Did you read the article? Who owns Mario? Nintendo owns Mario, full stop. Your argument completely eschews the legal system of which modern society depends on to function as effectively as it does. There’s a reason you can’t steal other people’s work.
Nintendo owns both the trademark (even if not specifically registered) and the copyright, but these are distinct things.
As I'm not a lawyer I don't want to embarrass myself by opining whether or not Nintendo has any claim over photographs of cosplays or other fan art, especially given quite how close two of the "video game plumber" images seemed to be to what they do own. The other two images, being a lot more fan-art-like, are examples where I think it would be an interesting question rather than incredibly obviously too close to Nintendo, although even there "interesting" means I wouldn't be surprised by an actual lawyer saying either of "this is obviously fine" or "this is obviously trademark infringement regardless of what it was trained on".
Now I'm wondering if there even are any videogame plumbers besides Marion and Luigi…
Mario is a 30 year old culural touchstone that is well known by people who have never played a Nintendo game.
I don't see why we need to give Nintendo the exclusive right control the use of Mario for the next 65 years. That duration of control is absolutely not necessary for society to function.
Society would function just fine of the copyright on mario had expired two decades ago.
On the other hand, I kind of like knowing that all sold Mario stuff has some affiliation with Nintendo. I don’t want to deal with thousands of chinese knockoffs.
