Today, Tokyo District Court ruled against MariCar, the unofficially real-life Mario Kart, ordering the company to cease lending out Nintendo-themed cosplay and cough up ten million yen in damages.
That’s $122,550, off a recent currency conversion anyway.
Tokyo District Court ordered Mari Mobility Dev., previously MariCar, to pay ¥10 million in compensation and stop using Nintendo-related outfit. The street go-cart company operates services in Japan, and Nintendo was complaining it was damaging its “Mario Kart” franchise.
— Takashi Mochizuki (@mochi_wsj) September 27, 2018
Nintendo filed suit against MariCar, now known as MariMobility, early last year for intellectual property violation. The MariCar tours are incredibly popular with tourists, ranking high on Trip Advisor.
But besides the obvious copyright issues, there have been other problems, including incidents of tourists crashing MariCar go-karts.
The MariCar homepage remains up and still features images of customers in Nintendo-themed costumes, such as Peach, Luigi and Yoshi.
In an official statement, Nintendo added that it will continue to take the necessary steps to protect its brand and intellectual property.
Comments
6 responses to “Nintendo Wins Lawsuit Against Tokyo’s Totally Unofficial Mario Kart ”
Im at two minds about this…. kinda saw ut coming once they used the cosplay and name gimmick..
At the same time as someone who has done the tours themselves they are quite awesome and the guides and folks who run it quite fun and great folks in general. The problem with crashes/incidents usually come from folks who dont seem to know how to follow instructions and apprdciate you are driving on a public road =/
By taking something done as a homage to one of the best games ever and shutting it down, leaving all the fans who wanted to do it disappointed. “Protect it’s brand” is nothing more than an excuse to shut down something that’s popular that they didn’t think of first till they can find a way to make money out of it themselves.
Nintendo has the biggest and most harsh history of shutting down mods, fixes, homages, fan creations and just about anything else fan made just because they want to make sure that profits stay up in the company while they release bad port after bad port on their latest gimmick machine… which also has an emulator for all their past good games that they are reselling to you for the 800th time.
Someone’s got a bee in their bonnet.
1) You have no idea if Nintendo has actually thought of this themselves or not. I find it hard to believe they haven’t at least considered it to be honest. I’d say they probably have, and decided not to go ahead with it, for probably a range of reasons, not the least of which is the risk of serious injury.
2) You can’t use someone else’s IP without permission, especially if you are making money off it. It doesn’t matter who you are or what you’re doing, you can’t do it. It’s that simple.
3) Protecting their brand is not just about making profits, it’s about making sure that this kind of thing is not affiliated with them or endorsed by them. If someone seriously injures themselves or someone else – especially since there’s been a number of incidents of accidents happening – they don’t want to give anyone the impression that they are liable.
4) Nintendo is not the only company to do this. Other big companies like Hasbro and Disney are also notorious for shutting these kinds of things down – and they are well within their legal right to do so. While some companies don’t seem to mind as much, and some like Sega seem to embrace it, they are the exception rather than the rule.
no they arent. They are using an existing brand and trying to profit off it. Thats all. If they wanted to pay homage as you say they would do it for free.
Flashcarts are insanely popular on nintendo systems. So following your own logic nintendo has no right to shut down the makers of them because “its popular”
They are well within their rights to do such a thing. They own the copyright. They spent decades investing the time and money developing these brands but you think its perfectly fine for someone to come along who has not invested anything and just use those brands to generate money for themselves?
Let me know next time you make something so i can copy it and sell it so i can make money off it. After all, You think copyright infringement is okay!
Wow. I’m shocked. Shocked. Well, not that shocked.
They’re certainly ignoring the court for the time being, they just rolled past me in Shibuya and the Nintendo cos play was in full force.