[ I posted a question (below) over at HN on the thread for this article and got the reply (further down) ]
> "In July 2024, a new company called Tengen Games released its first game, “Zed and Zee,” for the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) ... Tengen and its parent company, Atari Games, had disappeared 30 years ago after being crushed in court by Nintendo for doing exactly the same thing: manufacturing unauthorized cartridges for the NES."
The article doesn't address how Tengen is now able to produce unauthorized NES-compatible cartridges. Is Tengen paying Nintendo for a license? Did the patents expire? Did relevant legal precedents change? Another possibility might be that, while Atari's 80s legal actions established that intermediate infringement during reverse engineering could be fair use, Atari itself was precluded from relying on that fair use because its lawyers did naughty things. Maybe "new" Tengen reversed engineered it again from scratch without naughty lawyers?
[ Reply ]
> The patent on the lockout mechanism has expired and clean software implementations of the algorithm have been created. So the old legal protections no longer apply.
And while Nintendo still aggressively enforces their copyright on their old games, they probably don't care very much about unlicensed games being created for their very old hardware. It's just not commercially relevant to them.
> "In July 2024, a new company called Tengen Games released its first game, “Zed and Zee,” for the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) ... Tengen and its parent company, Atari Games, had disappeared 30 years ago after being crushed in court by Nintendo for doing exactly the same thing: manufacturing unauthorized cartridges for the NES."
The article doesn't address how Tengen is now able to produce unauthorized NES-compatible cartridges. Is Tengen paying Nintendo for a license? Did the patents expire? Did relevant legal precedents change? Another possibility might be that, while Atari's 80s legal actions established that intermediate infringement during reverse engineering could be fair use, Atari itself was precluded from relying on that fair use because its lawyers did naughty things. Maybe "new" Tengen reversed engineered it again from scratch without naughty lawyers?
[ Reply ]
> The patent on the lockout mechanism has expired and clean software implementations of the algorithm have been created. So the old legal protections no longer apply.
And while Nintendo still aggressively enforces their copyright on their old games, they probably don't care very much about unlicensed games being created for their very old hardware. It's just not commercially relevant to them.