Nintendo Promotes Music Piracy?

f-matic writes "A New York Times article discusses an amusing character in a popular virtual world: K.K. Slider, a travelling canine musician in Nintendo's Animal Crossing: Wild World, apparently promotes music piracy." From the article: "... it's a bit disorienting to find an 'information wants to be free' message embedded in a video game - particularly one aimed at young children and teenagers. After all, video game industry representatives, along with their brethren in the music, film and computer software industries, have long complained that this is precisely the kind of thinking that is eating away at their business models - and maybe civilization itself. "

Piracy?

[chrismcdirty]

I didn't take this message as supporting piracy, so much as artists don't want to be screwed. I suppose DMB, Phish, Grateful Dead, Bela Fleck, and tons of other artists who allow live recordings to be redistributed for free among their fans also support piracy?

Re:Article is absolutely stupid

[A beautiful mind]

"Not that it's a good thing. It shouldn't be possible to sign away your "moral rights" to the music. But that's the current legal situation in the US."

I disagree with that completely. You see, in Hungary exactly such is the situation: You cannot sign away the "rights" to your music. There is also an added measure, that you cannot not ask payment for your music, which conveniently a civilian agency called Artisjus enforces after deducting a certain percentage for their "efforts", want it or not, according to the current legislation.

That situation results in this nonsense: Let's suppose that you want to give music away for free on your homepage. Artisjus demands from you around 50 cents for each download. They then deduce around 10% of the total you payed to be able to put your own music for free on the website and make some trickery with charts etc, and in a lucky case you get around 10 cents back from Artisjus as your "profit". That is all in the name of protecting the artist using early 20th century legislation which was supposed to prevent artists being pressured into signing their rights away over music they made.

This stupid law killed my favorite amateur music compilation which was housed on some popular hungarian IT magazine's CD back in 1998.

Trust me, you don't want the government to protect you. In the end it will be perverted and used against you.

Re:No Nintendo Doesn't

[sl3xd]

The difference is auto owners realize that GTA is a game. The ??AA and their cronies are so detatched from reality they can't see the difference.

I don't want to know what the ??AA thinks about the idea that a person using their right of free speech to express their political/economic views, in a copyrighted, reproduced, and marketed way, is a valuable thing (in a monetary sense).

This is exactly how pundits make their living; they excersize their free speech, people pay to hear it, and the circle of life completes itself.

Pundits have a funny way of swaying public opinion... a popular pundit may be many things (including a liar), but stupid isn't one of them. Espescially when the subject is about expressing the same kind of views that earns a pundit a soft life.

K.K.'s Name

[10Neon]

"The initials "K.K." themselves are the equivalent of "Inc." or "Corp." in Japan, where Nintendo is based, which suggests that the company may have wryly co-opted the digital age's equivalent of the "Steal This Book" mantra, repackaged it as a puppy and inserted it into a happy video game village. The company did not confirm that this was the genesis of the name, however."

Since "K.K" is short for "Totakeke" It seems more reasonable to assume that he was named after Kazumi Totaka, the game's composer. ...At least, that was the GCN Animal Crossing's composer (K.K. existed there too). I have not played Wild World.

Quick reality check

[Ahaldra]

Wait a sec - is Mr. Zeller actually saying, in his own words, that excercising your freedom to market your own artistic works is equal to murder, rape and robbery on the seven seas? And he really publishes in the NY friggin Times?
*blinks*
I wonder if this guy wrote the article with a straight face. And I smell cat pee.

Conflicting theory:

[rohlfinator]

"It's also just good marketing, and K.K. is, after all, the offspring of a huge gaming juggernaut, developed behind layers of boardrooms and P.R. machines and demographic analyses. The initials "K.K." themselves are the equivalent of "Inc." or "Corp." in Japan, where Nintendo is based, which suggests that the company may have wryly co-opted the digital age's equivalent of the "Steal This Book" mantra, repackaged it as a puppy and inserted it into a happy video game village."

From what I understand, the initials K.K. were derived from the Japanese name of the character, Totokeke. It has also been suggested that they were a reference to Koji Kondo, a well-known composer at Nintendo and author of the Mario and Zelda themes. In fact, one of K.K.'s "secret tracks", K.K. Song, is believed to be a song composed by Koji Kondo, which was featured only as a hidden track in a few other games. Nobody even hinted at this corporation theory a few years ago, when the original Animal Crossing was released.

Also, even though K.K. is apparently supporting piracy, there's no in-game way for players to duplicate K.K. Slider's "airchecks" and share them with other players. Nor is there any indication that these "bootlegs" are pirated copies of published work. His songs are, for all intents and purposes, bound to their distribution media. Some people are reading way too much into this. ;P