We all know that Nintendo protects its franchises with an iron fist: they don’t allow immitations or playing without paying, even for unobtainable video games from 35 years ago. Much less fan-made games, even if they’re made with the best intentions (unless they’re created by ‘Super Mario Maker’)! In their crusade against supposedly copyright-protected derivative content, Nintendo has now launched an attack against something unexpected: the scores of their songs.
Denial: the musical
More specifically, Nintendo has targeted Sheet Music Boss and purpleschala, two YouTube channels that create sheet music for Nintendo songs. And before them, it was the website Musicnotes, which then began removing their sheet music from the soundtracks of ‘Super Mario’, ‘Pokémon’, and ‘Zelda’, among other legendary sagas.
The three sheet-music channels have joined forces in an attempt to get Nintendo to reconsider their decision, especially considering that the arrangements had been licensed and the original artists received a percentage of the sales of those scores. It’s important to note, moreover, that it’s not as if Nintendo is making money from their exploitation: there are hundreds of scores that they intend to remove from the Internet that are not available anywhere else.
Of course, the big N sees it in terms of “copyright infringement”, just like unplayable game ROMs today. These are scores that nobody benefits from, but that doesn’t mean they still wouldn’t eliminate them forever. The surprising thing about the case is not only that the Japanese company believes they gain something by pursuing these channels, but also that some of these scores had been untouched for years and years. Will Nintendo give them the benefit of the doubt or add another notch in this frustrating pursuit? We’ll see in the coming months. As if they didn’t have anything better to focus on right now!
