APIs are (generally…) not copyrightable for similar reasons.
https://knight.sc/reverse%20engineering/2018/11/19/game-boy-...
"The idea was that if you were an unlicensed Nintendo developer and you produced an unlicensed game you would have to reproduce Nintendos logo which is a registered trademark. This would in turn allow Nintendo to manually enforce anti-piracy measures through litigation."
Second, that was the US ruling, I have no idea of how the rest of the world, specifically japan, views using a trademark like this. I do know japan is weirdly(at least to US sensibility) strict about copyright and trademark law.
So it was an attempt by Nintendo(and Sega) to have a legal crowbar to use to control third party use of their system. In the US it was ruled that this would not work for Sega. So Nintendo probably never used it for that purpose (in the US)
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/137.0.0.0 Safari/537.36Sega had implemented a measure to discourage unlicensed games for the Genesis/Megadrive. Upon boot, the console would ensure that the string "SEGA" was present at a certain memory location and then display that string as part of a longer message to the user asserting that the game was produced under license from [string]. The idea was that circumventing this would constitute trademark infringement.
Accolade reverse engineered and circumvented it. Sega sued for trademark infringement. Accolade eventually won. The whole thing only harmed consumers since by the time Sega implemented the measure there were already a bunch of games, both licensed and unlicensed, that did not pass the check.
> Microsoft disabled the AARD code for the final release of Windows 3.1, but did not remove it so it could be later reactivated by the change of a single byte.
IIRC it did manage to make it into the PCs of some users - testers and early adopters?
/pedant
andrewoneone•6h ago