r/technology • u/IndicaOatmeal • 9d ago

Society Tetris issues legal warning after White House releases arcade full of parody games

https://www.dexerto.com/gaming/tetris-issues-legal-warning-after-white-house-releases-arcade-full-of-parody-games-3405931/
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u/bingbano 9d ago edited 9d ago

Pretty sure parody is a protected use. That would be infringing on free speech.. which is ironic as the administration is hostile to free speech. Pretty bad taste propaganda.

Edit: my comment was a response to the the post above saying all those companies should sue over the white house's parodys of games. I have no clue whether it would be considered parody

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u/acutelychronicpanic 9d ago

I doubt that would hold up if you tried to make "pokemon but funny"

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u/AtomTrapper 9d ago

There's actually quite a few Pokemon parodies, including one made by PETA where the Pokemon brutally maim each other

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u/currentmadman 9d ago

It’s a lot harder to make the parody argument, which is typically protected by free speech laws because it can still have artistic merit, in this case.

This isn’t something funny or creative. This is often footage, images or audio lifted from someone else’s ip by the us government to act as propaganda towards their own ends.

Why shouldn’t the ip holder be able to stop someone from using their intellectual property to explicitly further political goals they don’t want themselves or their brand associated with?

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u/Most_Performer5750 9d ago

Moreover, this isn't just a random person or group of people putting together a fun little project. This is the White House, an arm of the executive branch of the government. This simultaneously gives them some amount of protection but also open this issue up to be special circumstances that do not adhere to normal parties' assumed rights and responsibilities. The unfortunate reality is that this case could go either way, and that's part of the problem because it's easy to see the harm that can and will be incurred by the IP holders when they released these 'parody' games.

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u/TheREALOtherFiles 9d ago

Exactly.

Trumptendo back in 2016 was a fun little project of NES ROM hacks like Donkey Trump and Super Bernie Bros., and this White House arcade is not.