Nintendo Apologizes to SuicideGirls

As a follow up to the unfortunate incident on Wednesday, thanks to emfra (and others) who pointed out that BoingBoing has Nintendo's Apology Letter to the SuicideGirls site up. They even went so far as to offer up a free game system and game to the site owner. So alls well that end's well...but not before Penny Arcade had a chance to comment.

I see . . . . .

[theparanoidcynic]

I was wondering why Penny Arcade was running like crap. I figured I'd check the overnight Slashdot stories and come back later. Seeing the top story answered that question.

Oh well, time to go help /. suicidegirls . . . . .

Enough is enough....

[Alci12]

SCO or Microsoft is one thing but /.ing hot goth chick sites..man thats just low.

Re:"All's well that ends well"

[Rude Turnip]

Luckily, all those years of playing Duck Hunt paid off and we were able to shoot that balloon down. Ha!...hoisted by your own petard Nintendo!

btw, anyone ever notice how much Nintendo stuff (clothing, stickers) is on the shelves at Hot Topic? They don't seem to mind alt.culture when there's a buck in it.

They've always seems sensible

[miyako]

Nintendo has always seemed sensible legally to me. I'm not saying they are alturistic or anything, but you just don't hear of them being evil, like one hears of Sony or Microsoft being evil.
From the letter, I can understand why they did what they did, after all, didn't zelda.com used to be (still is?) a porn site? For most kids, Nintendo is their first introduction to games, and it wouldn't be good for a kid to google for "pikachu" only to find out that some porn site had managed to come up high on the results list.
Somewhat off topic, but it seems to me that a lot of their newer games are targetting older gamers.
The recent entries to the zelda and metroid series seem to have been targetted at older players, mostly by virtue of their difficulty.

Re:So... will Nintendo pay SuicideGirls for...

[Cyph]

So Nintendo shold pay for all the free advertising SuicideGirls received on Slashdot this week? Did Nintendo post the Slashdot blurbs, or did Slashdot do that?

Infringement spidering

[NiceGuyUK]

To me, this just smacks of yet another "infringement spider" that trawls the web looking for mentions of a companiy's trademarks with little or no human intervention. There was a /. story akin to this relating to Linux Australia not long ago where an MPAA bot mis-identified a tarball that happened to have the same name as an obscure movie.

Automated Attorneys(tm) - Infringement Idiocy in a Digital Age

Let's give Nintendo a break, folks.

[Randolpho]

Now that we have the whole story, I think we can cut Nintendo a little bit of slack. Note the following from the original C&D letter:

It has come to our client's attention recently that you are using the Nintendo trademark(s)/works in the

hidden text/visible text/meta tags and/or title and/or links of the above-referenced sexually explicit Web site.

Note the bolded portions. Then note this quote from the apology letter:

The letter was sent as part of an ongoing Nintendo program to aggressively protect our younger consumers from the hundreds of sexually-explicit sites each year that use Nintendo properties to attract children. We are proud of our efforts in this area. Unfortunately, the site posting identified in our letter was targeted by mistake.

What Nintendo did was try to protect children from porn-site google-spoofing. I know every one of you has done an innocent search for, say, "dog food brands", and come up with hundreds of porn links, usually on the first page, often the first link! I think what Nintendo was trying to do is a good thing, not a bad thing; unfortunately, they targeted a legitimate porn site rather than a google-spoofer.

It was a mistake, and they recognized it and fessed up. That in and of itself takes balls, and I salute Nintendo for it. I think the rest of us should calm down about it. I understand the desire to knee-jerk and think the man is out to get us, but I think the truth, in this case, is a little more mundane.

Re:Can someone repost?

[nuxx]

What works really well for me is running a copy of CGIProxy [jmarshall.com] on a https vhost on my personal server. That way the URLs are obfuscated and all content is wrapped up in SSL. Works rather nicely, and it works for most types of sites.

Re:Makes perfect sense to me

[sindarin2001]

While I don't advocate shooting anybody, Bush was elected in a '00 year. We have this thing called the '0-curse with our presidents in the US. So far nearly every president elected in a year ending in 0 has died while still in office. I say nearly because it is thought that Reagan has broken the curse (there was an assassination attempt on him, but it was not successful).

Membership drive....

[un1xl0ser]

If the token of a Nintendo doesn't seem like much, just wait to see how many h0rny g33ky slashdotters sign up for memberships now. Horray for slashdotting pr0n.

Re:Nintendo game system of their choice?

[NeoSkandranon]

"Top loading" model NES and a copy of Final Fantasy 1 sealed in box =D

Only way they could have a harder time coming up with something is if you just asked for a shitty game that never had many copies made

Re:well after RTFA

[t35t0r]

Suicidegirls is not "goth porn", I saw no pictures of penetration, blowjobbing, cunninglingus, and cum gargling, but maybe i didn't look in the right places.

It seems to me the Suicidegirls is erotic/nude art with a gothic twist and should not be confused for porn, although it may have the same effect on your penis.

Re:Can someone repost?

[TiggertheMad]

And when the IT department works out that you're intentionally circumventing their monitoring and blocking of sites that frequently carry spyware and trojans, they're going to be _really_ pissed off with you.

If I were working in an IT department, and I found out someone set up a SSH proxie forwarding service, I would make a wild leap of logic and assume that the person was smart enough to keep their own machine spyware and trojan free. Most people don't even know what a port is, let alone how they work...

Parent has merit

[Adam9]

What kind of business letter starts with "Hello,"?

No contact information provided for the SG owner to contact customer service with the system of his choice

Most people scan in their letters as JPGs or PDFs, not retype them

Attorneys usually send e-mails to supplement a cease and decist letter sent via mail. SG says they only got an e-mail.

I could go on, but I think it's apparent now that SG did stage this.

Re:Can someone repost?

[Anonymous Coward]

If I were working in an IT department, and I found out someone set up a SSH proxie forwarding service, I would make a wild leap of logic and assume that the person was smart enough to keep their own machine spyware and trojan free

And if I were your boss and knew about this, I would fire you in an instant.

Re:Can someone repost?

[Babbster]

I can see making that assumption. Of course, I can also see the next assumption being that they're using that connection to transfer proprietary information from the company's network to their own computer.

Re:Nintendo game system of their choice?

[TheLink]

How about this [klov.com] instead?