Nintendo has issued a cease and desist order against a TikTok user that it feels is not only improperly using its intellectual property, but using it in a way that doesn’t align with its family-friendly reputation.
Nintendo reached out to the TikTok creator formerly known as Pokeprincxss, who has a whopping 1.9 million followers and was selling merchandise featuring her own Nintendo-influenced name and pictures of Pokemon. The Japanese gaming giant found out about her after she tried to trademark her own user name, which, in hindsight, probably was destined to fail from the jump. Nintendo informed her that her name and products were infringing on multiple copyrights.
As Kotaku points out, there are plenty of people across all sorts of content creation formats who use Pokemon and Nintendo imagery in their work, so what made the artist now known as Digitalprincxss stand out? Well, it’s probably the side of her business on the platform OnlyFans, where she posted adult content.
“Nintendo doesn’t want people to think that I’m in any way, shape or form affiliated with them, or that I have a partnership with them, and it all comes back to me being an adult entertainer,” she said in a video explanation. “Nintendo is a family-friendly company, so they don’t want that to at all ruin their reputation or anything, if people think that me and them are affiliated. Obviously, that really sucks, but from a business standpoint, I have to understand it and accept it because I [messed] up.”
The lesson here is not “if you don’t try to copyright your merchandise that 100 percent infringes on Nintendo’s copyright, or if you never make adult content, Nintendo will leave you alone.” The company will probably get to you eventually. But it expedited the process for this particular user.
But, she’s taken it in stride and is seeing the positive aspects of the whole ordeal.
“It’s kind of a cool thing to say, that … the ones who made my childhood so cool, they finally noticed me!” she told Kotaku. “All it took was for me to infringe on everything about them.”
