If I were Nintendo, I would threaten suit against Android or Apple for allowing these ripoffs. They should be preventing them from appearing on their platform.

It's not in Apple's or Google's interest to stop games from being released that have blatant copyright infringement.  They'd prefer to make as many sales as they can before Nintendo or other companies see the games in question and have to spent large amounts of money paying lawyers to get them taken down.

The guy says he didn't know who Yoshi was, he just bought the 3D model from a website - but even that website states it is a Nintendo character...

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Botond Kopacz, the developer behind Era's Adventure, has gotten back to Ars Technica, saying that the use of Nintendo's IP was unknowing and inadvertent. "Actually this is an indie game developed by one developer, so due to the limitation of effort, I purchased a cute character from TurboSquid, one of the biggest 3D asset stores, without knowing the background story of the character Yoshi, since I'm not a Super Mario fan," he said in an e-mail.

Indeed, the model from Era's Adventure does seems to show up in a quick search of Turbosquid's database. Turbosquid representatives weren't immediately available for comment on their hosting of this royalty-free 3D model of Nintendo's copyrighted character.

"Once the game was released on the Play Store, after spending hundreds of hours in making the game, I started receiving 'kind' mails from Super Mario fans that I stole Yoshi, etc. So I started Googling and I realized that the character is really from the Super Mario series," Kopacz said.

But even after hearing about the problem, he says he didn't find anything related to the specific 3D model of Yoshi in the US copyright, trademark, and pattern database. "Since no assets are stolen from any Nintendo game or website and the Yoshi's name is not present anywhere, there is no copyright violation. [There would be] at least pattern violation if the 3D model is detailedly registered in the US pattern database."

Still, Kopacz says he's working on modifying the character to be less similar to Nintendo's iconic dinosaur. "I know that, even if I modify the character a little bit, that this will still be a big problem for the Nintendo fans, but I'm making the game alone so I have really limited time to do some changes. And I still hope that many people will find the game great and many people will enjoy it."

Source

The guy is a liar, for sure.

And it's convienent that he doesn't "have the time" to make alterations to character to make it look different than Yoshi.  I'm sure he doesn't mind all the extra sales and attention for the simple fact that Yoshi is the character.  If he had a character that he created on his own, his game wouldn't be getting any sales or attention and thus, he wouldn't be making any money or noteriety from it.  He needs to keep the game as a Nintendo rip-off for as long as possible to gleam every penny from it he can before Nintendo is able to get it taken down.

Most people are not aware that games are rip offs. tehy dont care enough to find out. But what will happen is these ip's images will be damaged and it will be harder to carry over once they do need to release on tablets and phones.

Good luck with the lawyers in china and other countries that just dont care about ip law. their only real recourses would be to go after the marketplaces themselves. Again good luck.

It does not take large amounts of money to get such apparent copyright violations down. It needs only a mail to google. I have done this several times when people violated copyrights of my games and it took google about four days. I think they will work faster when Nintendo mail them :)

It's not always that simple, though.  Sometimes you have to prosecute, as there isn't any other recourse.  Besides, merely having to have a half dozen or more full-time lawyers working for you just to deal with nonsense like this is expensive in and of itself.

Its not always that simple ... but in this case it would be that simple because of the obvious copyright violations.

Yes.