I kind of feel like Nintendo would go "lol, neat" at you at best in my opinion. I'm not sure what kind of crap your friend went through, but it seems more characteristic of Disney than Nintendo. Besides, I'm kind of curious if they'd go after every mural of a Disney character that gets painted on the walls of day cares and such. :/

THREE daycares.

"The Walt Disney Company forced three daycare centers (Very Important Babies Daycare, Good Godmother Daycare and Temple Messianique) in Hallandale, Florida, to remove five-foot-high murals of Disney cartoon figures from their walls under the threat of legal action."

That I don't know! I remember reading the original articles a long time ago, and there was no mention of the repainting, nor did I ever hear that they did.
I searched for the articles today, and just came up with that quote on a Disney "did you know" sort of fact site.

I couldn't find the original articles, but then again, i didn't spend a whole lot of time looking.
That'd be cool if Disney DID repaint them for a $1.
However, I'm a very bad person for believing that Disney doesn't have that sort of compassion in them to do that. ;)
(hey, I'd love it if I was wrong!)

I've tried reading a lot about copyright and never heard of laches. o_o I gotta look into that more!

What I heard was whoever painted the original mural was paid to do it, therefore making money off of Disney's characters.

Purely based on law? Yes.
Are you likely to? No.
In addition to the fact that they'd have to first find out and track you down, they're likely to just consider it free advertisement. Especially Japanese companies are lax about fan antics.

Tattoo parlors are often shady places period, they often just yank work from the internet without regard of the original owners or keep work that people have had custom made for their own tattoo.

If people go to a tattoo parlor they need to make damn sure that the people who work there have basic ethics and principles.

I know this isn't Japan and all, but I'm thinking that if certain artists in Japan can get away with publishing racy fan comics (doujinshi, obvs) of Pokemon characters, you'll probably be fine with painting a Pokemon on your car for no profit. Heh.

Disney is famous (and notorious) with their copyrights. When I was teaching, I had to work things out with Disney to photocopy a playbook of theirs that went out of print that MONTH. I could not get any from any supplier because all of them ran out of "Alice In Wonderland!" And did I have to jump through hoops and timelines for 8 copies!

Legally, one is bound not to infringe on the rights of published works. But then, it's not for profit and only personal benefit. But it is going to be public since it will be on your car. And like Thally said, "They'd have to first find out, then track you down." My thought would be "Out of sight, out of mind."

when in doubt... ask the people in question...

http://www.nintendo.com/corp/legal.jsp
that spells out their views on intellectual property... but if you contact corporate and ask if you can do a free ad on your car, who knows? the worst that could happen is they say no.

mainly, yes... as that hurts their business more directly... but the page does mention characters' likeness and their status... if they had a page that focused only on that, i would have pointed to that instead... but they included all intellectual property info on that one page, you just have to be able to pick out where they state copyright laws on character images... even if it's brief.

Nintendo seems to support that kind of thing. I think you can even get stuff for submitting images to Nintendo Power.

If you do ask, and they say no, don't do it - you'll face triple damages for willful infringement.

Reading through all of the comments and legal BS you'd have to go through: is it really worth all the trouble?

I recall seeing a VW Beetle that was modded to look like a Pikachu. Think it was an official advertisement though... >.>

i think nintendo loves this kind of stuff, i remember a few years back in nintendo power, they posted photos of people that decorated their cars with zelda paintings and such.