As you may or may not know, Nintendo is well-known for being very serious when it comes to protecting its intellectual property. In fact, the company is quick to act when it comes to taking down fan-made projects like the Super Mario Bros. battle royale and Pokemon Uranium.
Now, it appears that the most recent target is the famous TikToker and Twitch streamer pokeprincxss, which has resulted in her completely rebranding her online image as well as handing over all the money she has made on merchandise sales.
At the moment, pokeprincxss has about 1.9 million followers on TikTok and she has quite a lot of followers on Twitch as well. However, she’s no longer allowed to keep her former identity, which is why she is now known as digitalprincxss instead.
The TikTok star recently uploaded a video on YouTube explaining what happened and why Nintendo sued her. You can watch the said video below, but please note that it contains some coarse language.
As you can infer, the name pokeprincxss is inspired by the Pokemon franchise, which is under Nintendo. In fact, the content creator is even covered in numerous tattoos of different Pokemon.
Since she has quite a huge following, she started to sell merchandise inspired by her former name pokeprincxss, which is an extremely common thing to do for many content creators on TikTok. Not only that, but she also proceeded to trademark her username via LegalZoom.
Since her former online identity was obviously inspired by Pokemon, she started creating merchandise that had a lot of Pokemon imagery such as Pokeballs and the like. She assumed that if she altered the art enough, using Pokemon imagery in her case would be considered as a parody and therefore, wouldn’t cause any legal issues.
After all, countless people online sell all kinds of Pokemon content such as fan arts. “I was young and dumb and I was just going full force with it because I didn’t know what I was doing was wrong,” she says in the video.
However, around 2 months ago, pokeprincxss was informed by LegalZoom via email that Nintendo gave her a cease and desist. It appears that the company didn’t want people to assume that she was affiliated with them in any way, especially since Nintendo has a family-friendly image to uphold and pokeprincxss is a part of the adult entertainment industry.
Pokeprincxss then proceeded to hire a lawyer who assisted her in the entire process, from fixing the issue with Nintendo as well as in rebranding. A couple of fans asked her why she didn’t just change the spelling of her brand to something similar like “poki,” however she states that she didn’t want to be in any more legal trouble with the company.
Lol, digimon will not come after me for my name solely for the fact that nobody would confuse me with the company when my content/brand isn’t at all surrounded by digimon.
— poke (@digitalprincxss) October 10, 2020
That being said, pokeprincxss believes that the reason why Nintendo targeted her specifically is because of her affiliation with the adult entertainment industry, along with the fact that she trademarked her name and sold merchandise containing obvious Pokemon imagery.
In the end, she gave to Nintendo every penny she received from her merchandise and rebranded to digitalprincxss. Near the end of her video, she clarifies that she doesn’t hold any grudge against Nintendo and would still continue supporting the company.
