3 Count: Blocked Dolphins
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1: T.I. and Tiny Lose Their Copyright Infringement Lawsuit Against L.O.L Surprise Toy Maker
First off today, Daniel Kreps at RollingStone reports that a jury has ruled in favor of the toymaker MGA Entertainment in their long-running case and T.I. and Tiny.
T.I. and Tiny sued MGA alleging that MGA used their name, likeness and other intellectual property of OMG Girlz, a pop group that they founded in 2009. The case went to a trial in January but was declared a mistrial when the plaintiff’s lawyer made claims of “racist cultural appropriation” by MGA despite a warning from the judge to avoid such arguments.
The case went back for a second trial this month, and the jury took only two hours to decide in favor of MGA, saying that their dolls were not infringing. MGA CEO Isaac Larian referred to the lawsuit as a “shakedown” or an attempt at “extortion”.
2: Videotron Wins Copyright Infringement Case Against Three Tech Firms and a Shareholder
Next up today, according to a press release, the Federal Court in Canada has ruled in favor of multimedia firm Videotron in their lawsuit against alleged pirates of their content, including some $553,000 in damages and an injunction barring further infringement.
The case was filed against three tech firms and one man who is a shareholder in two of the companies. According to Videotron, the companies provided telecommunications services to hotels. However, Videotron claims that those services included unauthorized access to the TVA and TVA Sports channels, prompting the copyright infringement lawsuit.
The court found in favor of Videotron and also found the shareholder personally liable for some of the infringement. According to the judgement, the defendants would present their services as legitimate to hotels even though they had not obtained the needed rights, causing the judge to find that the companies acted in bad fair and that their conduct needs to be “denounced and deterred.”
3: Nintendo Asks Valve To Kick GameCube And Wii Emulator Off Steam, Says It’s Protecting Its Creativity And Work
Finally today, Ethan Gach at Kotaku reports that Nintendo has filed a copyright notice with Valve to remove the Steam listing for Dolphin, an emulator for the GameCube and Wii.
Dolphin is a long-running open-source project that has gained new attention in recent years with the release of the Steam Deck, a handheld gaming system meant to play PC games. To aid in that, the developers of Dolphin announced a plan to include the emulator on the Steam store, with the team creating a page in March ahead of a potential release.
However, on May 27th, the team announced that the Steam debut would be “indefinitely postponed” following a copyright notice sent from Nintendo to Valve, the owners of the Steam platform. According to Nintendo, the emulator uses “cryptographic keys without Nintendo’s authorization”. As such, even though emulation itself is not illegal, Nintendo claims that the Dolphin emulator is infringing.
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