Quite a few negative feelings towards Nintendo of America (NOA) in the comments. A lot of "evil Goliath" style comments.
I think they probably did the right thing. IANAL, but I'm pretty sure NOA has to defend its registration. "But this is for a small supermarket" you might argue. And in this case, you'd be right. But how can NOA tell the difference between a genuinely different registration, or someone trying to hijack their brand and putting up a fake website in hopes of lulling them into not objecting?
Answer: they could try all sorts of steps, including flying to Costa Rica to check the local situation. Of course, they could still be played, and an attacker could suddenly be legally allowed to use their trademark.
Or they could use exactly this process, which is meant to ensure that the registration is only awarded if it is sufficiently distinct. Which is what they did. I won't hate something or someone for using procedures as intended.
There are legal resolutions besides formal court that allow you to defend your trademark.
A simple letter explaining that Nintendo acknowledges that they have the same trademark, and that is fine as long as the convenience store stays in the convenience store business and doesn’t use Nintendos other branding would be fine.
Not a lawyer but does not enforcing your trademark or copyright automatically relinquish your rights to it? On an individual basis? I'm not sure that is correct, as in, they could have let him sit in a sort of strategic legal ambiguity and spent those resources going after more flagrant violators.
But yeah, dragging a blue collar person through the legal system and you're basically threatening their entire livelihood and family. Good luck with those optics.
The purpose of a trademark is increasing trust and reducing fraud. E.g., when I buy lithium batteries I intend to store inside my home there's only so much I can do to audit the internals, so I rely on brand recognition to help purchase safer options. Other people and brands are welcome to sell lithium batteries, but masquerading as the brand I'm attempting to purchase from is damaging to that brand and to myself.
When other people use your trademark (even legitimately, as the courts have deemed for TFA), it's possible for that brand you've built to slowly morph into something other than just a name for your business or product. Band-aids and kleenexes are some classic examples, and the phrase "super mario" referring to more and more non-Nintendo things over time could do the trick too.
As something of a side tangent, this is philosophically related to the "heap" problem -- if you place one grain of sand at a time in a ___location, when does it transition from being an assortment of grains of sand into being a heap of sand? Which grain makes that transition? In much the same way, which trademark infringement dilutes the brand enough that when a court tries to go back to first principles they'll finally side with the infringer because the public doesn't actually recognize your brand name as referring to you in particular sufficiently often?
The playbook they're exercising is keeping that philosophical collection of sand very small. There isn't any legal recourse for suing a thousand infringers once public perception has shifted. Growing your brand and reducing the flow of sand to a trickle are both allowed though, and the legal half of that is the latter.
Note that the playbook says nothing about whether those are legitimate uses of your trademark. The thing you're fighting against is changing public perception, and you're trying to slow the change down as much as possible, using the courts as a cudgel.
I think they probably did the right thing. IANAL, but I'm pretty sure NOA has to defend its registration. "But this is for a small supermarket" you might argue. And in this case, you'd be right. But how can NOA tell the difference between a genuinely different registration, or someone trying to hijack their brand and putting up a fake website in hopes of lulling them into not objecting?
Answer: they could try all sorts of steps, including flying to Costa Rica to check the local situation. Of course, they could still be played, and an attacker could suddenly be legally allowed to use their trademark.
Or they could use exactly this process, which is meant to ensure that the registration is only awarded if it is sufficiently distinct. Which is what they did. I won't hate something or someone for using procedures as intended.