So, Nintendo of America, whose president is Doug Bowser, and who previously sued a Gary Bowser, had gone to court with a José Mario Alfaro González, who owns the supermarket chain Super Mario.
I'm pretty sure, at this point, they're just joshing us all.
evan_ 13 hours ago [-]
> José Mario Alfaro González
Just to add to it all: In Paper Mario: TTYD there’s a segment where Mario infiltrates a professional wrestling promotion, and in the English translation he uses the name “The Great Gonzalez”.
bilekas 6 hours ago [-]
Haha I actually had no idea about all this, given Nintendos proclivity for suing people over seemingly small things, I can imagine the hiring process involved something along the lines of "If you don't join us, we'll sue your family for infringement"
Cumpiler69 3 hours ago [-]
I'm still waiting for Nintendo to sue parents for naming their kids Mario.
14 hours ago [-]
pinko 15 hours ago [-]
Knowing quite a bit about the world of Costa Rican grocery stores -- many of which started using "Hiper-" (spanish for hyper-) as a prefix in their names a few decades ago, to one-up markets merely named "Super-" [1] -- I'm actually quite suprised they didn't just rename themselves "Hiper Mario" and save the legal fees. But bravo to them for winning against all odds.
Actually, "hiper-something" trend started with Hipermas, created by a bigger local supermarket chain (Corporación Supermercados Unidos, which owned others like: Más x Menos [More for less] and Pali). They were bought by and renamed to Walmart. Sharing the "hiper" prefix I only know HiperDiego, which like a Walmart big.
Here most are "super-" if they are big enough. if they are smaller "mini super-". All the categories before are self service.
If they are really tiny (a window) and not self service then they are called "pulpería".
Loic 7 hours ago [-]
This is interesting.
We have the same in France. The first big "big surface" stores were named supermarché, then we got hypermarché and the funniest is that now we have superette, a small surface store, branded like the super/hyper but within the city center.
The "ette" French suffix is to reduce the main word.
obiefernandez 33 minutes ago [-]
In Mexico I’ve seen a lot of small shops (what we would call “bodegas” in US cities) called Mini-Super. Always gives me a chuckle.
> A diminutive is a word obtained by modifying a root word to convey a slighter degree of its root meaning, either to convey the smallness of the object or quality named, or to convey a sense of intimacy or endearment, and sometimes to belittle something or someone.
Yeah, it's funny, a word consisting both of an augmentative (the opposite of diminutive) and a diminutive.
Loic 5 hours ago [-]
Thank you, I had the German word in mind and was not able to find the English one in my foggy brain.
Timwi 4 hours ago [-]
Um. The German word is Diminutiv.
Were you thinking of „Verkleinerungsform“? Do people still use those Germanized terms? It feels a little old-fashioned to me, like saying „besitzanzeigendes Fürwort“ instead of Possessivpronomen.
robertlagrant 5 hours ago [-]
> we have superette, a small surface store, branded like the super/hyper but within the city center
I think we visited a few of those when we had a family holiday to France last year. They seemed really nice.
PetitPrince 6 hours ago [-]
I think supermarché is more a type of shop that offers products that are traditionally from different shop (you've got a bakery, green-grocer, butcher, cheese-monger, electronics, etc... under one shop), while the hypermarché are really defined the "big surface" you mentioned.
So it make sense to have a superette in the corner of the street that offer everyday goods while an hypermarché have clothing, DIY materials, big appliances, etc. on sale..
mytailorisrich 6 hours ago [-]
Actually, there is a definition for "hypermarket", which is to combine supermarket and department store [1].
Most supermarkets that are big enough are in fact "hypermarkets" nowadays.
Sorry I explained myself poorly: I wasn't saying that a superette wasn't a supermarket, I was pointing out that OP curious remark about superette being a "small big shop" wasn't as contradictory as it seems.
Also, while we're digging Wikipedia: the French one points to the national statistic institute that have a definition of an hypermarket as "non specialized store that's over 2 500 m^2 in surface and make more than a third of their revenue from food".
(It's linked at the bottom of each page, along with the Guidelines, FAQ, etc)
RajT88 10 hours ago [-]
> Knowing quite a bit about the world of Costa Rican grocery stores
I love the internet. Mostly.
13 hours ago [-]
wslh 14 hours ago [-]
"Hiper" refers to something bigger than "Super", and it's common to respect that convention. Wikipedia defines both [1][2]. From this photo[3] the size of "Super Mario" follows that convention. It is obviously true that there are more options for names but congratulations to "Don Mario".
i think hypermarkets achieve their bigness not by being bigger supermarkets, but by selling everything a supermarket sells, and then also selling everything a department store sells.
dwood_dev 13 hours ago [-]
Yes.
A super is a like Kroger's or Walmart Express.
A hyper is a Walmart Supercenter.
12 hours ago [-]
14 hours ago [-]
kragen 13 hours ago [-]
He also could have named it "Super Alfaro" or "Super Jose".
IG_Semmelweiss 11 hours ago [-]
doesn't have the same ring to it, now does it ?
adamtaylor_13 14 hours ago [-]
Nintendo continues to be petty assholes to ordinary folks around the world.
I don’t know many other companies with such a reputation of petty litigation with dubious claims.
mrandish 14 hours ago [-]
> a reputation of petty litigation with dubious claims.
True but recently they've turned much worse by launching a major campaign of unprecedented legal attacks across the historical preservation, retro emulation and fan creation communities. While Nintendo has always been protective of its IP rights, it was mostly limited to piracy of current titles and protecting their trademarks from commercial infringement.
The greatly expanded scope of their recent legal campaign now threatens aspects of non-profit historical preservation and adjacent fan activities unrelated to Nintendo's present day commercial interests. This is new, different and dangerous. Previously, Nintendo's lawyers made at least some effort to distinguish between non-profit or fan hobby activities and piracy or commercial trademark protection. Nintendo changing to now aggressively pursue non-profit retro preservation has made me swear off buying anything from them again.
makeitdouble 12 hours ago [-]
The catch is, game preservation touches Nintendo's present day commercial interests, as they fully expanded their offering to "classic" games. Nintendo Online is already that, but I also wouldn't be surprised if tomorrow a playable GameBoy toothbrush was released from Nintendo.
For people looking for an entry point, Moon Channel has been covering this topic pretty in depth (author is a lawyer, but not in trademark per se I think)
This is the Disney play book - they would only release their classic movies on VHS for limited time before removing them from the shelves, look up the Disney Vault.
The long backward compatibility we enjoyed as kids was a bug not a feature
ghssds 11 hours ago [-]
Unsure why you want to make it a "we" thing as lot of us grew playing NES and then SNES, which didn't have backward compatibility.
RajT88 10 hours ago [-]
Regular reminder that LikSang was amazing, and killed mostly by Sony, but with help from other console manufacturers:
There is virtually no downsides to being petty assholes. People will even come out of the woodwork to justify your behavior and explain you have no choice than being an asshole.
Apple, Disney, Coca Cola, Nike back in the days. Any company with enough money in both marketing and legal department will usually be utter assholes regarding their trademark.
ryandrake 13 hours ago [-]
Yes, these companies are so rich, and their targets so comparatively poor, that they're not risking anything by spamming lawsuits. It's like a rich individual going to some developing country and suing poor people for their meager possessions, for no other reason than because they can.
rqtwteye 10 hours ago [-]
How else are their armies of lawyers supposed to justify their existence? It's the same as having a ton of UX people on staff who have to constantly move buttons around and change color schemes to stay busy.
Moru 7 hours ago [-]
The law makes it a nesessity. If they don't do all they can to protect their trademark, they loose it. It's not like copyright.
And ofcourse the lawyers have to make themselves needed somehow.
makeitdouble 6 hours ago [-]
This is a purposeful misleading stance propagated by trademark handlers, companies don't have to be assholes:
You walk in the streets of Costa Rica, see a yellow-blue sign with a shopping chart and ugly characters writing "Super Mario" with some spanish text underneath and then you decide, ah, I will buy games here rather than from Nintendo!
The seconds sentence is more like it. The danger to Nintendo is from their own stupid overacting lawyers.
kobalsky 2 hours ago [-]
This is a trademark opposition. If you try to file a trademark that has any common word that any big brand uses in their name, even if you try to register it in a completely different category, they will most likely oppose it.
They do this because trademark folks are lawyers and they get to bill their clients this way, and it's very easy to do since there's software to get notifications on keywords or similar namees. It's probably automated at this point.
pelagicAustral 3 hours ago [-]
"Nintendo continues to be petty assholes to ordinary folks around the world."
Never better said... Amen.
egypturnash 14 hours ago [-]
The Mouse.
adamtaylor_13 13 hours ago [-]
Touché
thrance 13 hours ago [-]
I don't know if owning a supermarket chain qualifies you as an "ordinary folk" but otherwise, yeah.
According to the article, the guy owns a single supermarket, not a chain.
usefulcat 11 hours ago [-]
A small business owner doesn't qualify as "ordinary folk"?
lupusreal 3 hours ago [-]
To most people it would, but to commies a small business owner is "petite bourgeoisie." Communists consider them to be the foremost supporters of fascism.
lolinder 9 hours ago [-]
> This legal victory is a testament to the determination of a small Costa Rican entrepreneur who stood his ground against a global corporation, proving that even the smallest of players can triumph in the face of seemingly insurmountable odds.
Oh, it's you, ChatGPT! I thought I recognized your distinctly bland style.
epistasis 11 hours ago [-]
I'm reminded of Caterpillar (tractors and some apparel, $50B revenue) trying to stop Cat & Cloud (coffee some apparel, <<$1M) from having a trademark. Despite their low revenue, it's a somewhat influential coffee shop due to their podcast and roasting, and also happens to be the closest cafe to me and my favorite.
It was cute for a decade; invent something new now, please, Nintendo.
Tainnor 6 hours ago [-]
There's a driving school called "Autoescuela Super Mario" on Lanzarote (Canary Islands). They're using a lot of Nintendo's branding (fonts, etc.). Somehow I can't imagine that Nintendo agreed to that though.
stevekemp 6 hours ago [-]
I live in Helsinki and there's a bar called "Super Bario" which always amuses me as a clever name. (Yes it does provide videogames and beers combined.)
Interesting. Wonder if we'll get a sequel to this case someday.
dgfitz 13 hours ago [-]
I would encourage you Google something to the effect of: super Mario-branded food
I would have posted a lmgtfy link for you, but I have faith you can manage it yourself.
jrootabega 13 hours ago [-]
Notwithstanding the sassmouth and the fact it doesn't address any of my questions, that does make this more interesting. Nintendo has food trademarks, so their position against the supermarket is even more legitimate, IMO.
atum47 13 hours ago [-]
I left a comment the other day about me loathing Nintendo nowadays and got downvoted. Well this is the kind of BS they pull that makes me hate them.
Suing people, getting fair use material removed from YouTube, fighting emulators and people who created them, charging ridiculous prices for old games... I'm pretty sure they are the bad guy.
lupusreal 3 hours ago [-]
They're one of those lifestyle brands, like Disney, which people feel personally connected to and personally attacked if you attack it.
VWWHFSfQ 12 hours ago [-]
Cool platform and fun games though. I'll keep buying their stuff forever and I think a lot of other people will too.
jader201 11 hours ago [-]
Yeah, for some reason, I still root for them (not necessarily in silly cases like these, just when it comes to being a successful video game company).
I have way too many fond memories dating back to NES, plus they still continue to make great games.
It’s hard for me to be mad at them.
Dban1 11 hours ago [-]
no they r the good guy /s
Freak_NL 4 hours ago [-]
Would a plumber get in trouble if Mario, the owner, called it Super Mario?
wbnns 14 hours ago [-]
Pura vida
xyst 15 hours ago [-]
Nintendo would rather dump endless amounts of money into law firms, waste time, bully small time players; rather than invest their profits into the company and fixing their god awful network/servers/net code used for multiplayer on the Switch.
Glad they lost.
nosioptar 14 hours ago [-]
The overzealous legal action on Nintendo's part of the biggest reason I stopped buying anything Nintendo. I haven't owned a Nintendo since the SNES.
layer8 13 hours ago [-]
So you stopped ca. 30 years ago?
nosioptar 13 hours ago [-]
Yup. As I recall, some fan site I liked because it had some maps and such was shut down by Nintendo.
smt88 14 hours ago [-]
In unregulated environments, it's often more cost effective to be a bully (in the market or the courts) than to sincerely compete. You can see the same behavior from Meta (which buys competitors instead of innovating) and xAI (which is suing OpenAI).
robertlagrant 4 hours ago [-]
We don't have unregulated environments.
johng 15 hours ago [-]
I miss super Josette markets
gamescr 12 hours ago [-]
Related, a compiled list of games made in Costa Rica:
Had breakfast in a Costa Rican supermarket once. Best breakfast ever. Unrelated,obviously.
tanewishly 11 hours ago [-]
Quite a few negative feelings towards Nintendo of America (NOA) in the comments. A lot of "evil Goliath" style comments.
I think they probably did the right thing. IANAL, but I'm pretty sure NOA has to defend its registration. "But this is for a small supermarket" you might argue. And in this case, you'd be right. But how can NOA tell the difference between a genuinely different registration, or someone trying to hijack their brand and putting up a fake website in hopes of lulling them into not objecting?
Answer: they could try all sorts of steps, including flying to Costa Rica to check the local situation. Of course, they could still be played, and an attacker could suddenly be legally allowed to use their trademark.
Or they could use exactly this process, which is meant to ensure that the registration is only awarded if it is sufficiently distinct. Which is what they did. I won't hate something or someone for using procedures as intended.
dghlsakjg 9 hours ago [-]
No.
There are legal resolutions besides formal court that allow you to defend your trademark.
A simple letter explaining that Nintendo acknowledges that they have the same trademark, and that is fine as long as the convenience store stays in the convenience store business and doesn’t use Nintendos other branding would be fine.
p3rls 10 hours ago [-]
Not a lawyer but does not enforcing your trademark or copyright automatically relinquish your rights to it? On an individual basis? I'm not sure that is correct, as in, they could have let him sit in a sort of strategic legal ambiguity and spent those resources going after more flagrant violators.
But yeah, dragging a blue collar person through the legal system and you're basically threatening their entire livelihood and family. Good luck with those optics.
hansvm 9 hours ago [-]
It's not automatic.
The purpose of a trademark is increasing trust and reducing fraud. E.g., when I buy lithium batteries I intend to store inside my home there's only so much I can do to audit the internals, so I rely on brand recognition to help purchase safer options. Other people and brands are welcome to sell lithium batteries, but masquerading as the brand I'm attempting to purchase from is damaging to that brand and to myself.
When other people use your trademark (even legitimately, as the courts have deemed for TFA), it's possible for that brand you've built to slowly morph into something other than just a name for your business or product. Band-aids and kleenexes are some classic examples, and the phrase "super mario" referring to more and more non-Nintendo things over time could do the trick too.
As something of a side tangent, this is philosophically related to the "heap" problem -- if you place one grain of sand at a time in a location, when does it transition from being an assortment of grains of sand into being a heap of sand? Which grain makes that transition? In much the same way, which trademark infringement dilutes the brand enough that when a court tries to go back to first principles they'll finally side with the infringer because the public doesn't actually recognize your brand name as referring to you in particular sufficiently often?
The playbook they're exercising is keeping that philosophical collection of sand very small. There isn't any legal recourse for suing a thousand infringers once public perception has shifted. Growing your brand and reducing the flow of sand to a trickle are both allowed though, and the legal half of that is the latter.
Note that the playbook says nothing about whether those are legitimate uses of your trademark. The thing you're fighting against is changing public perception, and you're trying to slow the change down as much as possible, using the courts as a cudgel.
Rendered at 14:16:08 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
I'm pretty sure, at this point, they're just joshing us all.
Just to add to it all: In Paper Mario: TTYD there’s a segment where Mario infiltrates a professional wrestling promotion, and in the English translation he uses the name “The Great Gonzalez”.
[1] https://ticotimes.net/2004/04/02/hipermas-supermarket-aims-f...
Here most are "super-" if they are big enough. if they are smaller "mini super-". All the categories before are self service.
If they are really tiny (a window) and not self service then they are called "pulpería".
We have the same in France. The first big "big surface" stores were named supermarché, then we got hypermarché and the funniest is that now we have superette, a small surface store, branded like the super/hyper but within the city center.
The "ette" French suffix is to reduce the main word.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diminutive
> A diminutive is a word obtained by modifying a root word to convey a slighter degree of its root meaning, either to convey the smallness of the object or quality named, or to convey a sense of intimacy or endearment, and sometimes to belittle something or someone.
Yeah, it's funny, a word consisting both of an augmentative (the opposite of diminutive) and a diminutive.
Were you thinking of „Verkleinerungsform“? Do people still use those Germanized terms? It feels a little old-fashioned to me, like saying „besitzanzeigendes Fürwort“ instead of Possessivpronomen.
I think we visited a few of those when we had a family holiday to France last year. They seemed really nice.
So it make sense to have a superette in the corner of the street that offer everyday goods while an hypermarché have clothing, DIY materials, big appliances, etc. on sale..
Most supermarkets that are big enough are in fact "hypermarkets" nowadays.
A "superette" is a small supermarket.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypermarket
Also, while we're digging Wikipedia: the French one points to the national statistic institute that have a definition of an hypermarket as "non specialized store that's over 2 500 m^2 in surface and make more than a third of their revenue from food".
(It's linked at the bottom of each page, along with the Guidelines, FAQ, etc)
I love the internet. Mostly.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypermarket
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supermarket
[3] https://www.techspot.com/news/106591-super-mario-supermarket...
A super is a like Kroger's or Walmart Express.
A hyper is a Walmart Supercenter.
I don’t know many other companies with such a reputation of petty litigation with dubious claims.
True but recently they've turned much worse by launching a major campaign of unprecedented legal attacks across the historical preservation, retro emulation and fan creation communities. While Nintendo has always been protective of its IP rights, it was mostly limited to piracy of current titles and protecting their trademarks from commercial infringement.
The greatly expanded scope of their recent legal campaign now threatens aspects of non-profit historical preservation and adjacent fan activities unrelated to Nintendo's present day commercial interests. This is new, different and dangerous. Previously, Nintendo's lawyers made at least some effort to distinguish between non-profit or fan hobby activities and piracy or commercial trademark protection. Nintendo changing to now aggressively pursue non-profit retro preservation has made me swear off buying anything from them again.
For people looking for an entry point, Moon Channel has been covering this topic pretty in depth (author is a lawyer, but not in trademark per se I think)
https://youtu.be/7rzWR9JP1WE?si=UOk5TI9iESdAONVB
The long backward compatibility we enjoyed as kids was a bug not a feature
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lik_Sang
Apple, Disney, Coca Cola, Nike back in the days. Any company with enough money in both marketing and legal department will usually be utter assholes regarding their trademark.
And ofcourse the lawyers have to make themselves needed somehow.
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/11/trademark-law-does-not...
You walk in the streets of Costa Rica, see a yellow-blue sign with a shopping chart and ugly characters writing "Super Mario" with some spanish text underneath and then you decide, ah, I will buy games here rather than from Nintendo!
The seconds sentence is more like it. The danger to Nintendo is from their own stupid overacting lawyers.
They do this because trademark folks are lawyers and they get to bill their clients this way, and it's very easy to do since there's software to get notifications on keywords or similar namees. It's probably automated at this point.
Never better said... Amen.
https://maps.app.goo.gl/icLLDdZxXw861bVNA
Oh, it's you, ChatGPT! I thought I recognized your distinctly bland style.
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/caterpillar-cat-cloud-coffee-...
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nissan_Motors_v._Nissan_Comput...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41550417 Paraguay Loves Mickey, the Cartoon Mouse. Disney Doesn't
I just had a look at the site and (at least for me) the name is not resolved anymore (used to ba a landing page with the whole story)
Edit: it does now, but the original page is gone
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42868220
If the market decides to start selling Nintendo or Mario products, could they get in trouble?
Does this prevent the market from expanding to selling other types of products even if they never sell a Nintendo or video-game-related product?
I can buy video game gift cards at my local supermarkets. (I'm aware my local law and definition of "supermarket" may not apply here.)
https://maps.app.goo.gl/icLLDdZxXw861bVNA
I would have posted a lmgtfy link for you, but I have faith you can manage it yourself.
Suing people, getting fair use material removed from YouTube, fighting emulators and people who created them, charging ridiculous prices for old games... I'm pretty sure they are the bad guy.
I have way too many fond memories dating back to NES, plus they still continue to make great games.
It’s hard for me to be mad at them.
Glad they lost.
https://www.reddit.com/r/gamedevcr/comments/3gwimk/la_gran_l...
I think they probably did the right thing. IANAL, but I'm pretty sure NOA has to defend its registration. "But this is for a small supermarket" you might argue. And in this case, you'd be right. But how can NOA tell the difference between a genuinely different registration, or someone trying to hijack their brand and putting up a fake website in hopes of lulling them into not objecting?
Answer: they could try all sorts of steps, including flying to Costa Rica to check the local situation. Of course, they could still be played, and an attacker could suddenly be legally allowed to use their trademark.
Or they could use exactly this process, which is meant to ensure that the registration is only awarded if it is sufficiently distinct. Which is what they did. I won't hate something or someone for using procedures as intended.
There are legal resolutions besides formal court that allow you to defend your trademark.
A simple letter explaining that Nintendo acknowledges that they have the same trademark, and that is fine as long as the convenience store stays in the convenience store business and doesn’t use Nintendos other branding would be fine.
But yeah, dragging a blue collar person through the legal system and you're basically threatening their entire livelihood and family. Good luck with those optics.
The purpose of a trademark is increasing trust and reducing fraud. E.g., when I buy lithium batteries I intend to store inside my home there's only so much I can do to audit the internals, so I rely on brand recognition to help purchase safer options. Other people and brands are welcome to sell lithium batteries, but masquerading as the brand I'm attempting to purchase from is damaging to that brand and to myself.
When other people use your trademark (even legitimately, as the courts have deemed for TFA), it's possible for that brand you've built to slowly morph into something other than just a name for your business or product. Band-aids and kleenexes are some classic examples, and the phrase "super mario" referring to more and more non-Nintendo things over time could do the trick too.
As something of a side tangent, this is philosophically related to the "heap" problem -- if you place one grain of sand at a time in a location, when does it transition from being an assortment of grains of sand into being a heap of sand? Which grain makes that transition? In much the same way, which trademark infringement dilutes the brand enough that when a court tries to go back to first principles they'll finally side with the infringer because the public doesn't actually recognize your brand name as referring to you in particular sufficiently often?
The playbook they're exercising is keeping that philosophical collection of sand very small. There isn't any legal recourse for suing a thousand infringers once public perception has shifted. Growing your brand and reducing the flow of sand to a trickle are both allowed though, and the legal half of that is the latter.
Note that the playbook says nothing about whether those are legitimate uses of your trademark. The thing you're fighting against is changing public perception, and you're trying to slow the change down as much as possible, using the courts as a cudgel.