An interesting legal question: Does the Pokemon Company own the rights to Missingno

probably not, considering they've never acknowledged it in any meaningful capacity

no because i adopted it in '07 and it's legally my child now

i don't believe it's ever been copyrighted either, it'd probably have generated a huge fuss if it had been

it seems to hinge on whether or not digitally generated works are eligible for copyright, like if you wrote an AI that generated 1 million books can you be considered the author of those books

and the answer, as of 2016 in the US, is you can't

but it varies by country

it probably doesn't help that iirc the missingno glitches in japanese rgby are really different from the missingno from the english release

then there's copyright vs trademark, like, could you sell a missingno t-shirt

missingno. itself isn't even what everyone tends to think of when they think of it

our blocky friend is actually named 'm

YEAH....

missingno. itself has 5 different things it can look like

[nods sagely, while pretending i didn't get nightmares from the fossil missingnos as a child]

I like the fan interpretations that make it a bird because it used the dummied-out Bird type.

yeah