Nintendo Strikes Down Kickstarter Project For Infringing Animal Crossing Copyright

Want to share your love of Animal Crossing: New Horizons by making cute fan-made products? Well, you might want to be careful not to step on Nintendo’s toes…

What you see below is the ‘New Adventures Passport Travel Holder‘ – a Kickstarter campaign product that obviously paid homage to the Animal Crossing series with its prominent leaf logo and lanyard featuring Animal Crossing fan-art. The campaign saw quite a bit of success, with 1,823 backers pledging more than £34,000 altogether.

Of course, Nintendo eventually took notice of this and issued a DMCA take-down to halt the project. According to the take-down notice, Nintendo’s law partners alleged that the campaign creator had infringed on the company’s Animal Crossing copyright with the passport holder design. Subsequently, Kickstarter took down the campaign and posted a notice about the dispute:

It looks like the campaign creator responded rather quickly to this take-down, however – and switched up the passport holder’s design to dodge Nintendo’s wrath. As you can see below, the campaign page is now back up with a new pink design that lacks the obvious leaf logo. The lanyard is also no longer on display.

As an alternative in light of this situation, it also looks like the campaign owner is now selling the original design with the leaf logo on their own website instead of Kickstarter. It’s not clear whether Nintendo will take any further action there – but we’ll report back if we hear more in the future.

What do you think of this project? Did it veer too close to Nintendo’s IP? Feel free to discuss below.