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"Don McGowan has worked at The Pokemon Company, Microsoft, and Bungie"
"I would be sitting in my office minding my own business when someone from the company would send me a link to a news article, or I would stumble across it myself," McGowan explains. "I teach Entertainment Law at the University of Washington and say this to my students: the worst thing on earth is when your 'fan' project gets press because now I know about you."
Exposure is just one step towards getting your project shut down though, as the legal professional continues: "But that's not the end of the equation. You don't send a takedown right away. You wait to see if they get funded (for a Kickstarter or similar); if they get funded then that's when you engage. No one likes suing fans."
Basically, the main thing that's different from what Woolie says about the topic is that this guy says (to paraphrase) "Shut the fuck up about it and also don't try to fucking make money off of it via Kickstarter or Patreon or whatever."
That said (and contrary to what this guy claims here), over the past few decades, Nintendo has indeed shut down a hell of a lot of fan stuff that never even remotely got close to the point of having a Kickstarter/Patreon/donation button/whatever. In other words, they did "send a takedown right away." So... still, the worst thing about your fan project is the fact that anyone else knows about your fan project, whether you have a money thing attached to it or not. So, maybe just stick with Woolie's initial advice and simply shut the fuck up about it, regardless.
These days, whenever I see a bunch of articles popping up on various "video game journalism" websites talking about some new, potentially cool-looking fan project, my initial reaction is never "Oh, hey, this looks great! I can't wait to try it!" The reaction is, invariably, "*weary sigh* Welp, here we go once again. This is going to get shut down in 5... 4... 3..."
Keep that shit under lock and key, because if even a whiff of it gets out, you're not going to be able to stop a bunch of dim bulbs at IGN or Kotaku or PC Gamer or whatever from writing articles about it. And if fucking IGN knows about your fan project, you damn well can be sure that fucking Nintendo (or whoever) knows about it, too. Cat is already out of the bag at that point. You might as well go ahead and just shut it all down, yourself.
"I would be sitting in my office minding my own business when someone from the company would send me a link to a news article, or I would stumble across it myself," McGowan explains. "I teach Entertainment Law at the University of Washington and say this to my students: the worst thing on earth is when your 'fan' project gets press because now I know about you."
Exposure is just one step towards getting your project shut down though, as the legal professional continues: "But that's not the end of the equation. You don't send a takedown right away. You wait to see if they get funded (for a Kickstarter or similar); if they get funded then that's when you engage. No one likes suing fans."
Basically, the main thing that's different from what Woolie says about the topic is that this guy says (to paraphrase) "Shut the fuck up about it and also don't try to fucking make money off of it via Kickstarter or Patreon or whatever."
That said (and contrary to what this guy claims here), over the past few decades, Nintendo has indeed shut down a hell of a lot of fan stuff that never even remotely got close to the point of having a Kickstarter/Patreon/donation button/whatever. In other words, they did "send a takedown right away." So... still, the worst thing about your fan project is the fact that anyone else knows about your fan project, whether you have a money thing attached to it or not. So, maybe just stick with Woolie's initial advice and simply shut the fuck up about it, regardless.
These days, whenever I see a bunch of articles popping up on various "video game journalism" websites talking about some new, potentially cool-looking fan project, my initial reaction is never "Oh, hey, this looks great! I can't wait to try it!" The reaction is, invariably, "*weary sigh* Welp, here we go once again. This is going to get shut down in 5... 4... 3..."
Keep that shit under lock and key, because if even a whiff of it gets out, you're not going to be able to stop a bunch of dim bulbs at IGN or Kotaku or PC Gamer or whatever from writing articles about it. And if fucking IGN knows about your fan project, you damn well can be sure that fucking Nintendo (or whoever) knows about it, too. Cat is already out of the bag at that point. You might as well go ahead and just shut it all down, yourself.
