorrow a playable GameBoy toothbrush was released from Nintendo.
For people looking for an entry point, Moon Channel has been covering this topic pretty in depth (author is a lawyer, but not in trademark per se I think)
This is the Disney play book - they would only release their classic movies on VHS for limited time before removing them from the shelves, look up the Disney Vault.
The long backward compatibility we enjoyed as kids was a bug not a feature
I'm not so convinced it's that dangerous, but part of that is a naive sense that if they keep doing more dumb lawsuits, that just means it's more likely for a handful of defendants to actually fight them (as here) and win, which is the way to establish precedent or in the longer term actually get new laws that make things clearer. In this case, hopefully Costa Rica legal fees aren't so bad. Settlements are kind of bad in that regard though -- I'm reminded of the Youtube / Viacom fight that started in 2007 and eventually settled for an undisclosed amount. But in the meantime some bills were raised in committees about forcing site owners to implement things like what later became Content ID; what we got instead was Youtube doing their own proprietary version on their own accord (it probably did help fend off more lawsuits) and the law and courts being silent on the matter. Is that better or worse? What of the "danger"?
I guess another part of me not seeing much danger is because in the extreme, technology has for decades made this a non-problem when it comes to possibility and existence -- my old ROMs aren't going anywhere regardless of what Nintendo does or doesn't do, or what the law does or doesn't become. There's the matter of possibly lessened access and less widespread historical knowledge, which as a gamer I think is a shame, but the archives will survive and devs will continue making emulators for fun, anonymously if they have to. So long as things are available to those who seek them out, that's what I care most about, and that victory has already been won for non-service games.
I don't follow news that closely but I'm also not so sure these are all that new and unprecedented -- Nintendo's always been kind of a dick when it comes to lawfare and fan activities and work. Maybe you can point me to a piece that's looked at the frequency and types of legal activity over the years to compare? Is there anything concrete to suggest I should actually be worried at all about the future availability and development of Dolphin or bsnes or snes9x? I'm somewhat aware of them getting more aggressive with streamers, but the difference there is mainly that streaming and "content creation" are so much bigger now (it's come a long way since Zot the Avenger), so there's a lot more of it and consequently more legal related affairs. To me almost all of it falls under fair use, so whatever, but clearly Nintendo disagrees and Japan itself doesn't have the concept despite having a culture of doujin... (Sega, Capcom, Sony, and other Japanese companies all get my ire as much as Nintendo when it comes to this sort of thing at least.)
There is virtually no downsides to being petty assholes. People will even come out of the woodwork to justify your behavior and explain you have no choice than being an asshole.
Apple, Disney, Coca Cola, Nike back in the days. Any company with enough money in both marketing and legal department will usually be utter assholes regarding their trademark.
Yes, these companies are so rich, and their targets so comparatively poor, that they're not risking anything by spamming lawsuits. It's like a rich individual going to some developing country and suing poor people for their meager possessions, for no other reason than because they can.
How else are their armies of lawyers supposed to justify their existence? It's the same as having a ton of UX people on staff who have to constantly move buttons around and change color schemes to stay busy.
You walk in the streets of Costa Rica, see a yellow-blue sign with a shopping chart and ugly characters writing "Super Mario" with some spanish text underneath and then you decide, ah, I will buy games here rather than from Nintendo!
The seconds sentence is more like it. The danger to Nintendo is from their own stupid overacting lawyers.
This is a trademark opposition. If you try to file a trademark that has any common word that any big brand uses in their name, even if you try to register it in a completely different category, they will most likely oppose it.
They do this because trademark folks are lawyers and they get to bill their clients this way, and it's very easy to do since there's software to get notifications on keywords or similar namees. It's probably automated at this point.
To most people it would, but to commies a small business owner is "petite bourgeoisie." Communists consider them to be the foremost supporters of fascism.
> This legal victory is a testament to the determination of a small Costa Rican entrepreneur who stood his ground against a global corporation, proving that even the smallest of players can triumph in the face of seemingly insurmountable odds.
Oh, it's you, ChatGPT! I thought I recognized your distinctly bland style.
I'm reminded of Caterpillar (tractors and some apparel, $50B revenue) trying to stop Cat & Cloud (coffee some apparel, <<$1M) from having a trademark. Despite their low revenue, it's a somewhat influential coffee shop due to their podcast and roasting, and also happens to be the closest cafe to me and my favorite.
It reminds me of that Mike Rowe kid that Microsoft threatened with legal action, because he had a domain for his web design business called MikeRoweSoft.com [0].
There's a driving school called "Autoescuela Super Mario" on Lanzarote (Canary Islands). They're using a lot of Nintendo's branding (fonts, etc.). Somehow I can't imagine that Nintendo agreed to that though.
Nintendo would rather dump endless amounts of money into law firms, waste time, bully small time players; rather than invest their profits into the company and fixing their god awful network/servers/net code used for multiplayer on the Switch.
In unregulated environments, it's often more cost effective to be a bully (in the market or the courts) than to sincerely compete. You can see the same behavior from Meta (which buys competitors instead of innovating) and xAI (which is suing OpenAI).
I live in Helsinki and there's a bar called "Super Bario" which always amuses me as a clever name. (Yes it does provide videogames and beers combined.)
Notwithstanding the sassmouth and the fact it doesn't address any of my questions, that does make this more interesting. Nintendo has food trademarks, so their position against the supermarket is even more legitimate, IMO.
They have no reason to change when they keep raking in millions of dollars. They'll probably pump out the same games on Switch 2 and make a killing and new games with new ideas will continue to struggle. Cause just like big franchise movies, people want safe and predictable just on shinier hardware.
Oh, it's not that I can't understand their point of view. Mario is part of our culture now, and I don't think we should let such things be under tight control of big corporations for more than a decade or so, in part also to give them some incentive to innovate.
I left a comment the other day about me loathing Nintendo nowadays and got downvoted. Well this is the kind of BS they pull that makes me hate them.
Suing people, getting fair use material removed from YouTube, fighting emulators and people who created them, charging ridiculous prices for old games... I'm pretty sure they are the bad guy.
Quite a few negative feelings towards Nintendo of America (NOA) in the comments. A lot of "evil Goliath" style comments.
I think they probably did the right thing. IANAL, but I'm pretty sure NOA has to defend its registration. "But this is for a small supermarket" you might argue. And in this case, you'd be right. But how can NOA tell the difference between a genuinely different registration, or someone trying to hijack their brand and putting up a fake website in hopes of lulling them into not objecting?
Answer: they could try all sorts of steps, including flying to Costa Rica to check the local situation. Of course, they could still be played, and an attacker could suddenly be legally allowed to use their trademark.
Or they could use exactly this process, which is meant to ensure that the registration is only awarded if it is sufficiently distinct. Which is what they did. I won't hate something or someone for using procedures as intended.
There are legal resolutions besides formal court that allow you to defend your trademark.
A simple letter explaining that Nintendo acknowledges that they have the same trademark, and that is fine as long as the convenience store stays in the convenience store business and doesn’t use Nintendos other branding would be fine.
Not a lawyer but does not enforcing your trademark or copyright automatically relinquish your rights to it? On an individual basis? I'm not sure that is correct, as in, they could have let him sit in a sort of strategic legal ambiguity and spent those resources going after more flagrant violators.
But yeah, dragging a blue collar person through the legal system and you're basically threatening their entire livelihood and family. Good luck with those optics.
The purpose of a trademark is increasing trust and reducing fraud. E.g., when I buy lithium batteries I intend to store inside my home there's only so much I can do to audit the internals, so I rely on brand recognition to help purchase safer options. Other people and brands are welcome to sell lithium batteries, but masquerading as the brand I'm attempting to purchase from is damaging to that brand and to myself.
When other people use your trademark (even legitimately, as the courts have deemed for TFA), it's possible for that brand you've built to slowly morph into something other than just a name for your business or product. Band-aids and kleenexes are some classic examples, and the phrase "super mario" referring to more and more non-Nintendo things over time could do the trick too.
As something of a side tangent, this is philosophically related to the "heap" problem -- if you place one grain of sand at a time in a location, when does it transition from being an assortment of grains of sand into being a heap of sand? Which grain makes that transition? In much the same way, which trademark infringement dilutes the brand enough that when a court tries to go back to first principles they'll finally side with the infringer because the public doesn't actually recognize your brand name as referring to you in particular sufficiently often?
The playbook they're exercising is keeping that philosophical collection of sand very small. There isn't any legal recourse for suing a thousand infringers once public perception has shifted. Growing your brand and reducing the flow of sand to a trickle are both allowed though, and the legal half of that is the latter.
Note that the playbook says nothing about whether those are legitimate uses of your trademark. The thing you're fighting against is changing public perception, and you're trying to slow the change down as much as possible, using the courts as a cudgel.
I'm pretty sure, at this point, they're just joshing us all.
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