I agree; I think it should apply even more strictly for user-provided content.
Assuming there's no third-party backup of these levels somewhere, they're destroying countless people's creative work. I don't care what the terms of service say. Companies shouldn't have the legal authority to delete the only copy of third parties' copyrightable work.
I never understood this line of reasoning. You are not "entitled" to Super Mario Maker. Nintendo made it, they hosted the servers, they let you build stuff within their platform, and you were fully aware of all of it. You weren't forced to contribute, you weren't forced to play. How can you then turn around and cry about censorship?
If Nintendo decides tomorrow to shut it down, tough luck! These servers cost money, and it's even more work to responsibly open it up to the community.
Key point: Nintendo is also not inherently entitled to copyright protections. We grant it the ability to exercise violence on people who copy Super Mario Maker. It's a perfectly reasonable compromise to require that people who want the protections of copyright also make that protected asset accessible.
Right, but that was Nintendo's business decision, and it's really up to society to decide if that's acceptable or not.
A hypothetical book publisher could adopt a similar models for books - if you're an author, you have to use the publisher's app to write your novel, and anyone who wants to read it has to access it from the publisher's servers via the publisher's app. For whatever reason, said publisher could corner the market on some niche, culturally-important genre of book. Would be a bummer if they decided server maintenance was no longer worthwhile and just deleted all the books as per the license terms.
And I've never understood this line of reasoning. Nintendo made it and sold it to people. They didn't rent it. There was no lease with a defined expiration. None of that was ever presented to the user when they bought the game. It's tucked away in some TOS users are asked to click through post-sale where they essentially say "yeah you gave us money to access this but we can permanently revoke your access at any time for any reason git wrekt".
I don't care if the servers cost money. Boo hoo. Nintendo sold access to people. They should be held responsible for upholding their end of the deal. At the very least they should stop being able to use misleading terms like "buy", the terms of the deal should be much more strictly defined instead of this "we can do whatever" nonsense, and the relevant parts of that deal should be made clear and apparent to consumers prior to any exchange of money.
I don't think it's "censorship", but I do think the way it currently works is unethical and should be illegal.
Assuming there's no third-party backup of these levels somewhere, they're destroying countless people's creative work. I don't care what the terms of service say. Companies shouldn't have the legal authority to delete the only copy of third parties' copyrightable work.
The current situation is mass censorship.