Nintendo vs. SuicideGirls

Making its way towards the top of our "Silliest Lawsuits of the Year" list is this cease and desist letter sent to our friends (and sponsors) at SuicideGirls today, which takes the indie porn site to task for—gasp!—allowing one of its members to list his favorite Nintendo videogames in his profile. (This, remember, from a company whose new ad campaign carries the slogan "Touching Is Good".) As SG founder Sean Suicide says, "I enjoy an ice cold coca cola on a hot day. Do you think Coca Cola is going to sue me for posting that?" We'd list our favorite Nintendo games here in solidarity, but we're more PlayStation fans ourselves. And besides, that's really a subject for one of our other weblog titles.

"Nintendo to sue SuicideGirls" (forum @ suicidegirls.com; more @ Boing Boing)
Order: "SuicideGirls: The Book" (Amazon)
Thumbnail via the Accidental Video Game Porn Archive

See also: "A Meta Tag Nintendo Didn't Like" (Wired News, 1/01 - via Slashdot)

Update Could Nintendo's letter to SG be a hoax, or maybe the work of an overzealous automated webcrawler that looks for certain keyword combinations on websites? Read on ...

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In an update to their original post, Boing Boing quotes an email from a reader:

"I called the S.F. and the Seattle offices of the law firm representing Nintendo here, Perkins Coie. They not only seem to not know about this, they can't even look at it because their firewalls won't allow them to get to porn sites.

"I've emailed someone in their offices the posts so I expect this'll get cleared up inside a day or two."

We'd really prefer not to believe that Nintendo could be so clueless—though nothing surprises us any more. More updates to follow, presumably.

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Update In a move that reaffirms our faith in corporate sanity, Nintendo apologized to SuicideGirls and its readers for inadvertently sending them the original notice "as part of an ongoing Nintendo program to aggressively protect our younger consumers from the hundreds of sexually-explicit sites each year that use Nintendo properties to attract children" ... and even offered them a free game system to make up for the whole brouhaha. Boing Boing has the full text of the letter here.

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Previously: "Sims 2", Sex, and Porn, "Unreal" Sex Portal?, More Video Game Porn, Sex and Gaming