How Nintendo's Legal Team Destroyed Atari Games Through Courtroom Strategy (mit.edu)
- Reference: 0177052243
- News link: https://games.slashdot.org/story/25/04/17/0715235/how-nintendos-legal-team-destroyed-atari-games-through-courtroom-strategy
- Source link: https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/how-nintendo-bled-atari-games-to-death/
When Atari Games (operating as Tengen) attempted to circumvent Nintendo's control by reverse-engineering the NES security system, Nintendo's legal team discovered a fatal flaw in their rival's approach: Atari had fraudulently obtained Nintendo's proprietary code from the Copyright Office by falsely claiming they were defendants in a nonexistent lawsuit.
Though courts ultimately established that reverse engineering was legal under fair use principles, Atari's deception proved catastrophic. The judge invoked the centuries-old "unclean hands" doctrine, ruling that Atari could not claim fair use protection after approaching the court in bad faith.
"As a result of its lawyers' filthy hands, Atari was barred from manufacturing games for the NES. Nintendo, with its stronger legal team, subsequently 'bled Atari to death,'" writes tech industry attorney Julien Mailland. The court ordered the recall of Tengen's "Tetris" version, now a rare collector's item.
After a 30-year absence, Tengen Games returned in July 2024 with "Zed and Zee" for the NES, finally achieving what its predecessor was legally prohibited from doing.
[1] https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/how-nintendo-bled-atari-games-to-death/
Title seems inaccurate (Score:5, Insightful)
"How Atari Games Destroyed Themselves By Committing Legal Fraud" seems more on point.
The more interesting one was Sega and EA (Score:2)
EA had reverse engineered the Sega Genesis lockout chip and they went to Sega and threatened to not only release games but license out a reverse engineered tech. Sega got scared and caved and gave EA a sweetheart deal on Sega Genesis license fees making them vastly more popular and leading to the EA we know and hate today.
The thing is EA's lockout chip work around didn't actually work. If EA had gone forward with it and released the cartridges it would have lost a ton of money, maybe even gone out of bu
The best part: they didn't even need it (Score:2)
The chip that Tengen used is a completely different CPU from what Nintendo used, and can't run the same code. So it is likely that Tengen managed to reverse-engineer the chip on their own without it. It could have been just some legal intern who did this on his own.
How Atari were caught stealing code .. (Score:2)
How Nintendo's Legal Team Destroyed Atari Games Through Courtroom Strategy
More accuratly, how Atari was caught stealing Nintendo's propriarity code.
Reverse engineering the NES (Score:2)
I worked for a computer game company in the late 1980s that had an undercover project to reverse engineer the protection mechanism on NES cartridges so they or more likely one of their publishers could duplicate it without paying Nintendo large per cartridge licensing fees. There was enclosed office with a door that was always shut, a window they kept the blinds closed at all times, and lights turned down even when they finally let me in on what they were doing in there. Before that it was a secret proje
jailbreak! (Score:1)
They clearly learned their lesson with the Wii. That was an easy system to crack.
Nintendo: an early enemy of all programmers (Score:2)
Before I was a Microsoft-hater (I didn't start hating them until 1989 while getting fed up trying to use LIM EMS as a means of dealing with MS-DOS' limitations while jealously eyeing all the 68k machines' (Amiga/ST/Mac) flat memory), if asked who is the worst of the worst, I would have had to say Nintendo. Their efforts to prevent independent development on Nintendo hardware (both through technical and legal means) made them The Enemy of the day.
When I bitch about iOS being a video-game-console-inspired per
I briefly worked for Atari TenGen as a playtester (Score:2)
My first job in high school was working as a playtester for Atari TenGen games, at that time mostly games made for the Sega Genesis (this was 1991-ish). I had just gotten my driver's license and I would drive to Atari in Milpitas during one summer to work with the other temps who were mostly random people of all ages and backgrounds employed through a local temp agency. We'd play the games over and over, trying to break them and find bugs. The usual thing.
A friend who I had met through the Amiga scene
Destroyed? (Score:5, Informative)
Tengen went on to release more games in the 90s, for other systems as well. IIRC they found a way around the Sega licencing system for the Megadrive too.
Other manufacturers released unofficial cartridges for the Nintendo Entertainment System too, but using a different technique that sent a voltage spike to the lockout chip that disabled it. It often took them a few attempts to boot as the spike didn't work every time.
The history of their evolving "security" chips is interesting. The original Famicom didn't have one, the European and US version (the NES) did and it was relatively sophisticated for the time. Meanwhile in Japan they also released the Famicom Disk System, which relied on having a physical Nintendo logo as part of the disk case, which the drive then had teeth that slotted into. Unfortunately for Nintendo, you could just have holes where the teeth were, without forming an actual Nintendo logo.
The Gameboy took it a step further, requiring a Nintendo logo graphic to be on the cartridge. The ROM code that checked it was part of the CPU, and took decades to extract. Of course anyone could put the image in their ROM, but it was copyright Nintendo, and caused a Nintendo copyright logo to be displayed on screen, so they could be sued. IIRC someone figured out how to put a different logo that passed the check in there, but again only decades later.
Re: (Score:3)
> And Amiga by 1991 could be hard for about $800 with a good quality color monitor
I want to say it was 1995, I was walking on the east side of Manhattan, and saw an Amiga 500 with monitor in the trash outside of some ritzy apartment building. Both in perfect working order. They were considered literal garbage by that point. I remember rap guys being absolutely amazed with the ease I could capture and sequence samples with a mod tracker. Like I owned some magic box from an ancient civilization, even though it was probably less than ten years old at the time.
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> and he manipulated the election with the help of AI and gerrymandering maps preventing 7 millions democrat voters to vote
You have no idea what gerrymandering means. If you did you would know why it does not affect Presidential elections.
Re: (Score:2)
I'd argue that the 1929 Permanent Apportionment Act was defacto gerrymandering because it set the number of representatives hard-capped at 435, which in turn directly influences the total number of EVs.
This quantity was defined to avoid having to build yet another building for the House of Representatives.
The problem with this is that if the number of representatives was truly proportional then the high-population states would have much greater numbers of representatives, both in the House and in EVs. That
Re: (Score:2)
> I'd argue that the 1929 Permanent Apportionment Act was defacto gerrymandering because it set the number of representatives hard-capped at 435, which in turn directly influences the total number of EVs.
> This quantity was defined to avoid having to build yet another building for the House of Representatives.
> The problem with this is that if the number of representatives was truly proportional then the high-population states would have much greater numbers of representatives, both in the House and in EVs. That's why it's effectively gerrymandering, agrarian states in the upper midwest and upper Rocky Mountains have disproportionately more representation in the electoral college than their populations would naturally call for.
> While the original 30,000:1 ratio for representatives might not be supportable, something like 100,000:1 would work in a much larger hall. This would more naturally lead to proportional representation in the House and in the EC. It would also have downstream effects on states because states choose their districts for the House. If the ratio is 100,000:1 then it's much harder for states to gerrymander because the smaller the number of people for a given rep, the harder it is to mess with the boundaries to force districts that are just barely noncompetitive.
It's a bad argument and irrelevant to the notion that somehow Elon did it. Each state gets electors equal to the number of senators plus the number of house representatives. Each state gets 2 senators. The house representatives are based on population. Every argument about this fixates on the minimum 2 EV for the 2 senators, but this is the United STATES of America and every state has an interest in the Presidential election. California has 54 while multiple states only have 3. I'd argue that DC shou
Re: Those of you who are (Score:2)
You saw an Amiga in the trash, and you knew it was working? So, you "salvaged" it from the trash?
By 1995, the Amiga trackers were stagnating for years, and the new development in the tracker scene was basically MSDOS-only.
Logo requirement in GB is legally ineffective (Score:2)
> Of course anyone could put the image in their ROM, but it was copyright Nintendo, and caused a Nintendo copyright logo to be displayed on screen, so they could be sued. IIRC someone figured out how to put a different logo that passed the check in there, but again only decades later.
This was flawed in at least three ways, at least with respect to the law of Slashdot's home country. First, the logo in Game Boy and Game Boy Advance program headers is a picture of text, and typography is not copyrightable in the United States. Second, look at the packaging of Game Boy, Game Boy pocket, Game Boy Color, and Game Boy Advance systems that don't include a bundled game. They typically show the boot screen with the Nintendo logo. This could lead a reasonable consumer to believe that the logo dis
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I think that's why Sega used the phrase "produced by or under licence from SEGA" on later machines, although then undermined their case by demonstrating that it was in fact possible to prevent that message being displayed if you knew how. Their lawyers seemed to think that the fact it could be disabled by wasn't was evidence of misrepresentation, but IIRC the court interpreted it as SEGA simply withholding information in order to force 3rd parties to display the message.
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> IIRC they found a way around the Sega licencing system for the Megadrive too
That was Accolade. Basically what Sega did was two things. First they put in a 256-byte phantom boot ROM which displayed the "produced by or under license from SEGA" message, delayed for a moment, then started up the external cartridge ROM. The second thing was a watchdog timer that would reset the system a moment later if a new hardware register wasn't written with the 32-bit ASCII code for "SEGA".
Accolade's "workaround" was to literally copy the first few dozen bytes of the cartridge startup code from a
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I think that last part is what really swung it. The fact that it was forced, but SEGA knew of a way to prevent it being displayed, and actually demonstrated that to the court, meant they couldn't hold Accolade responsible for it.