Dear Hasbro legal department: WTF? · 7:35pm Nov 27th, 2015
I've mentioned this in the previous blog, but, err... what is going on with the Hasbro legal department? Can someone explain to me how copyright infringement is supposed to work? Because I'm a little bit confuzzled here. On the one hand, okay, you get fan-made animations that are too close to the source material and might make it harder to defend the copyright. So legal action is taken, rawrawr fan outrage, all that stuff.
That, I get.
Then you get people who pay the franchise costs, and are allowed to use characters because they pay a fee for them. But that still implies, I assume, that the actual copyright holder has to approve what is done with these characters.
I bring this up because the past few days/weeks, I've gotten some ads on YouTube for a website called Mafagames, or some such. I don't recommend searching for it, it's just a website full of Flash games. If I wasn't on Linux, I might be worried about it carrying viruses. Maybe I should be, anyway. But that's beside the point.
My point is this: how, in the Nine Spheres according to Dante, with the publicity that fan projects have gotten and being taken down as a result, does a game featuring Twilight Sparkle giving birth to Flash Sentry's child manage to be a thing?
I'm not even going to link the C-section version of it. Suffice to say there's a C-section version of it.
Or this class act, featuring Equestria Girls characters in their underwear:
Nice to know they don't have toes, btw. Really staying with the pony look and feel there.
Now, correct me if I'm wrong on this, but the websites that host these games feature ads. Ads that make revenue. Do they make money or not? Seems to me that if they do, that means this is money being made off of Hasbro property. And if that's the case, either it's copyright infringement, or someone at Hasbro thought that this was a good idea, this is okay. And, oh yeah, Disney is in the same boat.
WTF, Hasbro?
The trick is that they're not making money off the IP, but the adverts. That is, the games themselves are free, and the adverts don't use ponies, so Hasbro can't touch them.
Well, I don't think all of those games are 'legalized' by Hasbro... The thing is, the brony fandom is always making such a fuss about anything they decide to do, (games, short-films, stories), the directors responsible for the My Little Pony franchise surely have an eye upon our community, considering our (fortunate, or unfortunate) influence.
(If you google anything related to My Little Pony, you'll easily notice that 90% of the related content (websites, pictures, vectors, artworks, videos, etc...) was created, developed, or influenced by the Bronies) So yeah, Hasbro kinda cares about our existence, and maybe not that positively.
As for those random flash games, no one gives too much attention, except kids. And they (the games) will very likely go unnoticed. The underground company producing them, probably releases a massive amount of simple flash games, based on hundreds of franchises.
They earn money by sheer quantity, as those games are practically expendable.
The truth is that corporations such as Hasbro and Disney are more worried about their sales and audience, than underground sub-products of their franchises (legal or not)
They gave up on us ever since probably the first porn animation... So... yeah, they gave up on bronies, and copyright. unless they are in a bad mood
It's not just Hasbro, it's Disney and others too. There's a couple of articles on Cracked about them.
I've been seeing ads for them on fimfiction for months now.
The website having ads means the website makes money. The website merely hosts non-profit games. It's the same reason we can have fan videos on YouTube. Before you talk about Hasbro taking those down, they don't, YouTube's bots do.
3572025 3572046 3572166
Ah, okay, now I follow. Thanks for clearing that up.
So basically, if I were to be feeling petty, I wouldn't have to bother notifying Hasbro or EqD, but instead try to poke the radical feminist hate mob on Twitter and let nature take its course. Duly noted.
3572163
I noticed those, actually. That's part of what confused me on how this was even possible.
3573496 In there defense (though, not saying I would ever play that ridiculous game) someone is going to be offended no matter what one does. No one has the right to not be offended, but they do have the right to be offensive. Though, it doesn't make one immune to being a dick or creep, or their material from being bad.
Seriously, though, who the fuck makes a game about MLP C-sections?