Though it is worthing that Nintendo is alleging patent infringement, not copyright infringement. IANAL (I Am Not A Lawyer), but that doesn't sound like they're going after the models used in Palworld, but more overall mechanics?
Possibly this patent Nintendo has for what seems to be "a thing the player throws at another thing to initiate a fight with it" (IANAL): https://patents.justia.com/patent/20240278129
Man, I'm really tired of patents and copyright. I'm not sure what's supposed to come out of this. Nobody is allowed to make a Pokemon-like game anymore? Who does that benefit other than Nintendo/TPC?
is there a clause in US patent law where if you choose to either selectively enforce your patents, or not enforcing them for a while then suddenly starting to do so, invalidates your patent?
“At press time, Nintendo responded, claiming guns or no they will come after Pocketpair with the same fury with which they go after 17-year olds who make fan games.”
EDIT: Hard Drive is a satyrical site like the Onion. So I just sounded like an idiot reading the Onion for the first time and taking it at face value XD
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My old comment below.
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Yuck. They may have just hired yakuzas lawyers (yakuzas use a lawyers a lot, and are experts in exploiting legal loopholes (and sometimes participating in the creation of them)).
That's a shame to put money into this disgusting mafia.
Note that it's for patents and not copyright (i.e. character likenesses), as many predicted.
It'll be interesting to see which patents Nintendo is trying to assert. Given that Palworld is purely a game, it seems likely to be Nintendo's patents related to game mechanics (e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37062820), which I think most people here are justifiably against.
That's interesting. Gameplay patents are difficult to enforce. The handful of successful gameplay-related parents have some technical element to them, e.g. running a mini-game while loading a level was patented on the grounds that running a non-intensive game in the foreground while loading the main game in the background was a technical innovation.
I can't understand how the game-while-loading hot granted. This "invention" was already invented and used long before, for example the "invade-a-load" fastloader on C64.
The "loading screen" patent expired in 2015[0]. I cannot think of any games which have incorporated this feature. Then again, on a PC, loading screens are typically so short I cannot even read the hint text they attempt to display.
I am absolutely not a lawyer; but, I don't believe game mechanics are patentable in the United States (this is Japan, so of course that doesn't matter); but there's a reason there's a lot of -opoly games that aren't Monopoly (and the -opoly, non-Monopoly games are not Hasbro games, in general).
> I am absolutely not a lawyer; but, I don't believe game mechanics are patentable in the United States (this is Japan, so of course that doesn't matter); but there's a reason there's a lot of -opoly games that aren't Monopoly (and the -opoly, non-Monopoly games are not Hasbro games, in general).
THE FILES OF PATENTS that have been granted are a fruitful hunting ground for forgotten games, although going through these files, as anyone who has ever been involved in a patent search well knows, is a time consuming job. Often the patented games are downright silly, such as a set of dominos made of rubber so that they can double as ink erasers (No. 729,489) or a sliding block puzzle with edible pieces so that a player who despairs of a solution can find consolation in gratifying his stomach (No. 1,274,294). Often the patents are repetitious: There are over a hundred variations of the well-known checkerboard and over a thousand different baseball games.
...
Preceding THE LANDLORD'S GAME by just under a year, on April 21, 1903, Patent No. 726,023 was granted to Henry Busch and Arthur Jaeger, also for a game board. Their game, called BLUE AND GRAY, made no lasting impression in the world of games which, I suppose, is understandable since it didn't have the innovative qualities of THE LANDLORD's GAME. Yet it was, and is, a delightful pastime, which should particularly appeal to the ChEckers fan who is looking for something different.
The name Blue and Gray, of course, refers to the uniforms of the South and the North in the Civil War and in the original game the playing pieces of the contestants were of those colors.
Japanese legal system is... well... not good by Western standards. Remember it's a place where you can be sued for defamation even if you say verifiably true things.
IANAL, but I'm going to chime in as someone familiar with one significant aspect of how the Japanese patent system is used.
It is very common in Japan for large companies like Nintendo to file and hold patents for smaller companies, this is especially prominent in the video game industry. This is a tradition borne out of, ironically, refusal to use the patent system at first.
For those that don't know, a lot of Japanese society operates on the honor system. You are expected to be truthful and honorable in your business dealings and in general. Patents were initially shunned because Japanese people didn't see a need, you don't need a rights protection system if everyone already respects them. That notion went straight out the window once Japan had to compete on the world stage: Suddenly, westerners saw Japanese ideas that weren't protected by patents and patented them and Japanese companies subsequently got sued and lost.
This led to a critical reassessment of how Japanese values are applied, and the result was that larger companies with sufficient financial strength would register and hold patents for smaller companies (not necessarily affiliated, by the way) who don't have the money to pay for all that, and in exchange those patents would be shared as a Japanese industry-wide good.
Nintendo is one such custodian of patents for the wider Japanese video game industry at large.
I am going to presume that Nintendo is suing Palworld for reasons beyond just its own interests in Pokemon. I haven't played Palworld nor have I looked at the details of this lawsuit, so I can't make an in-depth comment; but this probably isn't Nintendo acting like a copyright draconian as they are commonly seen in the west, rather they are likely doing this for the sake of the entire Japanese video game industry at large.
A few years ago, Nintendo sued (and won) a fellow Japanese video game developer, COLOPL, for infringing on mechanics patents that Nintendo was holding as custodian for the industry. Why? Because COLOPL broke the gentlemen's agreement and filed their own patent for the mechanic.
The original game was covered by two patents. Parker Brothers bought them from the creator after finding out that Charles Darrow had lied when he claimed that Monopoly was his own invention.
Aren't patents of video game mechanics protect the technical implementation of a feature and not the feature itself?
I've always been under assumption that one can avoid patent infringing if the underlying implementation is different enough.
For example, one of more famous patents is Sega's yellow arrow on top of the screen, showing player where is the next objective. In your game you can still use that feature of "showing player in which direction the objective is", you just have to be more creative about it, here are some immediate ideas I got:
- small red hand pops up from side of screen when you're stuck for a minute and points to objective
- player character himself points with hand to your goal
- make sun, moon or other celestial body appear on the sky in the direction where the objective is.
Each of these provides the very similar feature without infringing on Sega's patent.
Monopoly was patented-- in 1935. So that's long-expired.
And many of the non-Hasbro -opoly games (that use that as part of their name) actually are licensed. Hasbro's been known to go after unauthorized users of the name for trademark infringement.
I've built games in the US where we specifically avoided certain features(if I recall correctly around minigames on loading screens) because of those concerns. We never got to find out if they were enforceable but they certainly impacted how we build the title(which never really had a material outcome, the game was doomed for other reasons).
You can't just patent any random game mechanics you might be able to think of, but nothing in patent law categorically precludes patenting them. I don't recall the details, but Wizards of the Coast infamously had a patent on a specific combination of mechanics in Magic: The Gathering, which led to several card games carefully constructed to not infringe the patent in question. This typically took the form of all cards in the game being included in a single box instead of random packs, but in at least one case a company produced a pointed parody in which the instructions told players to not to assemble decks from randomly allocated cards and then "tap" them for resources because that would be patent infringement.
Palworld is what happens when Pokemon fans get fed up with the swill that Pokemon puts out every few years.
While the primary goal of the game is to get all of the pals, most of your time is spent putting your pals to work building up your base, breeding better pals, and manufacturing the weapons needed in order to get even better pals. This is a stark contrast to Pokemon games, where you just walk around challenging gym leaders. It's an entirely different game.
So if Pocketpair reskinned a few assets sure, pay Nintendo 5% at most. But those skins had nothing to do with the success of the game and Nintendo doesn't deserve anything more than that.
I think this is kind of a bad take. There have been plenty of "monster catching game"/"pokemon with the serial numbers filed off" games that have been somewhat successful, but no smash hits. "Cassette Beasts", "Nexomon" and "Temtem" spring to mind. From larger studios there has been stuff like "Monster Hunter Stories" and "World of Final Fantasy".
Palworld is really a "survival crafting" game and is closer to a game like "Conan Exiles" which has a similar gameplay mechanic of capturing slaves to put to work in your base.
What made Palworld stand out was the shock factor elements of "Pokemon with guns", "make pokemon work as slaves in a factory" and "grind up pokemon for meat", which streamers were able to convert into clickbait thumbnails and views.
> There have been plenty of "monster catching game"/"pokemon with the serial numbers filed off" games that have been somewhat successful, but no smash hits.
Notably, the Megami Tensei series, which predates Pokemon.
I enjoy playing Palworld. I can’t stomach the thought of playing yet another Pokémon as I know it will be the same game with differently named gym leaders. Palworld is fun because it isn’t Pokémon. That YouTubers will be YouTubers has nothing to do with it in my case.
It's a good example of how IP can throttle our societal creative output. For a couple thousand years we all traded stories and art and dances about shared characters, such as various gods, heroes, legends, and monsters, and then suddenly if someone invents a new hero or monster oops now only they can make stories about it or you go to jail.
It's absurd. Pokemon has made bajillions of dollars, surely it's time to acknowledge it belongs to our common culture and we all now have a right to make up our own stories, games, music, whatever around it.
This isn't radical. It's just a question of time. We would call it madness if Disney claimed to own Greek mythology and sued the makers of the game Hades about it.
Dunno about Pokemon fans. But when I saw a Steam ad for a survival game with cute chimpanzee shooting guns I had to get it. And then the gameplay loop was nice so I spent too much time playing it.
Catching is pretty much the same, fighting, yes and now. Original Pokemon is round based with a specific battle screen, while Palworld is real-time on the overworld. Though, the latest Pokemon-Game has a mode where Pokemon can fight others in real-time in the overworld, without interaction of the player. And IIRC you can also catch Pokemon from the overworld directly or at least initiate a Player-controlled fight. So it's very similar to Palworld, but not exactly the same.
Palworld would’ve been nothing without riding off the coattails of Pokémon. I’m fed up with the modern Pokémon output too, but Palworld is just a stolen, AI-generated flash-in-the-pan.
I'm really having a problem understanding this mindset - all FPS games (especially older ones) were riding on coat-tails of Doom and other ID games. Which is great - we got a whole cultural revolution in wider gaming and spawned a massively popular genre full of experimentation on that formula. There's countless examples of this in culture through history.
How is that bad? Why is there this strong wish for a single corporation to own our culture and what we are without allowance to experiment, build upon it and allow market competition for the best evolution?
Tools like Stable Diffusion didn't even exist when Palworld and its creature designs were being shown. Unless you have evidence they were somehow AI generated, it sounds like you're just spreading falsehoods.
How do you know Palworld wouldn’t be successful without Pokemon? I would think it would be even more successful since they would be the first with the monster collecting system.
For anybody who's wondering, Nintendo doesn't _actually_ own Pokemon (a common misconception), but has a major stake in "The Pokemon Company", which does https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nintendo#Subsidiaries
As such, I wonder if this structure makes it harder to sue over IP infringement. I agree with others here that patent infringement is a seemingly odd pick, but perhaps this also has to do with character design patents, since Palworld didn't explicitly use Nintendo's IP?
Should be interesting regardless to see what happens
That is a fun fact! Doubly so, because according to Wikipedia, Pokemon is the highest grossing media franchise on the planet, with some estimated $98.8 billion in revenue. Second place is "Micky Mouse & Friends" at a measly $61.4 billion.
I never played any Pokemon, I always thought it was lame, but I absolutely love Palworld. I run my own server and we still play with others, so this makes me sad.
I stopped buying Nintendo things years ago when they began going after emulators, rom sites, and others actively archiving and distributing these means. I don't support litigious companies and the vermin lawyers.
Is it litigious if they're enforcing their own patents? They didn't immediately go after Palworld for copyright infringement, but dug deep and seemingly found something in violation of their own patents lol
There are a large number of patents out there that have no business existing (overly broad, ridiculous broad, patents stuff that already existed or shouldn't be able to be patented, etc). Software patents in particular have quite a bad reputation for this. So yes, trying to enforce one's own patents can absolutely be litigious, since the patents themselves can have no business existing in the first place.
>Is it litigious if they're enforcing their own patents?
In most cases, probably yeah. Patent trolls and malicious actors make such easy money off of frivolous patents that the default assumption in cases like these is that it's just a litigious action to make a quick buck. We're at the stage where it's very rare for a patent to actually aid innovation rather than stifle it.
Early on there were countless pokemon clones back to the OG gameboy that were far more egregious in use of various pokemon features and methods, and there hasn't been legal claim to shut any of them down in 25 years. It is a well discussed topic with the pokemon vs palworld haters, so if Nintendo has anything, I imagine they found some minor method that probably shouldn't have had a patent anyways, but the Japanese agency over patents loving Nintendo for 100 years already gave it freely regardless.
Now with Nintendo in short of revenue and late with a new platform for Christmas with their stock taking a beating, I guess this is how they'll make up some difference and feed their wild herd of lawyers hungry for some action in the mean time.
Rabidly litigious companies still disgust me when outside developers fill a void they cannot or will not. I can buy from Amazon hard drives and entire systems filled with every Nintendo video game from the 80's on, maybe they should sic the lawyers on them instead of the little guys like Pocketpair putting a positive spin on the genre.
I watched a trailer and was constantly questioning myself whether it was Pokémon with guns, or a high-budget clone (noting that there are many b-grade clones of Digimon and Pokémon that aren’t worth litigating against).
My young child was convinced it was Pokémon throughout the whole video. Even cited which Pokémon each ‘pal’ was meant to be.
I know this is for the patent, not the trademark, but doesn’t it cross a line when the likeness of a product causes confusion in the market?
Ignoring the guns, as a whole it looks like Pokémon. I wonder if the reason they went after the ‘mechanic’ of Pokémon is because each individual asset is distinct from it?
> My young child was convinced it was Pokémon throughout the whole video
I figure the biggest thing causing the seeming parallels is the art style, which is pokemon-esque (cute, colorful, fluffy, polished, original). Second to that comes the balls
I didn't know what Pocketpair was and immediate glace made me think they were Pokemon and Nintendo was suing because Pocketpair+Nintendo were in a partnership/official-license and something had broken down in the relationship.
Nope!
Clearly mimicking Pokemon and even all the headlines are "Pokemon with guns". Is it okay? No idea, this seems extremely muddy.
I think the games are so clearly different in mechanics, audience and design that, all they have is character likeness infringement. But there are literally hundreds of pokemon, and I have a hard time suggesting Pokemon should be the sole rights holder for "Pokemon like character design".
Given how broad the Pokemon character IP is, I am surprised Nintendo has not been sued themselves. But so different is IP law in Japan that Pokemon itself was altered at inception to avoid being in conflict with an entirely unrelated IP, Ultraman. The game was originally capsule monsters, but Ultraman has capsules, so they changed it, even though the stories and world's mechanics are otherwise entirely different.
It's unclear how mimicking Pokemon would be a basis for a lawsuit because Nintendo doesn't own the monster taming genre. There's a long history of others, including a couple that predate Pokemon: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monster-taming_game
Its very difficult to find a game that doesn't have a few dozen other nearly identical in their game play. There's a reason for that, which is that they are not legally protected. Copyrights, trademarks, and patents are very specific and narrow in their definition.
And yet no one would confuse the two. It's not a copyright or any other case, its a patent case. And "game mechanic" patents are frankly gross, in my opinion.
This being a patent suit is very bizarre. Everyone was expecting a copyright lawsuit, if anything. I'm not a big fan of software patents, and it seems like they're only exercised as a convenient bludgeon against a rival, not based on something a company feels it legitimately invented.
Software patents are much worse for something fast evolving like video game mechanics were over the past 30 years or so. Imagine, for example, if id software had patented the first person shooter mechanics from Doom. It would have 20 years after that (2013) before anyone could offer a similar FPS and id would have been able to tack on incremental patents to extend their lock on the FPS market for decades longer.
Japanese laws pertaining to copyright/corporate rights in general can make the US look like a paradise of freedom.
Another game company, Konami, is suing Cygames for--in short--having a system where characters compete and can be leveled up.
Plus the concept of "fair use" technically kind of exists legally but not in practice. You sample something and the owner doesn't approve, you're screwed. You don't sample something but simply say something that lowers their reputation, you're screwed (the bar for "libel" is incredibly low--even facts can be successfully tried so long as it can be proven that the intention was to in some way lower a person or particularly a company's reputation). The last one is particularly funny since you'll see the media giving endless praise to a CEO/businessperson and treating them as Jesus 2.0, but the very day they die, the floodgates open and you find out they've committed every crime known to mankind and everyone around them knew it.
Basically, Pocketpair is quite likely heavily screwed. Nintendo can attack them on several fronts and likely will. People saying they made a better Pokemon than Nintendo themselves probably angered a few people within the company and it's easier to take them out legally than to actually compete.
What makes software patents different than any other patent if it is a genuinely unique piece of software? Not a baited question, by the way. I don't understand why it would be different unless it's something like zooming in or copy and paste.
I would argue the speed at which innovation occurs in software world means "original" work is happening in multiple places simultaneously. It's not fair to simply grant the first claim, especially considering how slow the patent system is.
That, and that software is so easy to copy you could argue that not copying it greatly impedes technological advancement of your society. Especially in comparison with adversaries who will violate the patents freely.
Patents are there to protect people who develop concrete solutions and products. Patents are not there to protect scientific discoveries or intellectual works.
It's much easier to compare two screw heads and work out who copied who from the dates they were put on the market than it is to work out who invented the flashing icon first. What's more, it's an endless debate as to whether the flashing icon can be traced back to an ATARI 2600 game from 1988 is a prior art.
Furthermore, patent protection must not have a disproportionate effect on the market. A patent and the licensing conditions for a technology such as the seat belt or ABS brakes should not completely prevent other car manufacturers from implementing them.
Software patents are often at the limit of mathematical demonstration, the absence of prior art is difficult to prove and they have disproportionate effects which are exploited by patent trolls. The market is made up of thousands of small studios and independent developers who don't have the means to search for patents. This is not the same as the aerospace market, with 5-6 major manufacturers all backed by law firms specialising in intellectual property and patents.
This has been tested and even the most fervent capitalist thinks it was a bad idea. The only people who really defend software patents are patent trolls.
not a lawyer but i write software so this is not 100% accurate information i have found on the internet and repeated back to me. further corrections are appreciated
software patents usually don't contain source code. just the general idea of how to achieve the outcome, they can be very broad or very subjective depending on who is in court
Patents Vs. Copyright:
you can create software that does the same thing differently.
kinda like torrenting vs direct download, they both deliver bytes too you but the bytes are delivered/received in very different ways.
taking someones software/machine instructions (the bytes that are the code) and calling it your own is copyright infringment.
if someone creates a new patented algorithm and you copy that algorithm into a different language then it is patent infrigement.
also patents have too be filed and approved while copyright is generally a given if the copyright is not already existing (depending on your jurisdiction i guess)
It might just be they've got enough money to make them a juicy enough target to go after for damages. I can't imagine it took the lawyers this long to come up with something to sue them over, and the game didn't exactly fly under the radar... so I'm not sure what else it could be.
I suppose there might have been a flurry of scary lawyer letters being sent back and forth and the lawsuit only happened once negotiations broke down.
I believe they were waiting for something, too. And the game is successful enough to make some bank out of it. Coromon also has tons of similarities, judging from the demo alone, and I doubt they were ever sued. Correct me if I am wrong, anyone.
It's probably because two months ago PocketPair announced a joint venture with Sony Music and Aniplex that includes merchandising. [1] The revenue from the Pokémon games is nothing compared to the revenue from merch; Pokémon merch generates more revenue per year than Pokémon GO generated over its entire lifetime. [2,3]
Thus Nintendo is likely more concerned with consumer confusion between Palworld and Pokémon merch than between the games. On top of that it would damage The Pokémon Company's position in any negotiations surrounding merchandising agreements, because partners can use a potential Palworld merch deal as leverage to get a better deal from The Pokémon Company.
Nintendo posted an announcement about "we're looking into this" around 6d after the game was released, so I imagine they were thinking carefully about the cost/benefit and whether they could win.
Readit News
https://hard-drive.net/hd/video-games/pocketpair-hires-ident...
Though it is worthing that Nintendo is alleging patent infringement, not copyright infringement. IANAL (I Am Not A Lawyer), but that doesn't sound like they're going after the models used in Palworld, but more overall mechanics?
Possibly this patent Nintendo has for what seems to be "a thing the player throws at another thing to initiate a fight with it" (IANAL): https://patents.justia.com/patent/20240278129
Also, it was filed on May 2, 2024. Seems to me like there's millions of instances of prior art in that case.
[1] https://hard-drive.net/about/
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Yuck. They may have just hired yakuzas lawyers (yakuzas use a lawyers a lot, and are experts in exploiting legal loopholes (and sometimes participating in the creation of them)).
That's a shame to put money into this disgusting mafia.
Dead Comment
It'll be interesting to see which patents Nintendo is trying to assert. Given that Palworld is purely a game, it seems likely to be Nintendo's patents related to game mechanics (e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37062820), which I think most people here are justifiably against.
#EndSoftwarePatents
[0] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/12/loading-screen-game-pa...
In Japan, or in other countries?
Some patents of interest:
Method of conducting simultaneous gameplay using stackable game pieces https://patents.google.com/patent/US6352262B1/en https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/225/icehouse
Trading card game method of play https://patents.google.com/patent/US5662332A/en https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/463/magic-the-gathering
Light-reflecting board game https://patents.google.com/patent/US7264242B2/en https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/16991/khet-the-laser-gam... (and the patent win https://www.insurancejournal.com/news/west/2012/11/26/271633... )
You will note that http://www.gamecabinet.com (of old) has a link to searching US Patents on board games - http://www.gamecabinet.com/info/PatentSearch.html
From A Gamut of Games by Sid Sackson:
https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/19254/blue-and-grayIt is very common in Japan for large companies like Nintendo to file and hold patents for smaller companies, this is especially prominent in the video game industry. This is a tradition borne out of, ironically, refusal to use the patent system at first.
For those that don't know, a lot of Japanese society operates on the honor system. You are expected to be truthful and honorable in your business dealings and in general. Patents were initially shunned because Japanese people didn't see a need, you don't need a rights protection system if everyone already respects them. That notion went straight out the window once Japan had to compete on the world stage: Suddenly, westerners saw Japanese ideas that weren't protected by patents and patented them and Japanese companies subsequently got sued and lost.
This led to a critical reassessment of how Japanese values are applied, and the result was that larger companies with sufficient financial strength would register and hold patents for smaller companies (not necessarily affiliated, by the way) who don't have the money to pay for all that, and in exchange those patents would be shared as a Japanese industry-wide good.
Nintendo is one such custodian of patents for the wider Japanese video game industry at large.
I am going to presume that Nintendo is suing Palworld for reasons beyond just its own interests in Pokemon. I haven't played Palworld nor have I looked at the details of this lawsuit, so I can't make an in-depth comment; but this probably isn't Nintendo acting like a copyright draconian as they are commonly seen in the west, rather they are likely doing this for the sake of the entire Japanese video game industry at large.
A few years ago, Nintendo sued (and won) a fellow Japanese video game developer, COLOPL, for infringing on mechanics patents that Nintendo was holding as custodian for the industry. Why? Because COLOPL broke the gentlemen's agreement and filed their own patent for the mechanic.
The original game was covered by two patents. Parker Brothers bought them from the creator after finding out that Charles Darrow had lied when he claimed that Monopoly was his own invention.
I've always been under assumption that one can avoid patent infringing if the underlying implementation is different enough.
For example, one of more famous patents is Sega's yellow arrow on top of the screen, showing player where is the next objective. In your game you can still use that feature of "showing player in which direction the objective is", you just have to be more creative about it, here are some immediate ideas I got:
Each of these provides the very similar feature without infringing on Sega's patent.And many of the non-Hasbro -opoly games (that use that as part of their name) actually are licensed. Hasbro's been known to go after unauthorized users of the name for trademark infringement.
They are. But it’s rarely done. And even more rarely enforced.
While the primary goal of the game is to get all of the pals, most of your time is spent putting your pals to work building up your base, breeding better pals, and manufacturing the weapons needed in order to get even better pals. This is a stark contrast to Pokemon games, where you just walk around challenging gym leaders. It's an entirely different game.
So if Pocketpair reskinned a few assets sure, pay Nintendo 5% at most. But those skins had nothing to do with the success of the game and Nintendo doesn't deserve anything more than that.
Palworld is really a "survival crafting" game and is closer to a game like "Conan Exiles" which has a similar gameplay mechanic of capturing slaves to put to work in your base.
What made Palworld stand out was the shock factor elements of "Pokemon with guns", "make pokemon work as slaves in a factory" and "grind up pokemon for meat", which streamers were able to convert into clickbait thumbnails and views.
Notably, the Megami Tensei series, which predates Pokemon.
It's absurd. Pokemon has made bajillions of dollars, surely it's time to acknowledge it belongs to our common culture and we all now have a right to make up our own stories, games, music, whatever around it.
This isn't radical. It's just a question of time. We would call it madness if Disney claimed to own Greek mythology and sued the makers of the game Hades about it.
Fighting? Not at all similar, unless Psyduck suddenly got Gatling guns.
How is that bad? Why is there this strong wish for a single corporation to own our culture and what we are without allowance to experiment, build upon it and allow market competition for the best evolution?
But Palword feels such a rip off of Zelda BOTW (the intro and the items are 1:1 the same of Zelda, even the tablet!) and Pokemon.
For most if not all "pals" I could instantly name their Pokemon counterpart, that is textbook copyright infringement done in the weakest form.
As such, I wonder if this structure makes it harder to sue over IP infringement. I agree with others here that patent infringement is a seemingly odd pick, but perhaps this also has to do with character design patents, since Palworld didn't explicitly use Nintendo's IP?
Should be interesting regardless to see what happens
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_highest-grossing_media...
I stopped buying Nintendo things years ago when they began going after emulators, rom sites, and others actively archiving and distributing these means. I don't support litigious companies and the vermin lawyers.
[1] https://automaton-media.com/en/news/20230808-20590/
In most cases, probably yeah. Patent trolls and malicious actors make such easy money off of frivolous patents that the default assumption in cases like these is that it's just a litigious action to make a quick buck. We're at the stage where it's very rare for a patent to actually aid innovation rather than stifle it.
Now with Nintendo in short of revenue and late with a new platform for Christmas with their stock taking a beating, I guess this is how they'll make up some difference and feed their wild herd of lawyers hungry for some action in the mean time.
Rabidly litigious companies still disgust me when outside developers fill a void they cannot or will not. I can buy from Amazon hard drives and entire systems filled with every Nintendo video game from the 80's on, maybe they should sic the lawyers on them instead of the little guys like Pocketpair putting a positive spin on the genre.
The gameplay is Zelda BOTW glued together to Pokemon (even the initial items and the intro scene is obscenely identical).
Most "pals" are lifted from Pokemon, as I was able to say things like "Pokemon X but green", "Pokemon Y", etc.
Ignorance is not a justification for misconduct.
The game seems like a collage of stolen bits rather than a nice blend of games (which is in what the gaming industry excels).
But it is fun to play. And that's all we ask from games.
My young child was convinced it was Pokémon throughout the whole video. Even cited which Pokémon each ‘pal’ was meant to be.
I know this is for the patent, not the trademark, but doesn’t it cross a line when the likeness of a product causes confusion in the market?
Ignoring the guns, as a whole it looks like Pokémon. I wonder if the reason they went after the ‘mechanic’ of Pokémon is because each individual asset is distinct from it?
I figure the biggest thing causing the seeming parallels is the art style, which is pokemon-esque (cute, colorful, fluffy, polished, original). Second to that comes the balls
I’m still wondering what the edge for a “patent rights” case is. I’m guessing trademarks and copyright was a nonstarter.
Nope!
Clearly mimicking Pokemon and even all the headlines are "Pokemon with guns". Is it okay? No idea, this seems extremely muddy.
Given how broad the Pokemon character IP is, I am surprised Nintendo has not been sued themselves. But so different is IP law in Japan that Pokemon itself was altered at inception to avoid being in conflict with an entirely unrelated IP, Ultraman. The game was originally capsule monsters, but Ultraman has capsules, so they changed it, even though the stories and world's mechanics are otherwise entirely different.
And yet no one would confuse the two. It's not a copyright or any other case, its a patent case. And "game mechanic" patents are frankly gross, in my opinion.
Another game company, Konami, is suing Cygames for--in short--having a system where characters compete and can be leveled up.
Plus the concept of "fair use" technically kind of exists legally but not in practice. You sample something and the owner doesn't approve, you're screwed. You don't sample something but simply say something that lowers their reputation, you're screwed (the bar for "libel" is incredibly low--even facts can be successfully tried so long as it can be proven that the intention was to in some way lower a person or particularly a company's reputation). The last one is particularly funny since you'll see the media giving endless praise to a CEO/businessperson and treating them as Jesus 2.0, but the very day they die, the floodgates open and you find out they've committed every crime known to mankind and everyone around them knew it.
Basically, Pocketpair is quite likely heavily screwed. Nintendo can attack them on several fronts and likely will. People saying they made a better Pokemon than Nintendo themselves probably angered a few people within the company and it's easier to take them out legally than to actually compete.
That, and that software is so easy to copy you could argue that not copying it greatly impedes technological advancement of your society. Especially in comparison with adversaries who will violate the patents freely.
The legal basis for why that doesn't apply to software has always seemed specious at best to me.
It's much easier to compare two screw heads and work out who copied who from the dates they were put on the market than it is to work out who invented the flashing icon first. What's more, it's an endless debate as to whether the flashing icon can be traced back to an ATARI 2600 game from 1988 is a prior art.
Furthermore, patent protection must not have a disproportionate effect on the market. A patent and the licensing conditions for a technology such as the seat belt or ABS brakes should not completely prevent other car manufacturers from implementing them.
Software patents are often at the limit of mathematical demonstration, the absence of prior art is difficult to prove and they have disproportionate effects which are exploited by patent trolls. The market is made up of thousands of small studios and independent developers who don't have the means to search for patents. This is not the same as the aerospace market, with 5-6 major manufacturers all backed by law firms specialising in intellectual property and patents.
This has been tested and even the most fervent capitalist thinks it was a bad idea. The only people who really defend software patents are patent trolls.
software patents usually don't contain source code. just the general idea of how to achieve the outcome, they can be very broad or very subjective depending on who is in court
Patents Vs. Copyright: you can create software that does the same thing differently. kinda like torrenting vs direct download, they both deliver bytes too you but the bytes are delivered/received in very different ways.
taking someones software/machine instructions (the bytes that are the code) and calling it your own is copyright infringment.
if someone creates a new patented algorithm and you copy that algorithm into a different language then it is patent infrigement.
also patents have too be filed and approved while copyright is generally a given if the copyright is not already existing (depending on your jurisdiction i guess)
I suppose there might have been a flurry of scary lawyer letters being sent back and forth and the lawsuit only happened once negotiations broke down.
Thus Nintendo is likely more concerned with consumer confusion between Palworld and Pokémon merch than between the games. On top of that it would damage The Pokémon Company's position in any negotiations surrounding merchandising agreements, because partners can use a potential Palworld merch deal as leverage to get a better deal from The Pokémon Company.
[1] https://palworld.co.jp/en/news/?article_id=65768
[2] https://www.pocketgamer.biz/the-pokmon-company-caught-108-bi...
[3] https://www.pocketgamer.biz/pokmon-go-catches-nearly-8-billi...
Initial release date: January 19, 2024