Redbubble Trouble Over Pokemon Copyright

[Neo Emolga]

To be honest, I think this is perfectly fine. It is Pokemon (and Nintendo's) right to defend their properties and that includes people taking their materials and selling it as their own.

I think this is especially true when people are using the sprites that Pokemon made and put them in romhacks then profiting of it. In this case, people are taking the official art and putting them on shirts. Literally in the shirts being pictured in this article there is cover art from Japanese Pokemon Crystal, the official Play! Pokemon logo, Pokemon GO assets, and sprite assets from Pokemon RBY. All things that were made by Pokemon and simply put on a shirt.

So basically you are paying money for somebody who just got the rips from the official games and put it on a shirt with no money going to the original artist which in this case is Pokemon. Even worst, based on the picture above, you are paying over 30 dollars for a shirt where a guy took official assets from Pokemon and put it on a shirt where not a single dime is going to Pokemon.

Now, the shirts that use original art are perfectly fine. There may be a gray area in using the characters but they seem worth buying from fans. I would love to buy the Mimiyku shirt if it was better priced.

There are my two cents.

Yeah, but they also shut down Pokémon Uranium which was a harmless fan game spinoff that was made entirely to be shared and be for free. The Pokémon-themed party at PAX is another example where even after the party was canceled, Nintendo felt that wasn't enough and got a little more greedy for reimbursement for "damage" (yeah, what kind of damage?).

That's too extreme. They're literally punishing their fans for enjoying their franchise and making their own fan works for it to share with others, which are things Nintendo refuses to do on their own.

The thing is, Nintendo would go after people that do their own original art also and put that on a t-shirt. For them, it's like a witch hunt. :\