http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2006/09/07

Seems like a parent wouldn’t want their kid to come across that, either.

First, they can’t even petition you properly using “Hawkins” as your first name.

The letter holds no force of law (revealed by their “ask[ing]” you to remove the potentially offensive image).

You’re not using any Nintendo trademark. If anything Nintendo might try to pursue the original artist (certain to fail as well).

Finally, the notion that the image they found was tagged as part of a sexually explicit website. Wii could all start posting images of cow dung and tag it with “Nintendo” and thus drive searches to that image.

Matt’s not making money off of that image, and it seems its not the image itself that bugs them, but that kids might find it if they do a web search for Nintendo, Mario or Peach.

Now, I think it should be fair use for a website that does news coverage of videogames to use related terms in their page tags, but that’s what they want you to remove. You need to ask yourself which would hurt the site more: remove the image, or remove the tags? You could remove the image and they’d still want you to remove the tags.

Either way, I don’t think their request hold any water. Your a news site, basically, so you need to make reference on your site to videogame companies, games, and characters. And this image was from a videogame related exhibit.

And videogames aren’t just for kids. So if that means you need to add an intro page to your site “Warning: may containt explicit content, enter only if you are 18 or above blah blah blah” then that might be something you’d have to do, if it comes to that.

shoot me an email if it’s anything i need to know about. i saw the curator of the show over the weekend and i’m sure she’d love to hear nintendo is harassing her patrons.

~leah

Did you read about Rich Steven’s recent letter from Lucasfilm’s lawyers?